The Sun.
London, England, 1864-02-18 00:00:00

TUB CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the Ti2ilCS Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, Feb. 5.
The Senato and the House of Representatives,
though agree d that a conscription is necessary, and
that the President has both the right and the power
to call for all the men he needs, are not in accord
upon some of the most important portions of the

machinery by which a conscription is to be enforced,
The Senate, not having the fear of public opinion

before its eyes—for its members are not elected
by the people, but by the Legislatures of their re-

spective States—is in favour of the utmost stringency
i❑ carrying out the Act ; while the House of
Representives, elected for a shorter period, and
by direct vote of the masses, has a wholesome
dread of the consequences that might befall if it

legislated in a spirit hostile to the wishes or the
prejudices of the multitude. The Senate, with the
double purpose of procuring the largest possible
number of men, and of extracting from the pockets
of unwilling conscripts the largest possible amount
of money, fixed the price of exemption at 400 dole.,
instead of 300 dots., and furthermore enacted that
this commutation was only to exempt the payer
from one Presidential call. In other words, the

man who had been drawn and paid his money

might be drawn a second, a third, or even a tenth
time, if the President saw fit to make a second, a
third, or a tenth demand upon the country for

soldiers, and would have to pay commutation
each time if he did not choose to face the dan-

gers of the battlefield and do his part otherwise
than by proxy in the extermination of Southern
" rebels." Another provision of the Senate was

that no conscript should be allowed to procure a
substitute out of the classes liable to the draught,
but only from the class of aliens and persons
under 20 or above 45 years of age. The first
two of these provisions were generally felt to
be cruel aggravations of the inevitable torture of

the draught, while the third was considered to place
unnecessary difficulties in the way of those who
were willing to pay their money. In that shape

the bill came from the Upper to the Lower House,
where, by large majorities, it has been stripped of
the obnoxious clauses. 'The price of eommutation
has been restored to 300 doll„ as it stood under the

abortive conscription of last year; the payment of
that sum is to liberate the conscript for the full
period of three years, or the war, and he who prefers
to find a substitute may take him from among the
class liable to the draught, and not to be compelled
to find an alien or a boy under age to serve in his
place. The Republican journals do not approve
these amendments. They insist that the experience
of last year is sufficient to prove that a large pro-
portion of the draughted men will avail themselves
of the privilege of exemption ; that each man who
pays his 300 dols. will have in his pocket a certificate
of freedom from military service for three years, and
that it will take but a very small number of draughts
or calls under these circumstances to rule the whole
serviceable male population out of the lists. Unless
the bill be restored to the shape given to it by the
Senate, they fear that the conscription will be little
mere than an irritating nullity. They are un-

doubtedly right. The last conscription was nest to
a nullity, and the new one can be no better, and
may perhaps prove averse, both in respect of the
irritation it may cause and the small wool that may
be yielded after the loud cry. Oct of the 300,000
men called for last summer, 75,000 were exempted
for physical disability, 74,000 for alien age and
other causes; 41,000 paid 300 dole. each and left
the Government to find substitutes ; 34,000
took the matter into their own hands and
paid the market price for a substitute, whatever
it might be; 11,000 took the bounty and went
to the camp, the field, or the hospital ; and
G 5,000 were either not procured at all or remain un-
accounted for. There is no reason to believe that
the new conscription will be more successful, ex-
cept, perhaps, in the amount of money which it will
extract from the pockets of the rich, or from the
funds at the disposal of cities and counties, the inha-
bitants of which will prefer to buy off the poor rather
than incur the risk of street insurrection, accom-
panied by murder and arson. Thus the chances of
any ceneiderable increase of the existing army are
exceedingly smell. This, however, might prove to
he no real disadvantage if competent men were at
the head of affairs. If that army, inclusive of the
veterans who have re-enlisted under the call of
October last, amount to half a million of men, it is
quite large enough for a man of military genius to
hatalle, and for a wise administrator to provide for ;
better than an army three times as large com-
manded by such officers as this war has produced,
and controlled in its movements by the three gentle-
men who form the Military Council at Washington.
A last resource, however, remains, which is to de-
clare the war a " holy war," and to preach a crusade
for the extirpation of slavery, root and branch.
It is no longer sufficient that the nigger should be
free, that he should be a soldier and a voter, but
that he should be to all intents and purposes the
social equal of the white man. Nay, more ; it has been
discovered by the advanced spirits of the party that
he is in many important respects the superior of the
whites, and that if the latter do not forget their
pride of race and blood and colour, and amalgamate
with the purer and richer blood of the blacks, they
will die out of America and wither away in un-
prolific skinniness, meriting by their obstinacy and
folly the fate of the red man, whom they have either
exterminated or driven into the wilderness. The
first to give tongue to the new doctrine was the Rev.
Theodore Tilton, the coadjutor of the Rev. Henry
Ward Beecher in the editorship of the Independent,
who a few months ago declared in an assemblage
principally composed of women—possibly all of the
strong-minded order—that it was good for white
women to marry black men, and that the "pas-
sional" and " emotional" nature of the blacks was
needed to improve the white race. Mr. Wendell
Phillips has often hinted the same thing, no doubt
to the great joy of the stalwart negroes who have
attended his lectures, if not to that of the shameless
white women who have not thought it unworthy
cf their modesty to listen. The doctrine once
broached has found believers and adherents, and
a little tract called " Miscegenation" has recently
been widely circulated, in which the whole sub-
ject is discussed for the study of such Yankee
girls as have exhausted the sensational novels,
and of back Abolitionist preachers and lecturers
as have not vet risen to the height of this
black argument.
When Miss Dickinson repeated
on Monday
evening last, at the Cooper Insti-
tute, the lecture which she delivered before the
President at Washio
gten a fortnight ago, she was
somewhat late in melting her appearance on the
platform, and to Pacify the audience (mostly cam-
posed of women), who were areeei
delay, the advertisements and ;rowing impatient of
and laudatory notices of
this tract were handed mina for their perusal—a
circumstance which suggested to
many
tt that the lecturerteas either the author of the
pecu-
niarily interested in its sale. A few fromeztraets
this work will serve to convey to Te
11To
Pean readers
some notion of the fanaticism that so easily takes
root Americo, and of the fermentation of ideas
even of the most disgusting kind, which may is
made to prevail among a people in times of social
and Political revolution. The fundamental idea
of the new Anacharsis Clootz, or worse than he,
who is guilty of the treatise, is this—" Whatever
there is of power and vitalityin the American rece
is derived, not from its Anglo-Saxon progenitors,
but from all the diff,rent nationalities which go
to make up this people. All that
is
us the finest race on earth is to
engrafton our
needed to make
stock the negro element which Providence-
u on
has placed
by our side upon this continent. Of all the rich
treasures of blood vouchsafed to us that of the negro
is the most precious, because it is the most unlike
any other that enters into the composition of our
national life. . • They (the negroes)
,are our
brothers and sisters. By mingling with them we
become powerful, progressive, and prosperous; by
refusing to do so, we become feeble, unhealthy,
narrow minded, unfit for the nobler offices of
freedom, and certain of early decay." The author
cites various writers to show that in marriage
people are attracted by their opposites; that the
intellectual man does not seek for intellect in his
wife, but for sffpction without much intellect; thole
the dark prefer the blonde, the abort the tall, the

lean the plump, and vice versa. He then goes on to
prove, with an unction which might almost make one
suspect him of being a matmais farceur, wily it is
that the American white race must intermingle with
the American black race, or die out. The white
people, he says, "are perishing for w lnt cf flesh and
blood. They have bone and sinews, but hey are dry
and shrivelled for lack of the healthful juices of life.
The cheeks are shrunken, the lips aro thin and
bloodless, the under jaw narrow and retreating, the
teeth decayed and painful, the nose sharp and cold,
the eyes small and watery, the complexion of a blue
and yellow hue, the head and shoulders bent for-
ward, the hair dry and straggling." This is his pic-
ture of the men; that of the women is scarcely
more flattering. "The waists of the women are
thin and pinched, telling of sterility and con-
sumption; the general appearance gaunt and
cadaverous from head to foot. You see them,"
he adds, "with eye-glasses and spectacles, false
teeth, artificial colour in the face, artificial plump-
ness to the form ;" while the social intercourse of the
sexes he describes as being " formal, ascetic, and un-
emotional." " How different," he says, "is an
assemblage of negroes ! Every cheek is plump, the
teeth are whiter than ivory, there are no bald heads,
the eyes are large and bright, every face wears a
smile, every form is stalwart." In short, he says
that American white men need contact with healthy,
loving, warm-blooded natures to fill up the lean in-
terstices of their anatomy, and that such natures are
only to be found among negresses. It is possible,
and highly probable, that the author himself is one
of the lean, gaunt, bloodless Yankees whom he so
eloquently describes, and that, failing to find a wife
to his mind among the strong-minded ladies of whom
Miss Anna Dickinson and Mrs. Beecher Stowe are
the types, he longs for a more congenial partner
from the Southern plantations. " What," he in-
quires, "does the Anglo-Saxon (American) look
for in a lovely woman ? Her cheeks must be rounded
and have a tint of the sun, her lips must be pouting,
her teeth white and regular, her eyes large and
bright, her hair must curl about her head and de-
scend in crinkling waves; she must be merry, gay,
full of poetry and sentiment, fond of song, childlike
and artless." " The most beautiful girl I ever saw,"
he adds," was a mulatto. She was a ripe and com-
plete woman. Her complexion was warm, and dark,
and golden with the heat of tropical suns ; her lips
fall and luscious, her cheeks perfectly moulded, her
hair curling and black as the raven's wing."
It is just possible that this lean Yankee—if he be
one, and have the means to maintain a wife—might
find a suitable one among the Caucasian race in
Europe, if he were to try, especially in England and
Scotland, without resorting to negresses or mulatto
girls; but there is no accounting either for the
vitiated taste of sane men or the vagaries of mad
philosophers. But not for his own individual plea-
sure dues the American Clootz urge his plea of more
than brotherhood with the people he loves. It is
for his country, it is for the cause of progress, it is
for the world, it is for Christianity, that he pleads
for amalgamation with a race which, with his purely
(or impurely) animal instincts, he believes in all
physical attributes to be so superior to his own.
Our prejudices," he says, "are dying out and
Nature is asserting the unity of all men. The negro
declares that he loves the white man, and the pro-
gressive party of the North asserts the rights of the
negro. The leaders of progress, among whom we
quote Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton,
urge miscenganetic reform (amalgamation of the
races). The American people are ripe to receive
the truth. The Southern people feel the mag-
netism of association with a tropical race. Tne
mothers and daughters of the slave-holding aris-
tocracy are' thrilled with a strange delight by
daily contact with their dusky male servitors.
. . . Through the fiery gate of war they (the
Americans both of the North and South) are
being led to deliverance from old prides and pre-
judices; and, indeed, the instinct of the white
man has responded to the call of the negro for fra-
ternity. There were wants in his nature which only
the negro could fill. There were defects in his phy-
sical organisation that only the negro (i e., the ne-
gress) could supply. It is a mean pride, unworthy
ofa Cnristie.n or enlightened community, that should
lead any to deny this. The success of the anti-sla-
very party has proved it, so that denial of the prin-
ciple is denial of facts universally known. They
have touched a chord that has vibrated with a sweet,
strange, and marvellous music, awakening slum-
bering instincts in the heart of the nation and the
world." The author's politics are as decidedly black
as his heart's affections. ‘. It will be a sad misfor-
tune," he says, "it this war should end without a
black general in command of a white or mixed body
of troops. We want an American Toussaint L'Ou-
verture to give the black his proper position on this
continent, and the day is coming! People say the
rebellion is at an end ; but that is not true. The
South will fight to the last ; bat it is in the eternal
fitness of things that they should finally be subdued
by the black soldier." After that the lands of the
South must be divided among the negroes, who are
its only loyal population,"
Were the ideas of this fanatie confined to himself
they might excite laughter, disgust, or contempt ;
but when expressed in modester and more guarded
language by Mr. Phillips or Mr. Tilton they elicit the
approval of crowded audiences of educated Ameri-
cans, of whom a large preponderance are white
women. The madness of the hour in this distracted
country receives a new but unfragrant illustration.
If this be done in the green leaf, what shall be done
in the dry ? And through what new phases of insa-
nity must the Americans pass before the strong con-
queror, booted and spurred, with a sharp double-
edged sword in his iron grip, shall come at the call
of the timid majority to rescue them from the
shameless fanatics and the cruel bigots whq would
drive them to destruction ?