The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-16 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

TIMES.—This much justice must be done to the
Americans, that as they affect to surpass us in most
other objects of national pride, they are beating us
and all the world in the spirit with which they
conduct their civil war. No struggle in ancient or
modern times has exhibited greater intensity or
been carried on with greater cost of life and money,
or with more utter recklessness as to final results.
Strange that a people who for near a century have
looked on war as a vice of the Old World, and
utterly impossible within their own borders, should
in four years attain such a precocity in the path of
ruin and the arts of destruction. Certainly a man
is never so near an error as wt-en he claims a
blessed immunity, and we now see in the haughty
and independent tone long assumed by the Americans
the proof of spirit inc Table of accommodation, cer-
antagonism, and no less cera
taia to provoke a fiery
tain to fight it out to the end. In four years the
Northern States alone have run up a debt the inte-
rest of which is equal to our own ; they are adding
to this debt at the rate of two million dollars a day ;
their paper has suffered four times greater deprecia-
tion than ours did at the worst times when we had
all Europe against us ; they have squandered blood
even more freely than money, and compelled every
individual among them to take his fuil share in the
cost and rick of the war. But even these summary
statements lose their effect by the side of the work
done or attempted. Every
port of the Southern
Confederacy has been blockaded and attacked by
land and by water, every river has been penetrated
over and over again, every valley within reach
overrun year by year, and the enemy's capital again
and again all but invested by numerous armies. If
the defence has uot surpassed the attack in the mag-
nitude of its operations, it has exhibited even more
military genius, personal prowess, martial spirit,
and versatility. Ordnance, shipping, and every
device of regular or irregular, war, by land or by sea,
have gone ahead of Lurotrean invention, and we read
every day some now wonder such as the poet ima-
gines the rebel angels devising in their first trans-
ports of disappointed ambition. But even debt,
blood, bombardments,torpedoes,op
and
f p
such a destructionhas
not seen since the break-up of the Roman Empire,
rerty
as devastation,
the world
fall short of the bitterer private results coming hcme
to every class, to every citizen in the Union, These
arc brought out by the Presidential contest, of
which it is not too much to say that it divides the
Northern States es much as the open war divides
them from the South, and that if we look to the
strength of opinion, or to the interests at stake,
there is as much cause end material for a fresh war
in the North as there was between the North and
the South. Of course those who are carrying on
the war—that is, the Republican party—consider it
of supreme importance that they should hold the
reins of power, and continue the conduct of the war,
not only for the next four 3 ears, but as much longer
as may be necessary. It is vain to contend with
the enemy in the field if they aro to be ousted and
displaced and their whole policy reversed by a
stronger fee in the camp. They have, therefore,
left nothing undone that could be done with any
face whatever to insure the return of their present
chief. To what extent this has been done appear,
from the complaints of the Now York " Democrats."
Wherever the war actually rages, as it does in
Kentucky, the army itself becomes the means of a
canvass which is at once irresistible, and, through
the ballot, without scrutiny or appeal. The Govern-
ment has taken good care that the electoral privis
leges of the soldiers in the camp shall not be abused
to the weakening of the powers that be. Martial
h
law as been declared wherever there is a force suffi-
cient to control the elections, and even in the State
of New York a cordon has been drawn along the
northern frontier to admit or exclude all comers at
the time of election, as the military authorities may
decide. It is not easy to believe that one aide will
go such lengths without a degree of provocation from
the other; but even if it be so, it only proves that
this terrible' question of " existence," which has
riven the Union in twain, has really divided eve- y
State, every city, every street, every house in
the Union. The war has ruined everybody, unless
he can reimburse himself by the war; and for this
end he must be on the side, not only of the victor,
but of the ruler, What he loses by enormous taxa-