The Sun.
London, England, 1863-04-10 00:00:00

(From the Times Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, March 27.
The political optimists are still in the ascendant.
The credulous public shuts its eyes, opens its mouth,
and awaits the plum which it thinks the Govern-
ment will drop between its teeth as a reward for its
general good behaviour and patient expectancy.
Wall-street for the first time for many months is
sanguine that the Union will be restored. It believes
that South is starved out, and must surrender be-
fore many weeks. Furthermore it believes that the
Polish Revolution has so completely engrossed the
attention and so seriously endangered the peace of
Europe as to render it unlikely that the Emperor of
the French will recognise the South or concern
himself any further in the American quarrel. And
last of all it affects to believe that American liberty
will come out unscathed in a single feather of its
snow-white wings from the fiery ordeal of the war,
and that the large debt incurred will be cheerfully
paid by an invigorated, happy, and prosperous peo-
ple. Credulous Wall-street ! Sanguine brokers!!
Innocent bankers ! Guileless merchants! What
will they say or do if no great victcry rewards the
Federal arms,—if the veer drags out its slow length
as indecisively as ever—if, when the weeks and the
months pass, the South, having found corn and pork
enough to fight upon, scorns to yield, refuses co-
partnership with Yankees, and manifests a power of
resistance, intensified by every incident and hour of
the struggle ? Judging from their present undue ela-
tion of mind, they will run to the other extreme. A
fit of despondency, longer lived than their fit of joy,
will take possession of them. Gold, the barometer of
their fears, will mark 70 or 80. Mr. Chase will be de-
posed from his high place in their affections, and his
five-twenties, now such favourites, will go begging
for purchasers. Mr. Lincoln will be vehemently
called upon to change his Administration; and all
that is now rosy-tinted as morn in their imagina-
tions will be black as night. The present confidence
of all classes of the public amounts to a hallucina-
tion. It is founded upon nothing—except upon the
hope that famine will complete the work which the
fleets and armies of the North have been unable to
accomplish ; and upon the calculation that not even
a victory by land or sea is necessary to give the re-
bellion the coup de grace. The Government may
possibly be in possession of information which tends
to support this sanguine view of the immediate
future, but nothing is known to the public that can
justify it. The Confederate newspapers speak of
scarcity at Richmond, Mobile, and Charleston, but
not of famine. They betray no despondency, and
are in all respects as defiant and as confident as
ever, while the movements of the Southern armies
in Kentucky and Tennessee show a vigour and
activity that are far more suggestive of approach-
ing victory then of defeat.
The objects of the Loyal and National Union
Leagues that have been organised so suddenly
throughout the North are at length avowed by their
promoters. They are nominally to strengthen the
hands of the President and the Administration in
the prosecution of the war, bat really to strengthen
the hands of the Republican party in their hold of
power and patronage, and to take all necessary mea-
sures for controlling the Presidential election of
1864. The Union Leagues have as yet no candi-
date. Mr. Lincoln will be endured as long as his
term lasts, but will not be proposed for re-election.
In the meanwhile the organisation of the party
will be so extended and completed as to confront
the Democrats at every election, local or general,
-where a victory may be won. Among other
important cities where it has been deemed
expedient to establish a "League" is Washington.
It does not appear from the published reports that
any speaker of great note or character was present
at the inauguration ; or even that the Government
which it was intended to support was represented
et the meeting. The principal orator was a person
commonly called Jim Lane, the representative of
Kansas in the Senate of the United States. Mr.
Lane was well known in the days when the " Bor-
der ruffianism of Kansas was the staple subject of
the denunciations of the Republican party, and
when a Border ruffian was supposed to be a Pro-
slavery Democrat, whose peculiar business it was
to prevent free discussion by the agency of the re-
volver and the bowie-knife. Mr. Lane is not a Pro-
slavery Democrat, but an anti-slavery Republican,
—and the fiercest of all the " Exterminators" who
have arisen during the war to throw odium on the
form of Government that could produce such politi-
cians as he is and make Senators of them. A few of
the salient points of his speech will show the ideas
ho entertains of liberty, and the manner in which he
would enforce them. "It is a disgrace to the country
and the Government," he said, "that a sympathiser
with treason, whether male or female, should be
permitted to rest his or her foot on the soil of the
district of Columbia. I would purify the soil of them
by sword and fire. (Cheers.) In Kansas, where I live,
a Copperhead is not allowed to remain in the State.
If he does not leave when he is ordered to leave, we
shoot him down." (Loud applause, and cries of
" That's the way !") "I am informed by the Go-
vernor of our State that no longer ago than last
Saturday a Copperhead who refused to leave the
State in the morning was found before night
with two bullet holes through his body. (Cries
of " Good, good V') It had been said that we
ought not to use the negroes. So far es lam
concerned, I would rather that every rebel should
be bent to hell by a negro than a white man. (Great
laughter and loud applause.) I would like to live
leug enough to see every white man now in South
Carolina in hell, and the negroes occupying his
territory. (Cheers.) All this may sound to you
very wicked—(cries of No, not at all !)—but no
place on the face of the earth ought to be desecrated
by a traitor. I bid you God speed in clearing out
sympathisers with treason in the district of Colum-
bia. It would not wound my feelings any day to
find the dead bodies of rebel sympathisers pierced
with bullet holes in every street and alley of the
city of Washington. (Vociferous applause.) I
would regret the loss of the powder and lead.
(Laughter.) It would be cheaper and better to hang
them, and save the ropes. Yes, hang them ! and
let them dangle until their stinking bodies rot, de.
compose, and fall to the ground piece by piece."
(Enthusiastic applause.) The published reports do
not state what sort of an audience it was which
greeted this disgusting brutality with approval.
Possibly the audience was largely composed of the
th;eves by whom Washington is infested, who came
to listen, in the exercise of their vocation, with the
double hope of amusement from the mouth of a
kindred rowdy, and of a stroke of business to be
done in the 44'
Door 4-
of any army contractors or
suttlers who might have been attracted
by curiosity
to the gathering. Certainly they could not have
been intelligent, honourable, or decent men or such
blackguardism, if uttered in
their hearing' , would
have been hooted down after the first mouthful.
Senator Lane's affection for bullets may be explained
life in Kansas, when he
by an incident of his early
deliberately shot a neighbour for presuming to drin
or draw water out of a well on his property. Row
he escaped the gallows for that offence is only to to
accounted for on the supposition that there was no
law in Kansas at the time, and that every man was
judge, juryman, and executioner in his own cause.
Perhaps the consciousness that he not only deserved
the gallows, but the warmer doom to which he would
consign every in white man in South Carolina, may
have rendered him familiar with the idea of the rope
and the gibbet, and lent that fervency and point to
his oratory which so charmed the ears of his
audience. But if elections are to be conducted
under the auspices of such " Border rsffianism" as
this man preaches, a military dictatorship cannot
come too soon to save the country from anarchy.
And there are many symptoms that this military
dictatorship is not so remote ft contingency as the
easy public supposes. In whatever way the war
may terminate, it is clear that the Federal Govern-
ment will be compelled to maintain a large standing
army, which army must either find occupation in a
foreign war or in the subjugation of the people. The
military machine is already constructed, and only
awaits the advent of the hardy engineer who shall
drive it over the liberties of the country. That en-
gineer may be as yet a boy at school, feeding his
young', imagination with the bloody pabulum of
battles and victories; or he may be a full grown man,