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

Non-Intervention in Greece.

The following despatch has been made public
" Foreign•ofce, S3pt. 19.

" Sir,-1 have received your despatch of the Ist
inst., reporting the request of Count Sponneck that
her Majesty's Government would exert their in-
fluence with the National Assembly, and especially
with the so-called ' English party,' to induce them
to proceed with the discussion of the constitution
without unnecessary delay.
" You will state to Count Sponneck that her
Majesty's Government have no relations with any
political party in Greece, and only wish to act in
concert with France and Russia in the general in.
terests of Greece.

" But as regarda the request made by Count
Sponneck for the exertion of English influence on
the National Assembly, you would say that,
although her Majesty's representative expressing
to any deputies who may speak to him on public
affairs an opiLion of an early settlement of the con-
stitution, it would not be consistent with the prin-
ciples of her Mjesty's Government to attempt to
influence the decisions of the Assembly, while to do
so would be setting a bad example, and might lead
other Powers to exert influence in some other and
more objectionable direction. _ _

" Thelcs3 foreign Powers interfere in the inttr%
nal affairs of Greece the better will be the prospect
of internal tranquillity and external peace for that
kingdom.--I am, &a.,
" The lion. E. M. Erskine." " RUSSELL.

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 hes intervened between
this recount and the last, and this is always nr.
favourable to the banking reserve, because a cony
siderable amount goes in notes to the humbler
classes, who do not keep blnking 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. Oa the sth 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 quipker
it tends to return. Everybody who has money does
not let it sleep; perhaps, indeed, the clerk does not
pay his tradespeople quicker, bat as soon as a
tradesman gets money when it is so valuable be
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
t
active circulation like giving people a good bonus
bringing the notes home. Some part even of the
dividend issue may have been brought back by this
potent cause, and, atqaulalrter
events, the exceptional
issue at the end of the
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 bGfore-
hand either that these loans would not be renewed,
or that they would not be replaced by other loans.
It is 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
~ 19
If

Diminution in a fortnight ....
• There is some doubt whether the reduction in the
Government securities or in the private securities
strengthens the Bank reserve immediately ; but
there can ba 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 Milk an additional control over the value of
money even if—which is a moot point—they do not
actually bring in more notes.
On the whole, this week has had a favourable
effect upon the money market. People's minds are
calmer, and though no wise min 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. Tho 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 heard used, ditcounted
November, and so may, perhaps, look forward to
that dismal month with less app•ehension than some
weeks since would have been reasonable.

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE AND DEATH
AT BRIGHTON.—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
srom 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 were of opinion that death arose from exhaustion and
exposure, all arising from temporary. insanity, cud a verdic t
to that effect was recorded,

Abolitionism and the Negro.

(From the _lndex.)
The record of the negro race is a sad and inscrutable
enigma, If ever it was justifiable to say, " Behold the cursa

&:( he Eternal I" it would be so in respect to the history of
the negro. Metory I Bitter mockery I The negro has no

history, From the days when the sable sons of AL:ea
were the slaves of the Kings cf 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. I hey 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 app:ared in history, it has been as tools to be cast
aside and forgotten when the work was accomplished. So
far as the historian can discern: literature and ert, govain-
meat, 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. Not only have they thei: place in nature, but
they are !umbers 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 aboli'ionist
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 ti uth. We assert tie 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 melignity with which
he is persecuted by the abolitionists of New England,
What shou,d we say of those who would cot..upt childten,
incite them to commit infamous and bloody deeds, mean-
while robbing their v'ctims and subjecting them t) the
vilest uses; and who, to paraphrase Mr. Lincoln , would
drive them into slaughter-pens as a butcher does sheep ?
No language is power,ul enough to properly denounce such
crimes, and neither can any one fairly express the deles`a-
tion inspirl by the consideraJon of the horrible suffe:ngs
that New Eng'and abolitionism has inflictA on the negroes
who, by the cruel forttine of war, have fa'len wider its
merciless end 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, end therefore enjoy the prosperity a d suffer frcm
the adversity that lights u Jon their homes and country. It
was not; however, to be supposed that 'hey would have been,
as they have been the victims of the mostru hless passious
of the invaders. What has the negro done unto the North
that should be persecuted with bloody and unparalleled
ferocity ? What raised New Yo k to the rank of en Era•
pire city, aid I.ned her streets with marble palaces? The
profits realised from dealing in the products of negro la-
bour. And what laid the foundation of the greatrezts of
Boston ? Not emanc'pation, not any them.), of right, not
righ'cousness or philanthropy. The middle passage was re-
volting, but it was profitable; and the sett-dubbed saints of
New Eneland waxed rich by, the zealous pursuit of a hi:3ll:y
remunerative slave trade. Why should New Englend hate
the race that has given her riches? Because, forsooth, the
negro is the cause of the dissolution of the Union. The
North knows lull well that negro slavery was not the
ca tee of secession, and it is not in the way of reunion.
The Scuth would have left the North even if the Go-
ya-, ament of England had not forced her to receive tue
negto slaves brought to her por' 1 in English and Yankee
ships ; and if the South would return to the Union, slavery
would be no obstacle, and abolLionism would be no more
heard of.

We umlers:.-md why Mr Uncoln to deport the
negror-; to a remote place where they might die out. Mr
Lincoln ie from the West, and Western men, tharks 4:3 the
insidious teaching of New Eng'and, have always been in-
tolerant of the preance of the negro, end from a fee- that
free labour might compose vv:th white labour, have made
it penal for negroes to reside in their States. We
understand why the Irish settlers have an antip-thy to the
negro, for the unscrupulous abolitiolists have :old them
that the negro will interfere with their labour. But we do
not understand why New England &2ould so haze the
negro. Is it a mere savage instinct that makes her prone
to oppress the helples ? We cannot tell. The motive is
problematical, but 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 hrs
behaved inhumanly t 3 the negro. We have seen how the
Yankees,for the sake of gain, were ac:ive participators in
the slave trade. .While the Southerners were peLition'ag
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 were engaged in a holy mission.
They were rescuing the " blacks" corn savage life and
heatheatsm, and bringing them into a Christian lend. So
long as slave labour was profitable in the Northern Stites,
Lo long did the Northerners keep slaves. When 'he influx
of emigrants and a change in the cultivation of the roit
rendered slave labour unprofitable, slavery was abo!ished.
What did the New Englanders with their slaves? Eman-
cipate them ? What I the sa'nts of New England sacri •
flee property for the sake of a professed prig ? That
phenomenon has not yet happened. No; the New
Englanderi sold their slaves to the South—sold the
fathers :nd mothers f the slaves they arc now seeking to
destroy in th 3 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 (mid pur-
chase them, fcr otherwise they would have perished from
sheer neglect end misery. The free negro has not prospered
in the North. From 1810 to 1850 the census of the United
States ;nforms 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 happine!s, prosperity, and
virtue.

The war, as we have said, has emaz:ngly developed the
long existing hate to the negro. What can be more
wonderful than the demoralisation of the negroes that have
been ".reed I" 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 peni' entiaries :—ln the slave-
holding States, •938; free States, 28143. 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 23 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 civilising 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 lwutum fulmcn, 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 lyen 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 eavagry towards the negro is conscripting
him and placing him in the battlefield where there is no
escape from death or mutilation.
TheFoderal Genera's 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 a inaulus of the
bayonet to make him face the enemy. With the negro it
is altogether different, and especially with the negroea in the
Federal service. They shrink from the conflict, and above
all from a conflict with those who have gov..,rnci them from
the hour of their birth, and whom ere the war began they
loved and reverenced. But the trembling creat tares have no
chance. Drugged with whisky, uncle: cover of Federal
guns, and pricked en with Federal bayenete, they are driven
to "the post of honor::." The rest is soon told. The hiss-
., ing bullets and the whirring shells of the Courederates 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. Birney'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 Ncw
York Times narrate the rest:—" About 2,000 of the ne-
groes got int) 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 aro writing
of negroes, not of white troops. Retreat I 'What to ?
What would they gain? Are the Confederate balls mere
deadly than those of the Federals 11 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, thuugh 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 end 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 es "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
Gui 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 avel 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 are called upon to protest. There
must be 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 that
any Christian can do—it is surely the least that England
can do, seeing that England planted the negro population
in. the Confederate States.