The Sun.
London, England, 1863-07-27 00:00:00

very fully with you into the class of vessels required, and
the object these vessels were intended to accomplish.
The American Government, as you also informed me per-
sonally and by letter, May, 1861, had employed Captain C.
to endeavour to purchase suitable vessels for blockading
purposes, and that you were in communication with him on
this subject.
I did not name the negociation I had with the Federal
Government through you, until forced to do so by their
friends in the House of Commons, notwithstanding the re-
peated attacks made on myself and my sons in the Ameri-
can and English press, and by the partisans of the North at
public meetings and elsewhere.
To have remained longer silent would have been con-
strued into an admission that the charges made against me
were correct, and, therefore, I felt the time had arrived when
I must make some statement on the subject.
I hope your family are all well, and remain, my dear sir,
yours very truly,

(Signed) JOHN LAIRD.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

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SATURDAY REVIEW.—The reported capture of
Vicksburg, with the repulse of General Lee's army,
has, in the case of the leading Federal statesmen,
revealed the inherent vulgarity and insolence of
coarse and ungentle natures. In conformity with a
usage which it is difficult for the European imagi-
nation to realise, President Lincoln anti his Minis.
ters were, it seems, " serenaded," when the news of
the recent Northern victories reached Washington,
by a mob with a brass band, and had to open their
windows and make speeches in honour of the occa-
sion ; and of those speeches it is not too much to say
that they offensively exhibit every vice which is most
unworthy of the responsible rulers of a great country
in the crisis of its destinies. Vainglorious boasting
is the keynote of them all; while profanity, cant,
flippancy, levity, party spirit, and personal self-
seeking distinguish, in different ways and degrees,
the variations which each particular speaker per-
formed on the common theme. Not one of the orators
from the President downward, is reported to have
uttered a word of regret over the hecatombs of
human slaughter which constitute the price of the
late dear-bought successes. Not a syllable was
breathed of sorrowing tribute to the bravery of the
thousands of dead and wounded who had been
struck down during a series of battles lasting through
three days. Not the faintest aspiration for peace is
recorded to have passed the lips of any one of those
shepherds of the people. One and all, they are full
of their own small selves—their own official achieve-
ments and their own party triumphs. The President,
with characteristic dignity and propriety, insults
the defeated enemy, and tells a gratified auditory
how the Southern army, which only he and his like
would venture to brand with cowardice—" turned
tail and ran away." Mr. Secretary Stanton has the
satisfaction of thinking that all is over now with the
Northern advocates of peace, and that the same vic-
tory which has all but " crushed out the rebellion"
and annihilated the " rebels," has been equally
fatal to the " Copperheads." General Halleck
does not forget to make a little political capital
for himself at the expense of his own colleagues,
As he delicately hints, it was all his doing that Gen,
Grant was retained in command when others would
have removed him, and consequently he may credit
himself personally with that commander's achieve-
ments. Mr. Seward's first thought is to improve
the occasion by furbishing up his unfulfilled pro-
phecies, and explaining how it was other people's
fault that the " ninety days" have so frequently ex-
pired without witnessing the predicted " crushing
out ;" and his second is to say an unpleasant word
to " foreign nations." Altogether, it is a pitiful ex-
hibition of mental poverty and moral pettiness.
Here are men who, for two years and more, have
been wielding the pc veers of a mighty State, direct-
ing the movements of colossal armies, and struggling
with the forces of a vast revolution, who yet have
learned nothing of the sobriety, the reserve, the de-
corous self-possession and self-respect which the
world expects from the actors in great events, and
have forgotten nothing of the small vanities and vul-
garities which they brought with them into office.
An average Marylebone vestryman would probably
have acquired in the time something of that dignity
of demeanour, if not of character, which responsible
conduct of war and policy on the largest scale has
wholly failed to impart to Federal statesmen. Mr.
Lincoln's address to the serenaders, apart from the
grotesqueoddity:of a style in which civility is carried
to the last extreme of homeliness, is chiefly remark-
able for a rather clumsy piece of effrontery. He has
the assurance to pretend that the war of North
against South is, and all along has been, a war on
behalf of the immortal and " self-evident" Fourth
of July doctrine that " all men are created equal."
To hear him, it is a war of abolitionism against
slavery, and never was anything else. Considering
Mr. Lincoln's personal antecedents, as well as the
notorious facts of contemporaneous history which
he so audaciously travesties, that is, to say the least,
cool. Not three years ago, he was elected President
of a slave-owning Confederation. A little more than
two years ago he swore fidelity to a Constitution
which recognised and protected slavery, and which
recognises and protects slavery still. It is only
within the last few months that he has shown the
slightest inclination to call in question the domestic
institution which he is bound by oath to maintain ;
and his illegal and futile Emancipation proclama-
tion was avowedly resorted to with extreme reluc-
tance, and oniy as a military expedient. It is all
very well to step out on a balcony in dressing-gown
and slippers and tell the gentlemen with the trom-
bones that the Northern war for empire is a great
moral crusade for universal human equality ; but a
more shameless fiction was never broached by
the humblest village politician that ever went on
the stump. "This is a glorious theme, gentlemen,
and the occasion for a speech ;" and it is only to be
regretted that the glorious theme has not a word of
truth in it. For the rest, we have little to say of
President Lincoln and his speech, except that, as
usual, the characteristic graces of his diction defy
and disarm criticism. His concluding sentence, in
particular, may be confidently pronounced un-
matched for simple dignity in ancient and modern
oratory. " Having said this much, . gentlemen,
I will now take the music. It is always interest-
ing- and instructive to note how great
speakers perorate on great occasions. The
chief magistrate of the model Republic, in a speech
delivered at one of the most solemn and exciting
moments of his life, with thousands of his country-
men lying unburied on the battle fields, winds up
with telling the band to play " Yankee Doodle."
The only serious word which it is possible to say
about this unseemly and degrading exhibition of
American statesmanship is that the North is emi-
nently. unfortunate in its public men. Not one
among them has a head to stand success—even a
success bought at so terrible a cost, and so dubious
in its remoter issues, as that which was achieved in
the first three daya of July. At a crisis of the na-
tionaL fortunes which, it might have been thought,
would sober the most frivolous of politicians and
impose a decent self-restraint on the vainest and
emptiest, the President and his Ministers break out
into a perfect Saturnalia of vulgar rodomontade.
SPECTATOR.—We trust Earl Russell is satisfied
with his diplomatic success. The result of his
labour of months, of a combination including half
Europe, of warlike whispers to Baron Brunow and
peaceful speeches made in the Lords, of a formal
appeal to the faith of treaties, and a still more for-
mal repudiation of the means by which treaties are
supposed to be ultimately enforced, has been to
elicit from Russia a despatch full of a calm and
polished disdain. So loud has been the talk of the
clemency of the Czar, so carefully has excitement
been cooled by rumours of conciliatory counsels
at St. Petersburg, that the public scarcely yet un-
derstands the import of the reply. From end to
end there is not in it one trace of conciliation, or
compromise, or moderation, or fear, nothing but
sovereign pride—a determination to refuse all con-
cession, which :is only the more immutable because
it can permit itself officially to appear to discuss.
Even that discussion, however, has its carefully-
defined limit. if the Powers should begin talking
of promises made by Alexander I.—promises which
Prince Gortschakoff defines as a "passing inclina-
tion of the Emperor which he did not accomplish"
—and ask anything not confined to Congress
Poland, discussion is at an end. " This question,"
says the Foreign Minister of Ruisia, " must
be excluded, even in an interchange of ideas made
within the limits of the treaties of 1815," though
those treaties were notoriously drawn up by the
light of the Emperor's avowed designs. " We must
exclude," he says, still more definitively, in the re-
ply to France, "even from an exchange of friendly
ideas, every allusion to portions of the Russian
empire to which no special stipulation of any inter-
national act applies." It is Congress-Poland alone
of which Russia will even speak; and let us see
what she concedes to the demand on Congress-Po-
land. Simply this, that if Poland submits at dis-
cretion, the Cur will accept her submission. The
armistice is blankly rejected. " Desirable as it may
be speedily to place a term to the effusion of blood,
this object can only be attained by the insurgents
throwing down their arms and surrendering them-
selves to the clemency of the Emperor." Negotia-
tionse are to terminate before they can begin, and
the Poles, whose whole case is that by treaty they
are not subjects of Russia, are to acknowledge sub-
jo,fliand then see what interpretation the Czar
places on treaty, rights they will have themselvessurrendered.ered. Till then not only is armistice impos-
sible, but" his
Majesty
owes it to his faithful army,
which struggles for the maintenance of order, to the
peaceful
to tertatit
deplarable majority of the Poles, who suffer from these
impose aitations, and to Russia, on whom they
painful, sacrifices, to take energetic measures
a e thew;, -
Monrovia, as the Siecle -has