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

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five minutes to take leave of the fan*_are tfN,
.....
and there shot. Such is war in the luckless border
States, and such are the means employed by the
agents of professed philanthropists to hasten the day
when there shall be more negro slavery on the North
American Continent. It may be deplorable, but is
not surprising that the Confederates should re-
taliate upon the Federals when they have the op 4
portunity—and that the war should rapidly
degenerate into a war of savages.
The financial situation shares the uneasiness of
the political and military. The failures of the cotton
speculators of Europe have reacted upon IsT,w York
and Chicago, the great corn emporium of the West,
has witnessed within three days a perfect panic,
and the toppling down of banks and millionaires
whom nobody could have suspected of even the
heziid of insolvency. Gold has fallen 41 per cent.
within 17 days, on the faith of victorits that have
been either essggerated or invented, and has con-
tinued to rise and fall with and without adequate
cause, to the bewilderment of the public. In the
money-market ever3-thiog betokens a financial
crash, which not even a grcat victory of the Federal
arms can prevent. In h;ct, the whole financial and
commercial system is so rotten and abnormal that
victory is as certain to ruin one powerful set of
speculators, as defeat is to ruin another. No one
can tell which of the two would occasion the greater
panic, if its leading operators began to fall, or how
loud would be the reverberations of a smash that
might involve on one side or the other nine-tenths
of the mushroom magnates whom the war and a
war expenditure has produced, to dazzle the public
and each other with a wealth—which is wealth in
name only, and which will vanish into nothingness
at the first frost of a hard but wholesome reality.

PRICE ..4d.
STAMPED..... sd.

mendacious bulletins of the War Department, and
by the over-hopeful braggadocio of the Hibernian
Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and by the
reticence of the cooler and more calculating
Grant before Petersburg. To-day it is positively

known that Sheridan's advance in the Shenandoah

has been checked by the General in command of
the Confederate forces, supposed to be Longstreet,
who has taken the place of Eirly, and that Grant's
new plan of operations against Richmond, from
which so much was expected, has turned out as
great and almost as costly a failure, as every pre-
vious attempt he has made against the Confederate
capital, The two corps of his army which, under
Generals Meade and Warren, he debpatched to the
James River gained the permanently untenable po,
sition of Chapiin'sMill at the loss of upwards of:4,000
men, while Gen. Lee—fully aware that if Grant
had intended to march upon Richmond by that
route he would have marched with his whole army
—only detached sufficient force to foil the movement,
and retained the bulk of his legions at Petersburg.
He suspected or knew that Grant's calculation was
that he would be alarmed for the safety of Rich.-
mond against attack from the James, and would leave
Petersburg inadequately protected against an assault
by the main body of Grant's army. The conses
quence was that Grant's designs were frustrated.
He gained nothing, not even a barren victory at
Chapin's Mill, and was unable to risk an advance
upon Petersburg. The whole project has thus coma
to a standstill, having had no results but the loss
of thousands of lives, the befooling of the public,
and the temporary depression of the confidence of
Gen. M'Clellan's friends that he will supersede Mr.
Lincoln, Nor is the situation in the Shenandoah
much more comforting to the war party, either in
or out of the ranks of the Republicans or the
councils of the Administration. As if to prove
to his countrymen that even if he should con.-
quer the valley he could not retain possession,
Gen. Grant has issued an order characteristically
cruel and ruthless to Generals Custer and Merritt,
to proceed up the valley at the head of their respec-
tive divisions—to do all possible damage to the
railroads and the crops, to carry off the farming
stock and the negroes, to take all available measures
for preventing the cultivation of the soil, and, in
view of the probability that the war would last
for another year, to convert it into a " barren
waste," where not even a blade of grass should
be permitted to grow. An admiring critic, writ-
ing to a New York journal from the army of
the Potomac, informs the world that the order
has been or will be so effectually executed that if
a crow flies over the valley it will either have to
starve or carry its own rations. He adds that
in the course of one day (Thursday, the 29th of
September) Generals Custer and Merritt destroyed
as much wheat as would have sufficed to feed the
whole Confederate army for a twelvemonth. The
Shenandoah Valley, not only one of the most lovely
but the most fertile in the world, appears to be
doomed, like Italy, to pay a heavy penalty for her
beauty and productiveness. Her inhabitants to the
latest generation will have cease to perpetuate in
vindictive rhyme or tradition the remembrance of
the misdeeds of the worse than Attila who wrought
such horror in her fair fields in the desecrated
names of liberty and union.

And while these recent events in Virginia go far
to prove that the Confederate cause is by no means
so hopeless as Mr. Lincoln's friends and supporters
for electioneering purposes endeavour to represent
it, there are symptoms both in Georgia and Mis-
souri, that the tide of Federal success has begun to
turn. General Sherman, the besieger, bids fair to
become the besieged. Hood's foiled, but undefeated
army, now commanded by General Beauregard,
threatens to enclose him in Atlanta ; and his com-
mueications with his base of supplies, 140 miles in
the rear, are so constantly interrupted by Generals
Forrest and Wheeler, at the head of large bodies of
cavalry, acquainted with all the byways and passes
of the hills and valleys, as to task° it obvious to the
meanest military capacity that Sherman's generals
ship may speedily be subjected to severer testa than
it has yet encountered, and that ho may not only
require great skill, but great good fortune, to fulfil
the promise of final victory, which the North still
anticipates at his hands. In Missouri a signal
diversion in favour of the South has been effected by
Gen, Sterling Price, at the head of a well appointed
army of 25,000 men, the numbers of which he is daily
augmenting by forced conscription as he passes
along. This conscription, it appears, is considered
the reverse of a hardship by the Missourians who
join his standard, as in the event of defeat and the
scattering of the army by a superior Federal force,
the conscripts may plead that they were compelled
to take service and so save their property, if not
their necks, from the vengeance of the conquerors.
The avowed object of General Price is to seize the
the State capital, install Mr. Reynolds, elected in
the Confederate interest, as the legal governor, and
hold Missouri—or such part of it as his legions can
command—as a constituent portion of the Southern
Confederacy. The Missourians are intensely disaf-
fected to the rule of Mr. Lincoln, and all the mea•
sures of repression which have been adopted against
them have but served to harden their hearts against
the Union and the bloodthirsty officials deputed from
Washington to make them love and adhere to it. 1
An incident gathered from the lips of Missourians
who have fled from their homes within the last two
months, and found temporaryirefuge in Canada, may
help to show why the people of that State abhor
the Federal rule, as administered among them by
General M'Neil and other officers, and how it is that
General Sterling Price, at the first gleam of success
to his arms, may expect to be largely reinforced by
the people. The case occurred some time ago at a
place called Palmyra, where General M'Neil had
his headquarters. A Unionist for whom the General
had some special regard was reported to have been
shot by guerillas. M'Neil forthwith ordered ten
suspected inhabitants of the town, reported right•
fully or wrongfully to be in league with the gueril■
las, to be publicly shot in retaliation. One of them
was an elderly man, with a devotedly attached wife
and a large family of children, the youngest
but three years old. A youthful unmarried
man, named Sydnor, a resident of Palmyra,
was struck with sudden sympathy for the sad
fate of this husband and father, and in a fit of
generous impulse, which, had it been recorded in the
page of ancient history, would have rendered his
name immortal, offered his life to General M'Neil,
as a substitute for that of his older fellow.country-
man. M'Neil, without a spark of manly or Christian
feeling in his heart, had the ineffable brutality to
accept the offer. The old man was released, pro-
testing egainst the bargain, and the young man
was atrociously murdered in his stead. Though
this noble act of selfssacrifice was committed in a
prosaic :age, there is no fear that the memory of
Sydnor will not go down with honour to an ad-
miring futurity, and that when Americans of the
20th or 21st centuries, purified of the stain of this
savage war, shall have occasion to cite to their chil-
dren the names of those whose statues should find
a place in the national Valhalla, that of so brave
and unselfish a youth will find a foremost place, and
that the name of will be repeated with the
execration which it deserves. Another case, almost
as horrible, occurred within the last month in Ken-
tucky, under the rule of the ruffian Paine, whose
atrocities have become at last too bad for the Fede-
ral Government to tolerate, and who has fled into a
neighbouring State to avoid trial before a drum-
head court-martial. It seems that a Federal soldier
was shot by a rifle ball in front of the fences of a .
small farm, owned by a farmer suspected of vague
and undefinable crime of Southern sympathy. When
the fact was notified to Paine, he despatched a com-
pany of soldiers to the place. They found the farmer
digging in his garden, assisted in his labour by his
son, a lad of 16. They were both seized, accused of
the murder of the soldier, and without being per-
witted to say a word in their defence, or allowedeven