The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-24 00:00:00

The Bank Return of Last Week.

(From the Economist.)
The return of the Bank of England for the week
ending Wednesday evening last is a very remark-
able one, and well deserves a careful study. The
payment of the dividends has intervened between
this account and the last, and this is always urk
favourable to the banking reserve, because a con-
siderable amount goes in notes to the humbler
classee, who do not keep banking accounts. The
circulation outside the Bank increases, and the
Bank reserve is diminished often to the extent of a
million. Now, there has been only the most
trifling diminution of the banking reserve (only
£1,420), and no increase in the active circulation
worth attention. Let us consider why such has been
the case.

The first reason we believe to be the great dear-
ness of money. On the 6th of October, last Wed-
nesday fortnight, the Bank account showed a dimi-
nution of £1,236,503 in the reserve of notes and
coin in consequence of the usual payment of salaries,
&c., at the close of the quarter. These, like the
dividends, go out to the non-banking classes, who
have no deposit accounts, and gradually return as
they make their payments to their tradespeople
and other creditors who have banking accounts
This exceptional issue has now returned to the
Bank. The higher the value of money the quicker
psquicker,'indeed, the clerk does not
but as soon as a
it tends to return. Everybody who has money does
payn
not let it
tradespeople
it sleep;
a
perhaps,
tradesman gets money when it is so valuable he
hastens to make use of it—he sends it to his banker;
his banker directly or indirectly, sends it to the
Bank. There is no expedient for contracting the
active circulation like giving people a good bonus
for bringing the notes home. Some part even of the
dividend issue may have been brought back by this
potent cause, and, at all events, the exceptional
issue at the end of the quarter has now been brought
back.

This cause is an action of the public, not an action
of the Bank ; but the return itself, however, shows
that the Bank has by no means been idle.
First, they have decreased their other securities,
their loans, more than £2,000,000. This is natural
when the loans given at the close of the quarter are
paid back, but in the present peculiar state of the
discount market we could not feel certain before-
hand either that these loans would not be renewed,
or that they woald not be replaced by other loans.
i
It s very satisfactory to find that so much has been
repaid, and that the public have not pressed for
other accommodation to replace it.
Secondly, the Bank has sold or borrowed on se-
curities to a large extent.
On Oct. 5 Government securities were
7, 19 9,570,219

Diminution in a fortnight........ £1,026,816
There is some doubt whether the reduction in. the
Government securities or in the private securities
strengthens the Bank reserve immediately ; but
there can be no doubt that both operations augment
the command of the Bank of England over the mar.
ket. They strengthen its means of lending, and give
it an option whether it will lend or not. They give
the Bank an additional control over the value of
money even if—which is a moat point—they do not
actually bring in more note,.
On the whole, this
week has had a favourable
effect upon the money market. People's minds are
calmer, and though no wise Dam believes that the
pressure is at an end, few expect now to see actual
and wild panic.
The failures in Brazil are expected
to have a greater effect on the Continent than here,
though every shock to credit is felt here in some
measure. The drain of bullion to India is stayed
with singular completeness. The Council of India.
who lately had many times more applications for
bills on India than they had bills to grant, this week
actually could not sell their bills. We have, ac-
cording to a phrase we have beard used, discounted
November, and so
may, perhaps. look forward to
that dismal month with less apprehension than some
weeks since would have been reasonable.

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE AND DEATH
AT BBIGIITON.--The coroner's inquiry into this
case was concluded on Friday. From the evidence, reported
at length in the Brighton _Herald, it appeared that Mr
Whateley, a surgeon, expressed his opinion that death arose
arom exhaustion, want of food for 36 hours, and exposure
on a severely cold and windy night. The coroner was sum-
ming up when the foreman interrupted him, and said the
jury wore of opinion that death arose from exhaustion and
exposure, all arising from temporary insanity, and a verdict
to that effect was recorded.

The record of the negro race is a sad and inscrutable
enigma. If ever it was justifiable to say, "Behold the curse
ot:the Eternal 1" it would be so in respect to the history of
the negro. History 1 Bitter mockery 1 The negro has no
history. From the days when the sable sons of Africa
were the slaves of the Kings of Egypt until this hour,
when clad in Lincoln's livery they are driven into the very
jaws of death, their existence has been a blank—a perfect
blank. They have no trophies. They have left no tracings
on the sand of time, When not savages they have
been slaves. The monuments of antiquity raised by their
labour were designed and directed by others. When they
have appeared in histery, it has been as tools to be cast
aside and forgotten when the work vas accomplished, So
far as the historian can discern, literature and art, govern-
ment, and all other sciences, owe no more to the negro
race than to the generations of African cattle. Yet,
uegroes are not cattle, and hence it is that their career
is a riddle. NA only have they their place in nature, but
they are members of the human family. Intellectually in-
ferior to white people, as children compared to Caucasian
tribes, they are nevertheless men—men who, as the insti-
tution of negro slavery in the South shows, may be a
blessing to their generation, in whose hearts kindly treat-
ment begets grateful affection, who are capable of social
progress, who under favourable circumstances are happy,
and who above all else have aspirations for immortality,
and, like the white man, are supported by the faith and
rejoice in the promises of Christianity. The abolitionist
may tell us in his frenzy that the negro is intellectually
equal to the white man. But what avails mere assertion in
the face of the facts that we have cited ? We are not
afraid of the truth, We assert the negro's intellectual in-
feriority whilst we stoutly maintain his human brotherhood.
And because of his humanity and of his mental childhood,
we are incensed and appalled at the brutal—nay, the expres-
sion is inadequate—at the fiendish malignity with which
he is persecuted by the abolitionists of Now England,
What should we say of those who would corrupt children,
incite them to commit infamous and bloody deeds, mean-
while robbing their victims and subjecting them to the
vilest uses; and who, to paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, would
drive them into slaughter-pens as a butcher does sheep ?
No language is poweriul enough to properly denounce such
crimes, and neither can any one fairly express the detesta-
tion inspired by the consideration of the horrible sufferings
hat New England abolitionism has inflicted on the negroes
who, by the cruel fortune of war, have fallen under its
merciless and abominable yoke.
It was inevitable that the invasion of the South should do
harm to the negroes, because they are a component part of
the nation, and therefore enjoy the prosperity and suffer frcm
the adversity that lights noon their homes and country. It
was not, however, to be supposed that they would have been,
as they have been, the victims of the most ruthless passions
of the invaders. What has the negro done unto the North
that he should be persecuted with bloody and unparalleled
ferocity ? What raised New York to the rank of an Erne
pire city, and lined her streets with marble palaces ? The
profits realised from dealing in the products of negro la-
bour. And what laid the foundation of the greatness of
Boston ? Not emancipation, not any theory of right, not
righteousness or philanthropy. The middle passage was re-
volting, but it was profitable; and the self-dubbed saints of
New England waxed rich by the zealous pursuit of a highiy
remunerative slave trade. Why should New England hate
the race that has given her riches ? Because, forsooth, the
negro is the cause of the dissolution of the Union. The
North knows full well that negro slavery was not the
cause of secession, and it is not in the way of reunion.
The Scuth would have left the North even if the Go-
vernment of England had not forced her to receive the
negro slaves brought to her ports in English and Yankee
ships; and if the South would return to the Union, slavery
would be no obstacle, and abolitionism would be no more
heard of.

We understand why Mr Lincoln desired to deport the
negroes to a remote place where they might die out. Mr
Lincoln is from the West, and Western men, thanks to the
insidious teaching of New England, have always been in-
tolerant of the presence of the negro, anti from a fear that
free labour might compese with white labour, have made
it penal for negroes to reside in their States. We
understand why the Irish settlers have an antipathy to the
negro, for the unscrupulous abolitionists have told them
that the negro will interfere with their labour. But we do
not understand why Now England should so hate the
negro. Is it a mere savage instinct that makes her prone
to oppress the helpless ? We cannot tell. The motive is
problematical, bat the fact is hideously glaring.
This hate is not of recent growth, though the war has
amazingly developed it. From first to last the North has
behaved inhumanly to the negro. We have seen how the
Yankees,for the sake of gain, were active participators in
the slave trade, While the Southerners were petitioning
the Home Government to send them no more negroes, the
merchants of Boston were importing living cargoes and
selling them by auction. Nor were they without an excuse.
They declared that they wore engaged in a holy mission.
They were rescuing the " blacks " from savage life and
heathenism, and bringing them into a Christian land. So
long as slave labour was profitable in the Northern Stites,
so long did the Northerners keep slaves. When the influx
of emigrants and a change in the cultivation of the soil
rendered slave labour unprofitable, slavery was abolished.
What did the New Englanders with their slaves? Eman-
cipate them ? What I the saints of New England sacri.
fice property for the sake of a professed principle ? That
phenomenon has not yet happened. No; the New
Englanders sold their slaves to the South—sold the
fathers and mothers of the slaves they are now seeking to
destroy in the name of philanthropy. Thenceforth the negro
had no rest in the North. He was free, but he was a leper.
Happy for the Northern slaves that the South could pur-
chase them, fcr otherwise they would have perished from
*hoer neglect and misery. The free negro has not prospered
in the North. From 1840 to 1850 the census of the United
States informs us that in the South the free negroes in-
creased from 170,335 to 210,955, and in the north from
215,968 to 223,248—that is, in the South about 25 per cent.,
and in the North about 3 per cent. And this difference
cannot be mainly ascribed to the Southerners freeing their
slaves, for we find that in the same period tha slave popu-
lation advanced from 2,519,087 to 3,112,806—0 r at the rate
of nearly 20 per cent. So the negroes in the South were
more than six times as prolific as the negro in the South.
We suppose that few persons will deny that prolificacy is
an unerring test of comparative happiness, prosperity, and
virtue.

Thr' war, as we have said, has amazingly developed the
long existing hate to the negro. What can be more
wonderful than the demoralisation of the negroes that have
been " freed l" We might have expected some, but were
not prepared for such a rapid and fearful deterioration.
We learn from the United States census that in 1850 in
every 10,000 coloured persons, excluding slaves, there were
in the State prisons and penitentiaries :—ln the slave-
holding States, '938; free States, 28.743. Not quite one in
10,000 of the negroes in the South were in prison, while of
the free negroes in the North there were more than 28 in
10,000. But this, we repeat, did not prepare us for what
has occurred. In the South we see the fruits of 70 years of
a humane and cirilising treatment. All the incentives of
the North have not succeeded in shaking the fidelity of the
negroes to their masters, or in making them faithless to the
principles of our holy religion. Mr Lincoln's invitation to
them to rise up and murder the families of their masters—,
for such is the only meaning of what he is pleased to call a
military measure and a proclamation of emancipation—has
proved a brutum fulmen, and has been utterly disregarded,
Whilst the Southerners have been fighting their battles,
the negroes have in no instance plundered their masters'
property, or been other than good servants to the white
women and children. But mark what has been the con-
duct of those who have been dragged into the clutch of
abolitionism. Look at the horrible massacres per-
petrated by negro soldiers. Look at the host of coloured
prostitutes that swarm in the Federal camps. Look at the
Federal officers parading the towns with theirnegro wenches.
But decency forbids that we should unveil the filthy orgies
of miscegenation.

The condition of the negro in the North is at this mo-
ment heartrending as well as loathsome. See the freed
negroes on the Mississippi—freed, but forced to labour
for less rations and less money perquisites than the slaves
obtain, while even these rations and this money are kept
from them. There they are in shoals literally rotting away.
They are hungry, and the Yankee commissariat officers
purloin their food; they are sick, and the Yankee doctors
will not tend them, though they pocket fees for so doing;
and so the freed negroes rot away in hunger, dirt, and
disease. We write not thus on Confederate testimony. A
Federal inspector testifies to the shocking state of the
negroes on the Federal Government plantations ; and
Federal papers publish graphic accounts of the sufferings
and the degradation of the coloured race. But the climax
of abolitionist savagry towards the negro is conscripting
him and placing him in the battlefield where there is no
escape from death or mutilation.

The Federal Generals and the Federal Government evince
the most callous contempt for the lives of the mercenaries
they command. Grant is not censured for sacrificing
50,000 lives:to reach a position that he could have gained
without the loss of a man. Because the terms of service
of some of the Federal prisoners in the South have expired,
the Federal authorities will not exchange them. For the
German and Irish recruits there is no more feeling than for
the guns they carry ; but for the negroes there is, besides
callous contempt, a magnificent delight in their torture
and carnage. The Earl of Chatham denounced in wither-
ing language the proposed employment of Indians in the
first war of American Independence, But what is there
in such a scheme to compare with the employment of negro
soldiers ? The Indian is a warrior, and he fights with-
out dread. The Indian does not need the s'inaulus of the
bayonet to make him face the enemy. With the negro it
is altogether different, and especially with the negroes in the
Federal service. They shrink from the conflict, and above
all from a cor flict with those who have governed them from
the hour of their birth, and whom ere the war began they
loved and reverenced. But the trembling creatures have no
chance. Drugged with whisky, under cover of Federal
guns, and pricked on with Federal bayonets, they are driven
to "the post of honour." The rest is soon told, The hies-
ing bullets and the whirring shells of the Confederates fall-

ing amongst them, and, palsied with fear, they crouch in the
slaughter-pen. To advance is death, to flee is death, and so
they remain until the dead and dying form a wall, between
the Confederates and Mr Lincoln's drovers. How true this
is may be seen from the Northern accounts of the fight be-
fore Petersburg, and of the late action on the junction of
the Varina and Newmarket Roads. One story is so exact
a repetition of the other that it will suffice to notice the
last. Bimey's coloured brigade had to assault the Confe-
derate works. Before the works was a ditch, into which
2,000 negroes huddled. Let the correspondent of the New
York Times narrate the rest:—" About 2,000 of the ne-
groes got into this ditch and never came back. At least
20 of them climbed on the parapet of the fort and were shot
dead, tumbling back upon their comrades. The rest, it is
said, were slaughtered by the enemy with shells thrown
among them by hand." How awful yet how vivid is the
picture I Out of the terrified creatures only 20 ventured to
put their heads above the parapet. But, since they could
not advance, why did they not retreat ? We are writing
of negroes, not of white tramps. Retreat I What to ?
What would they gain? Are the Confederate balls more
deadly than those of the Federals ? But they had not
even courage to retreat if retreat had been possible. Bereft
of reason, screeching with agony, the quivering mass of
black flesh did not attempt to emerge from the grave
into which they had been driven. There they were, the
living, and the .dead, and the dying, until the work was
done ; the white troops looking on, but not helping
them. So 2,000 negroes were slaughtered for—what
for? That Mr Lincoln may reign over 34 States ? That
the loyal contractors may go rich ? That Mr Seward may
keep in office ? No, for none of these, though these are
the objects of the war. Will it be pretended that the
negroes are of any service to the North or any source of
danger to the South ? Is anything to be gained by this
horrible slaughter ? So far as the progress of the war is
concerned, Birney might as well have sent 2,000 black cattle
into the fatal ditch. We shudder at the crime, but we
cannot tell the motive thereof, unless it is savage hate.
We must turn from the sickening sight. To gaze too
long upon it would inflame the imagination and make rea-
son reel. But we cannot forget such deeds. We cannot
forget the Petersburg pit. We cannot forget the ditch of
death with its 2,000 negroes, whom the correspondent of
the New York Times, with grim diabolical humour, desig-
nates as "nameless black men who have won the title of
hero." Do abolitionists believe that there is a God who
sees the sparrow fall, and who is also the God of the
negro? Nameless black men I Yes, but as precious in the
sight of Heaven as white heroes. Would, for the sake of
humanity, that the abolitionist could learn that negroes are
not vermin, but men I

Cui bone ? Wherefore do we write ? Will words of ours
check the persecution of the negro ? No I So long as the
war goes on, the negroes that fall under Federal rule will
be debauched and slaughtered. For them there is no hope
but in their home—the South—being freed from the invader.
What then does it avail to expose the utter depths of aboli-
tion infamy ? We say that England, that the civilised world,
is bound to protest against the ruthless brutality of aboli-
tionism. We may or may not be justified in leaving the whole
work to the South. But we aro called upon to protest. There
must bo thousands of people in the North who have not
bowed down to the idol of abolitionism ; and it may be that
they will heed the protest. When the Great Avenger
maketh requisition for blood, let us be able to plead that,
though we could not save the negro, we denounced the
conduct of his persecutors. This is surely the least tha,
any Christian can do—it is surely the least that England
can do, seeing that England planted the negro population
in the Confederate States.