The Sun.
London, England, 1863-04-09 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY 14:,VILNING, APRIL 9, 1863.

bon and Cardiff, presented himself at his agents in London got. Witness told him she had been tried, convicted, and
for the amount of insurance, £407, which had been effected -sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment with hard labour,
in his name on certain bags of copper in the Maria's bill of and he then asked him (witness) if he had a newspaper con-
lading, and a further sum of £B6O which had been done on taining the report of her case. Witness told him he had not,
the freight. He expressed great surprise on finding his upon which the prisoner produced the pieces of newspaper,
claim disputed, and demanded an explanation. He was in- and said accounts given of him in the papers wer enot quite
troduced to Mr. Harper, the secretary of Lloyd's Salvage true. It was stated, he said, that he had drank Mrs. Levy's
Association, and accounted for the discrepancies in the bills port and sherry, but this was not true, for he scarcely, if
of lading and the Bahia price current, by pertinaciously ever, drank any wine. Again, it was stated that he had
declaring that the bulk of the cargo had been smuggled on dined off a turkey at the house of Mrs. Levy on Christmas-
board to save the export duty. On being informed that this day, at the expense of that lady, and this was equally un-
could not be, that the crew had declared there was no copper true, as he bought the turkey he dined off himself. In re-
whatever on board, he answered that they were telling a ference to the £5 note, which it was alleged he had
falsehood, and accounted for the abandonment of the ship changed in the Borough, he said Newton gave him a £5
by stating that they had had bad weather. When asked to note at the garden-gate. three days before she went away,
produce his logbook he said it had been lost in the ship, but as she owed him £2 at the time, and that note he changed
when pressed on this point he prevaricated, and at length in the Borough, and where he changed it he should recol-
admitted he had got it, or some of the leaves. He then left last. Witness told him that he had been informed by the
in order to produce the leaves of the log, but it is needless to young woman Newton, that the prisoner bad half the pro-
say he did not return. His manoeuvres, however, were party she stole from her mistress, but this he said was un-
closely watched by detective officers, and measures were true, as £5 was all he had from her. He said that he
taken for prosecuting him for attempted fraud, at the Man- had frequently been to the house of Mrs. Levy, to pray for
sion-house, but as the Court ruled that no offence had been and with that lady for her future happiness—(loud laugh-
committed against the English laws, no proceedings were ter, in which Mrs. Levy joined and shook her head in dis-
taken. Captain Albers, however, soon quitted London for sent). On their way to town the prisoner acknowledged
Hamburg, where £1,700 of the coffee had been insured in that he had accompanied Newton to the station on the
his name, and there waited on the underwriters for his morning of the 21st of February, when she left the house of
claim, who immediately handed him into the custody of the her mistress, and had also visited her whilst she was in the
authorities of Hamburg on the twofold charge of wilfully country, but while there they lodged at different houses.
scuttling his ship, and fraud. The crew of the Maria, who On their way to the railway station to this court, the pri •
were in London, were telegraphed for, and they have since sonar asked his opinion as to what he should do, whether he
arrived ; and upon their evidence, and the false bills of should not plead guilty to the receiving, as he was not
lading, Captain Albers was fully committed for trial. guilty of the stealing or receiving with a guilty knowledge;
In Captain Albers's possession, when apprehended, was and his (Martin's) reply was, that at his age and from his
found a memorandum, or form of letter, carefully drawn up, experience he must have sufficient judgment to form an
in order to assist him in imposing upon the credulity of the opinion for himself, and that he (Martin) should give none.
underwriters at Hamburg. We had prepared an extract to William Trast, of 7, New Bridge-street, Vauxhall, coffee-
append to these details, but to-day we were put in posses- house keeper, said the prisoner used to lodge at his house,
ion of a letter addressed to Messrs. Souza and Reizenberger, and that three or four weeks ago he changed a£s note for
from Captain Albers, at Antwerp, which appears to have him. The prisoner left his houseon the 16th of last month
been intercepted by the authorities at Bahia. It is an exact without giving any previous notice, leaving his boxes
copy of the form alluded to, and runs as follows : there.
" Antwerp, Feb. 5.
" Dear due time, in the month of October, as is
known to you, I leit Bahia with my vessel, the Maria, with
a cargo of coffee, for London, the port of my destination.
Unfortunately I have lost my vessel, she having sunk,
without my being able to save any papers, documents, or
effects—anything but my bare life. I had on board of the
vessel, for my own account, 1,700 bags of coffee, which were
declared before you, and subsequently registered in your
archives. The value of the same I caused to be inferred in
Hamburgh through Mr. Augustus Bolton. Now, as I was
also unfortunate enough not to save any of the documents
either out of the vessel, the underwriters, by reason of the
same, refuse to account to me for the value, I therefore
now wish to humbly beg you to be good enough to issue a
Peruvian consular attestation, setting forth that I declared
before you what is registered in your archives, namely
that I had, besides the cargo belonging to others, shipped
and included the said 1,700 bags of coffee on my own account.
This extract, in order to be valid in Hamburg, nust be lega-
lised by the Hamburg consul, Solely upon this will the
underwriters pay, I therefore beg you to promptly send
the same, with the note of your expenses, which I will will-
ingly reimburse you in, to —, shipbrokers, Hamburg. I
am at present in Antwerp.—Thanking you in anticipation,
your servant greets you, " M. ALBERS.
" Mr. Eustides Jno, de Souza, Peruvian Consul, Bahia."
From our letters respecting the firm of Souza and Reizen-
berger, dated Bahia, March 14, it appears that the misery
they have produced in that city by their fraudulent act was
b3yond description. Reizenberger, before he absconded,
cleared out of a social chest some 20,000 dole. in paper, m hick
he exchanged in Pernambuco for gold. He also received
£3,500 in gold from a house, value of coffee shipped in the
Trifolium, which he had not paid for, saddling a poor
merchant in Bahia with the amount, who is ruined in con-
sequence. Reizenberger's partner Souza has been arrested
by the Government, and is to be prosecuted for fraud. He
declared he was ruined by Reizenberger, who had destroyed
the leaves of the firm's books, and he had no means of jus-
tifying himself. He was refused bail. Blame is attached to
the authorities for allowing the principal criminal to escape,

This being all the evidence at present, and the prisoner
declining to put any questions to the witnesses, or offering
anything in defeace, observing that he should first prefer
having legal assistance, he was remanded to a future day.
The prisoner, who gave his age at 52, but who appears 10
years older, was then removed; but, on his application, Mr.
Elliott cor sented to take two sureties, in 100 each, for his
appearance.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The speech of the Solicitor-General on
the subject of the escape of the Alabama from Liver-
pool' was so eminently saccessful in the assembly to
which it was addressed that, for a time at least, it
put to silence the clamours of a small and active
party who, following their usual instinct, have set
themselves to discover that the great mass of their
countrymen are wrong in theory, lax in practice,
and instigated by motives the most sordid and feel-
ings the must reprehensible, because it has been the
pleasure of the press of the United States repeatedly
to stigmatise the Alabama as a British pirate, to
threaten all sorts of reprisals, and to denounce ex-
emplary vengeance against us for the loss inflicted
on their trade. These persons were for a while con-
vinced that we had flagrantly violated the law of
nations and broken through our neutrality, and
after all our sacrifices and fair professions had at last
openly sided with the South. Then it was said that
we had wilfully and deliberately connived at the
infraction of our laws, and suspended our interfer-
ence till we well knew it was too late. To this class
of declaimers and murmurers the speech of Sir
Roundell Palmer was a very serious calamity. It
absolutely and for ever demolished the whole super-
structure which the men who think that they can-
not be friendly to America without being hostile to
England have so laboriously built up. The accom •
plished lawyer had no difficulty in showing—and
that not by English, but by American authorities,
and by no authority so conclusively as that of Mr.
Seward himself—that the selling of contraband of
war to either party in the struggle by private Eng-
lish citizens was no breach of the neutrality of Eng-
land, nor any offence against her municipal law.
Then it was made equally clear that England was
not involved in any breach of neutrality, even
though private citizens, contrary to her municipal
law, should built or fit out ships for the use of
either belligerent. Finally Sir Roundel' Palmer
showed that the delay in producing proofs of the
real character of the Alabama was due, not to the
English Government, but to the American Minister
and that the case was advised on quite as speedily
as was consistent with its importance by the law
officers of the Crown. We should have thought that
in England at least, this controversy was for ever
laid at rest, and that the most sceptical must have
been convinced that nothing had been done against
which America had any right to remonstrate, or of
which any English subject had a right to complain.
But we find that a meeting has been held iu Man-
chester' not, indeed, attended by persons of any
political mark, nor by a single member of a Parlia-
ment, but amply compensating in violence of lea-
guage for what it might want in weight or impor-
tance, for the purpose of petitioning the House of
Commons with reference to the case of the Alabama.
Something was, indeed, said about the duty of neu-
trality which devolved upon England, but the lan-
guage which found most acceptance was the denun-
ciation of the " felonious and traitorous conspiracy
which now rules the so-called Confederate States."
The petition which this meeting is about to trans-
mit to the House of Commons is a curiosity of its
kind. It calls the attention of the House of Com-
mons to the building of ships for the " rebel slave-
holders' Confederacy," to be used against the Go-
vernment of the United States, with which this
country is in friendly relation. Having given this
sample of their qualification for advising the Legis-
lature of a neutral nation, the petitioners proceed to
show how well they are qualified for the customs of
a constitutional country by commenting, in flagrant
violation of the laws of Parliament, on words need
in debate by one of its members,—an irregularity
which must, we presume, prevent the acceptance of
the petition. The petitioners press urgently on the
House of Commons the
necessity of calling on the
Government to detain, and prevent from leaving the
country, certain vessels which they believe to be
now building for the Southern States until the
present struggle in the United States be terminated.
They do not ask, as it would seem, that the law
should be put in force, but rather that the Govern-
ment should act at once, not troubling itself to wait
for evidence, which might, as in the case of the
Alabama, lead to delays unfavourable to the stop-
page of the vessels. The petition calls attention to
the fact that the Alabama had on board trained
gunners belonging to the Naval Reserve, and ex-
presses the regret of the petitioners that no prose-
cution has followed these acts. As if this was not
enough, they express the gravest apprehension of
the irritation produced in America; they believe I
that the peaceful relations between the two coun-
tries are seriously jeopardised, and that we are
drifting into a war fatal to our commerce and to our
supplies of food, which would place the millions in
sullen opposition to the Government and sympathy
with the enemy, involve the loss of our colonies,
endanger our institutions and the integrity of the
United Kingdom itself. They, therefore, beg the
House of Commons to interpose its authority in
order to prevent any
more ships leaving England
for the use of the Confederate States. We have set
forth this petition at a length very disproportionate
to its merits, in order to afford our readers on both
sides of the Atlantic a specimen of what are not the
sentiments of the English people, so far as we are
able to gather them, with regard to American
affairs. There is hardly a word in the document
which we have set forth which is not most repug-
nant to the feelings of the great mass of the people
of this country. There is not the slightest wish to
speak disrespectfully or act unfairly towards the
North, but neither is there any disposition to em-
ploy or to approve the use of insulting language
towards the South. So far from regarding the cause
of secession as vile and infamous, we have freely ex-
tended our admiration to the unity, the constancy,
the courage, and self-denial with which the affairs
of the South are conducted. We refuse to identify
the objects of the war of invasion and subjugation
carried on by the North with the emancipation of
the Negro, and view, in the proposal to break the
bonds of a race which they will not suffer to tread
the same earth or breathe the same air with them-
selves, nothing but an attempt to remedy the in-
humanity involved in the slavery of the blacks by
the still more dreadful inhumanity of massacre and
extermination. W© wish that our law should be
respected, and that whenever sufficient evidence
shall be produced on oath, not by way of hearsay,
but of direct and primary testimony, the law should
take its course.
But as we would never tolerate
that which is every day practised in America in our
Government ; as We would never endure that, for
the sake of some imagined convenience, expediency,
or necessity, our Government should take upon
itself to dispense with one jot or one tittle of the
law which is our birthright ; so, least of all,
would we desire this
of the Foreign Enlistment Act. The law has
prohibited certain things,
but it has not made
them wrongto be done in the case
see why the selling of ships to belligerents
in themselves, nor are we able to
by the subjects of neutral States should be
prohibited by the municipal law. It seems unwise
to enact further restraints on our natural liberty
than the law of nations has imposed, and thus to
give foreign States
and their adherents a claim to
interfere in the management of our domestic affairs.
But, be this as it may,
we cannot too strongly con-
demn the attempt to urge our Government into a
violent and unconstitutional course by the threat of
a foreign war, of the disaffection of millions of its
subjects, and of their sympathy with the cause of

Serious Charge against a Baptist Minister,

is
Yesterday the Rev. T.Wicherley, a Baptist minister, who
had been brought up from Whitchurch, in Shropshire, on
a warrant, was placed at the bar of the Lambeth Police-
court, before Mr. Elliott, on a charge of feloniously receiv-
ing eight shirts and other articles, of the value of £5O, the
property of Mrs. S. Levy, a widow lady, residing at No. 7,
Stockwell place, Stockwell, Surrey.
The first witness called was Mrs. Sophia Levy, the pro-
secutrix, who said that for four years, and up to the 21st of
February last, a young woman, named. Mary Ann New-
ton had been in her service, and up to that time and for
some weeks after she had placed the most implicit confi-
dence in her honesty. A. few days before the time she
mentioned Newton represented that she had received in-
telligence from the country that her mother was in a dan-
gerous, in fact in a dying state, and asked permission to go
to see her. This permission she granted, and Newton
wished to start at five o'clock in the morning, saying that
her uncle was going to accompany her, but witness objected
to her going at such a time and before she was up. The
young woman, however, persisted in starting at the for •
mer time, repeating that her uncle was going with her,
and witness consented. Newton accordingly left her resi-
dence at five o'clock on the morning of the 21st of Feb-
ruary, and she did not afterwards return, nor did she
(witness) hear from nor see her again until the 18th of
March, when she was standing at the bar of this court,
on her own confession of having robbed her to a con-
siderable extent. On the 14th of March she (witness)
missed from a drawer in her bed-room two £lO and six £5
Bank of England notes and articles of jewellery, amount-
ing in value to £7O or ao, and the drawer in which this
property was kept was always locked, and the key always
kept in her own (witness's) possession. On the day she
saw the young woman Newton at this court the prisoner
called on her and said it had been his intention to have
given Newton into custody, but she had given herself up;
Mr. Elliott--A constable called on you the same day to
say that Newton had given herself up ; which, called first,
the prisoner or the officer ?
Witness—The prisoner, sir.
Had the prisoner called on you before that day F—Yes,
sir, on the Monday before, when he said Newton was a
great liar; and I then charged him with being concerned
with her in robbing me.
What was your reason for thinking so P—Because at that
time I had ascertained that he constantly came I o my house
without my knowledge, and that he used often to be in my
kitchen enjoying himself and drinking my wine—(laughter)
—my port and sherry. (Renewed laughter.)
Did the prisoner at that time say anything about receiv-
ing anything from the young woman Newton F—Yes, he
said he changed one note he received from Newton in the
Borough, but refused to say where or whether it was a £5
or £lO note.

Did this latter conversation take place on the Monday
or Wednesday ?—I now recollect it was on the Wednesday,
for when he told me about changing the note, I said I
thought it was time for me to send for a constable, and he
at once left my house, and I have not seen him from that
time to the present.
Had the prisoner been in the habit of visiting your
house, with your knowledge, before the time you have
spoken of ?—I recollect his doing so once, when my servant
told me that it was usual for persons attending the Baptist
place of worship to ask the minister to come to pray, and as
she was a constant attendant at the chapel of the prisoner
at Clapham-rise she asked me if she might ask prisoner to
my house, as he prayed beautifully. (Laughter,) At the
time I had no suspicion that there was anything wrong,
and therefore did not object to his coming. He accordingly
came and prayed in my drawing-room. I was not aware,
as I said before, of his constantly visiting my house with-
out my knowledge, and my slippers being ready for him
when he came there. In conclusion, the witness said that
from the examination of the prisoner Newton at this court,
and information given by her to the officer, she (witness)
examined a certain drawer she named, and there found
duplicates for part of her property pledged, and a bunch of
keys she had never before seen, which opened every lock in
the house. Since that time she had missed several shirts
belonging to her late husband, and the one produced she
had seen in a box belonging to the prisoner, at his late
lodging, on Monday last.

Serjeant O'Dell, 18 L, said that on Wednesday, the
18th of last month, he was on duty at the station-house in
Kennington-lane, adjoining the curt, at about eleven
o'clock, when the prisoner and the young woman Newton
came there. The prisoner, addressing the inspector, said,
" I have got a young lady here who wishes to give herself
up for robbing her mistress." The inspector asked him for
his name and address, which he gave, and also the name
and address of the mistress, and this he also gave, and left
the station saying he should go and fetch Mrs. Levy, the
mistress. During his absence Newton gave herself up on
her voluntary confession, and on his return, in about three
hours, he said Mrs. Levy was coming. He then asked to
have some conversation with Newton. Witness told him
he !could not do so then, and that what he had to commu-
nicate must be done in his presence and hearing. The
prisoner Newton at the time observed that anything he had
to say to her to say it then, and that she did not want to
say anything to him. The prisoner declined saying any-
thing, but wont away, and though he (witness) had been
his chapel, and several other places in search
ot of hishi
tol
,o dgheinhgasci
not seen him from that time until that
morning.
Police-constable Henry Martin, 63 L, deposed that on
Monday last he accompanied the prosecutrix to the late
,
lodging of the prisoner, at a coffee-shop in Bridge-street,
Vauxhall, and there found in a box belonging to him, a
shirt, which Mrs. Levy identified as one belonging to her
late husband. On Monday night he
, y a
widowcie nr n
:et
ed
la,
alidny ,
Whit-
church, in Shropshire, and there apprehended the prisoner
named Mary Ann Newton,
,on a warrant granted by hisworship. He told him the
notes
ag
proceeded to
charge was for being eon with a young woman,
£5O, and other property amounting togaboout a like sum, the
property of Mrs, Le,
Surrey. He denied the charge, but anxiously inquired if
Newton had been convicted, and of
at thest
Stockwell,
wu value
10.1,f
what punishment she had,,