The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-14 00:00:00

THERMOMETER.

This morning
This day at Two o'clock 6l

Barometer-30.29.
Wind—W.; moderate, and fine.

- 4
riDt 44441,:g'it-LN mut

LONDON, MONDAY, SEPT. 14, 1863.

In the midst of all the sanguinary horrors and
confusion of this most lamentable war in North
America, the one blessing which we have all felt so
hopeful, from the first,might result from it, is already
apparent as a thing inevitable. It is not only
now before us all, as the spectators of the struggle,
as a matter of mere vague expectation. It is even
now partially assured—it is already in process of
realisation. The belligerents themselves have,
within this present year of grace, 1863, guaran-
teed it, so to speak, as a result that can now by no
possibility be evaded. They have, in their several
ways, rendered it an unavoidable consequence of
the fierce struggle in which they are engaged.
The one has done this, it may be said, negatively
the other positively. Each has fully committed
himself to it. In neither instance, is there an open
left for withdrawal from the course upon which they
have both alike entered quite deliberately—the one
with the best grace possible, the other with about
the worst. And that course, in each instance, so
dissimilar, so apparently trending in opposite direc-
tions, after that seeming divergence, end at the same
beneficent goal—Emancipation.
President LINCOLN at the commencement of the
present year, holding up the Banner of Emancipa-
tion as a threat before the Confederates, issued a
proclamation virtually declaring the boon to be
penal in its character and in its consequence. In
the hands of that irritated ruler of the Federals—
worsted as all his plans had been then, from the very
outset of the war, by those bewildering Secessionists,
the rebels as their enemies call them, the Confede-
rates as they call themselves—in the weak but
spasmodic grasp of Mr. LINCOLN, that white and
blessed Banner of Emancipation, blackened by the
thunder of the fratricidal war in which it was

raised, and stained by the blood of the numerous

battle fields through which it had been trailed,
appeared to the recognition at once of both North
and South, and to the horror of all Europe, even
when viewing it remotely from the opposite shores
of the Atlantic, as a malignant and almost despair-
ing signal for the transformation of a Civil into a
Servile war ! Or, rather, it should be said, for the
enhancement of the atrocity of the one by the
addition to it of all the scarcely definable fero-
cities of the other ! Several months have, since
then, elapsed, and we all know the feeble conse-
quences of that most desperate of all the many
desperate ventures of the Federal PRESIDENT.
We know, so far as Mr. LINCOLN'S proclamation
itself is concerned, that, month after month, it ap-
peared powerless in the way of giving rise to any
appreciable consequences at all, great or small,
rapid or tardy, good, bad, or indifferent.
The pa3ans chauoted by the infatuated be-
lievers in Federalism as the rot) 074) of the
Abolitionist, month after month, here received
no kind of justification whatsoever. Similarly, it
might be said, tbat,with the advance of time, the fears
'of those who dreaded the effect of Mr. LINCOLN'S
ligtva for a Servile War, faded out most happily,
firm, of
all little by little, but afterwards rapidly
Jima
altogether. The one undeniable step, how-
free; which was taken by Mr. LINCOLN, in the
y
ver„et
of
issuing his historical proclamation—
(darkly Or brightly historical it matters nothing)—
11;tk advance, a step that could not be re-
traced.
mlamation, he hing that step, by issuing that pro-
-anent, he
hap pledged himself and his Govern-
pledged the Govetrmanently and unmistakeably
:tut of the North, the Govern-
ment of the Federate
a_
_maintain, thenceforth, touts
gui souls, to the life
etf p
°he death, theprinciples
of Abolition, the tense
motive :Irtmeipation. No mat-
ter how mean the
Prompting him to the
act, the act itself was aceorai,%er:
Mr. LINCOLN
had done for
spite, had done out of despair, had
done in fury, had done for what
Jull
which he and his predecessors had never had the
heart to do previously in obedience to the
Prompt..
ings of either conscience or magnanimity.

President DAVIS, after the lapse of nearly three
quarters of a year has only just now, and therefore
quite deliberately, responded to the challenge thrown
out to him by that proclamation of Mr. LINCOLN
on the Ist of last January. And now has the Con-
federate Gevernment responded to that challenge of
the Federal Government of the North in reference

to the future treatment of the black opulation of
both Northern and Southern States ? By a resolution

pledging President atvis and his colleagues no less
securely and permanently to the great and sacred
cause held dear to the heart and conscience of every
earnest Abolitionist. The calling out by the South
of 500,000 negroes—upon the promise of each one

amongst them receiving, not only a plot cf land at
the close of the war, but his emancipation from
slavery at the data of his enlistment—is the vir-
tual pledging of the Confederate States to the
abolition of slavery altogether. So that, already,
this otherwise most deplorable war is yielding
80rne happy results, even in the midst of the