The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-26 00:00:00

War of Independence is filled with denunciations of
the cowardly cruelty of the British Government in
employing Hessians and other mercenaries to coerce
and slaughter tho colorists. Bat the Federal
Government, under Mr Lincoln, has no greater
scruples in this respect than Gorge 111, and
Lord North. Not only Hessians, Prussians, Bava-
rians, Hanoverians, Wertembergers, Bi uuswickers,
Saxons, and Austrians, but Hibernians by the
thousand have been bought or, kidnapped into the
armies of the Union, to take the place of the indus •
trious and thriving Yankees who desired the aboli-
tion of slavery and the conquest of the South, but
thought their own lives too valuable to their busi-
ness and their families to be sacrificed while the
scum of Europe was available for the disagreeable
work of fighting. The system of high bounties still
flourishes, and the fear of another and more strin
gent conscription than the last keeps at fever-heat,
The kidnappers, who are mostly Yankees of the
kind popularly known as " regular down-casters,"
the sharpest of the sharp, drive a flourishing trade
in the hocussing and robbery of raw immigrants.
If there be anything much more detestable in the
African slave trade than there is in the recruiting
business as carried on in the Atlantic ports of Ame-
rica, it can only be found in the horrors of the
middle passage. In other respects, the bounty
brokers and agents commit as many atrocities as
their piratical compeers, and are slave dealers of
the worst kind. In hundreds of instances they not
only receive from the city, the State, or the Go-
vernment the capitation fee of 20 dols. or 50 dole,
but having enlisted the man against his will by the
preliminary process of stupefying him with drugged
whiskey, they rob him of the whole of the bounty
money, to which he would be entitled if he were a
bona fide volunteer. The time of the consular
agents of Great Brititain and the German Powers is
all but monopolised by their effort to obtain the
release of the unfortunates thus inveigled into
slaughter—efforts which in nine cases out of ten are
wholly unavailing. How little the vocabulary of
the occupation in which these men are engaged
differs from that of the slave trade may be judged
by the following circular issued by a Boston firm
of man dealers, and distributed in this city to all
the hotels and other places of business of which
the proprietors and conductors are in posi-
tion to be solicited for employment :

Boston, Dec. 8, 1864,

To ----

Dear Sire—Knowing that your business brings you in
connexion with persons who would like to join the army or
navy, and we being engaged in filling town quotas, we will
pay you as high a price for all the men you can furnish us
as any other firm in the States. If you have any men you
wish to dispose of you can address us by mail or telegraph
in regard to price, &c.
Office, 46, street,

P--- and Co.

Enclosed with the circular is A card addressed to
" Brokers and Runners," informing them that the
firm of P. and Co. (there is no necessity to advertise
their name) guarantee to pay them "more for their
men than any other film in Boston or New Eng-
land." The wrongs committed by such chandlers in
unsuspecting flesh and blood as P. and Co. have
threatened so seriously to embroil the Federal Go.
vernment with European Powers that Mr Lincoln
thought it advisable in his Message to wash his
hands of compiicity with their misdeeds. "I re-
gard," he says, " our emigrants (immigrants) as one
of the principal replenishing streams which are des-
tined by Providence to repair the ravages of inter-
nal war, and its waste of national health and
strength. All that is necessary is to secure the flow
of that stream in its present fulness; and to that end
the Government must in every way make it mani-
fest that it neither needs nor desires to impose in-
voluntary military service upon those who come from
other lands to cast their lot in this country." Mr
Lincoln has shown that he is not particular in ad-
hering to the strict forms of law, and that he and
his secretaries and Generals are quite willing to
stretch a point, or several points, of constitutional
or any other law on the plea of military necessity.
Would it not be worth his and their while to
stretch a point with regard to the bounty-brokers,
the man-sellers, the hocussers, the robbers, and the
kidnappers who provide the Federal armies with
unwilling, and, therefore, unless soldiers, who are
first drugged, then cheated, and then sent to the
army, as if they had no greater rights and were of
no more account in any way than the negroes of
Dahomey ? instead of allowing General Bur-
bidge or General Payno to hang the unhappy
planters and farmers of the Border fur the vague
offence of " sympathy" with the South, he would
hang one bounty-broker in New York and half a
dczm in Boston, he would do more in ono week to
encourage the wholesome influx of Europ. an labour
into America than he could do in a year by any
amount of rhetoric, or State paper verbiage, how-
ever plausible, which he might address to Coutgress
in a message, and issua to the world in the sl'.ape of
a pruclamation.

The alleged Confederate conspiracy to barn down
New York bids fair to be speedily forge tten. Not
a word is now said upon the subject„ -and not one
person has been arrested against wt., om there was
a reasonable ground of suspicion. The few idlers,
vagabonds, and disreputable characters taken into
custody on the first alarm have TN en discharged, and
the 25,000 dols. offered by tho
city as a reward for
the discovery of the incendikel
es remains without a
claimant.

December 14.
P.S.—A senaii.offieial •iitatement from the Army
of the Potomac, dated oil the 11th informs
the public that Grant 'Eras accomplished the object
of his new movement e zainst the Weldon Railroad.
It would appear tf•
against Weldon itse,t7,,
it'c either he had no design
or that, having a design, he
has been compelled, to abandon it by the :resistance
of the ?mealy. }ii forces under General Warren
destroyed 14 milia, of the read, burnt several depots
or stations, and, infle:cd other loss and damage,
suffering only ei loss of from 40 to 50 men. The
extreme sever',l" f of the weather is put forward as
the exp:anat'.c.o or apology for the small results of
the expediti era from which so much was anticipated,
cut as Cren..TiVarrec drove before him a large supply
of what ifs rayed " beef on hoof"—i. e., herds of
live cattl a•—it is not easy to avoid believing that he
had greyer objects in view than the destruction of
few rdiles of railway, and that he intended to re-
main v,a some part of the line, to isolate bath
Petets'Jurg and Richmond from their supplies in
that 'direction. As it is, the movement is resolved
into, mill proportions, and may be safely put into
the, long-extending list of Grant's failures.

INFRINGEMENT OF TILE EXCISE LAWS EY A
bRUGGIST.—On Friday, at the Salford Town
Hall, James Sherratt, chemist and druggist, Pendleton,
was charged with preparing and selling methylated spirit
as a beverage without a licence. Mr R. B. B. Cob-
bett, who appeared for the Inland Revenue, said that the
spirit was allowed to be used free of duty in the arts and
sciences, and with the view of preventing it being appro-
priated as a beverage, a quantity of naphtha was mixed
with it before it was permitted to pass free of duty. The
defendant had entered into the requisite bond, in which he
affirmed that the spirit would only be used for pharmaceuti-
cal purposes, Instead of carrying out this arrangement, he
had sold the spirit as a beverage, and thereby evaded duty.
Witnesses were called to support the charge. It was
proved that on the 3d of October, Mr Hynes, supervieor:of
Excise, accompanied by Sergeants Hargreaves and Walker,
of the detective police, watched near the defendant's shop.
A man came out with a bottle, containing what he termed
" Sherratt'a Cordial." Possession of this was obtained, and
some of the liquid was forwarded for analysis to the Inland
Revenue laboraory,London. The mixture was found, upon
the test being applied, to consist of methylated spirit,diluted
with water. Several reports had reached the ears of Ow
police that persons had purchased " Slaerratt's Cordial,.f
and using it as a beverage, had become intoxicated. It
was the prevalence of these rumours that induced the
police to inform the Excise authorities.—Mes.srs Morris and
Heime, assistant chemists at the Inland Revenue labora-
tory, London, stated the test they had used.—'Nr Heald,
for the defence, said that the cordial was sold as a. medicine,
and that it contained a small quantity of quinine. The
presiding magistrate, Mr Trafford, said that he bei'ie sad the
spirit was sold as a beverage under the guise of a inedidue.
For selling it without a licence the defendant would be fine.i
£l2 10e, and for preparing and selling it as a beverage £25,
being one-fourth of the full penalty in each case-
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