The Sun.
London, England, 1864-10-20 00:00:00

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the limes' Special Correspondent)
NEW YORK, OCT. 7.

After an absence of three weeks in British
America, to study the premonitory symptoms that
announce the birth of a new nation, I resume my
pen in this city, the commercial capital of what
might, in contradistinction, be called American
America, if it were not for the pleonasm involved in
the expression, to describe the more violent pa•
roxysms which seem to precede the final disruption
and political death of a greater Canfederation than
the world ever saw. In Canada all is peace and
order. In the outlying maritime provinces, almost
as remote from Montreal and Quebec in point of
time, as these are from Europe, there has been en-
gendered a growing desire, not alone to cement and
assure their relations with the mother country, as
the great centre of authority and the strongest
security of their liberty, but to enter into political
partnership with the Canadas, and with any other
States and colonies that may hereafter be founded
bet weep the Western shores of the Great Lakes and
the slopes of the Rocky Mountains ; thence to stretch
to the Pacific Ocean, and to include at no distant
date the magnificent territories of British Columbia
and Vancouver. In these colonies the still current of
political life is only disturbed by the healthy and
breezy ripple of progress and fair weather. Gold '
is at par. The paper dollar based upon adequate
security is exchangeable for the full value which
it represents. Confidence between merchant and
merchant and between the people and the banks is
unimpaired. Provisions are cheap and abundant.
Every honest, hardworking man can gain a com-
' fortable subsistence by labour not too long pro-
tracted. The authority of the law is paramount.
The inestimable privilege of the Habeas Corpus
has neither been suspended nor threatened.
Every man can sit in the sunshine, " with none
to make him afraid." There is not a grievance
to be alleged, or even whispered, against the
Imperial Government, the purely nominal
but beneficent suzerainty of which keeps the politi-
cal machinery of the colonies in working order, ex-
cept a querilons but affectionate complaint that
England does not reciprocate the kindly feeling
with which her American possessions regard her.
But in Federal America—about to be broken up
into two, if not into three or four political organises
tions, everything is the reverse. The fiery order l
of war has tried the stability of the institutions on
which popular liberty seemed to repose, and found
them ineufficient for the day of peril. The longer
the war lasts the more envenomed it grows. North
and South are no longer free Republics fighting
against each other for a principle of honour—but
hostile despotisms, ignoring the rights of the people,
—the one striving to exist, the other to dominate.
Liberty and war are found to be as incompatible
on the one side as on the others The law of might
is the only law recognised. Men's passions are in-
flamed to the fever point, and madness takes the
place of reason. Thieves and swindlers in high
places grow fat upon the plunder of the army and
the people. Commerce in the Federal North is de-
moralised, and, having made up its mind for high
prices, shudders at the prospects of peace and recon-
ciliation, remote and shadowy as they are, and
curses the victories, real or supposed, which the
Government and the Generals in the field announce
because they bring down the premium on gold, re-
duce prices, and, if continued much longer,
,will
ruin thousands of speculators, large and small, and
produce financial collapse, perhaps national bank-
ruptcy, even although they might not in the long
run be found stable or productive enough to
produce the pacification of the country. Party
feeling is venomous, and, as the day of election
for the President draws near, brings into
play the worst characteristics of human nature,
and, should the contest prove close, threatens to
introduce a new element of revolutionary convulsion
into the seething caldron of popular passion. The
existing Administration is at its wit's end to catch
the wavering favour of the multitude—lies by itself,
or its agents, on every event of peace or war that
it can twist or exaggerate into a reason, or a sem-
blance of reason, for the perpetuation of its power.
The working classes are sullen and discontented,
scowl at the idea of a forced conscription, always
threatened, but never attempted in any populous
community, and clamour for an amount of wages in
depreciated paper which will represent the purchas-
ing power of the wages in hard money which they
received before their hands, or those of their sons,
were imbrued in the blood of their Southern
brothers, and up to this time clamour, and are likely
to clamour, in vain. States as large as European
kingdoms are governed under martial law by attor-
neys and mule drivers, who seem to think that the
more horrible the atrocities they commit on their
political opponents the greater service they will
render to the Government that employs them. And
over and above all these sources of evil broods the
dark, iniquitous conviction that if the North cannot
conquer the South, or the South the North, and that
the Union cannot be restored by a civil war, a foreign
war against France or England, unprovoked
although it may be by either of those powers, may
afford the last desperate chance of preserving what
these proud Americans call "the life of the nation ;"
a nation, however that has never yet existed, and
which if the civilised world were wise, and awake
to its own interest and security, it would never
suffer to exist, if the formal recognition of the
South as an independent Power were sufficient to
prevent or even to retard the consummation. If
the Union be indeed moribund—which the North-
ern Americans passionately and continuously deny
—it dies hard. The strong man disbelieves in his
own dissolution. All things are mortal but
himself. Rome and Greece may be dead, England
may have approached her last hour, but the Union
is in its vigorous and rampant youth, and neither
insidious disease nor sudden calamity shall strike it
down. Ho feels that no external hand has aimed a
blow at his vitals, and cannot believe that i❑ his
rude and lusty frame there exists a poison that he
can neither eradicate nor neutralise, and the same
physical laws which apply to other living beings
apply also to him. He curses his doctors, repudiates
their remedies, and even in the last agony thinks a
vigorous maturity and a green old age are before
him.

For the last three or four weeks such thoughts s.s
these have had possession of the mind of the Yankee
nation. All has been joy and expectation, and pro-
phecy of crowning victory to be achieved at Rich-
mond by the great Gen. Grant, but within the last
three days there have been ominous whispers in
places of public resort and in the offices of merchants,
brokers, and bankers, that the people have again
and for the hundredth time been deceived by the