The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-19 00:00:00

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1863.

Non-intervention, if persisted in to an extremity,
becomes hardly less than a crime on the part of a
nation. The period arrives, in every contention
between armed belligerents, when—that conten-
tion becoming day by day more sanguinary, and
yet giving, day by day, clearer and clearer augury
of proving, so far as anything human can, in-
terminable—interposition becomes a solemn duty
on the part of powerful, on-looking non-bellige-
rents. To insist upon it that, under any and every
imaginable combination of circumstances, non-
intervention is the law of civilised nations, is, to
say the least of it, illogical. If ever, since the
hour of its commencement, this deplorable war in
North America has appeared to be utterly
hopeless as to its admitting of termina-
tion upon the battlefield —it so appears
to be, at this present juncture. The charm of its
definitive settlement through some crowning victory
won either by the Federals or by the Confederates,
seems more obviously than ever at this moment to ,
stretch away into a perspective so dim and remote
as to be altogether beyond the reach of vision.
Insomuch is this the case, that we are left wholly
to conjecture that that crowning victory is situated
far away in the vague hereafter, at some undefinable
interval beyond the vanishing point in the terrible
picture of the war now spread out before us.
The hopelessness of that fierce conflict being
brought to a close by the belligerents themselves,
in a manner would appear to necessitatethe ultimate
abandonment by non-belligerents of the principle
of non-intervention. Sooner or later, in the in-
terests of humanity, in the interests alike of the old
and the new world, the interposition of Europe
between North and South—the striking up of the
bloody weapons by the potent wand of diplomacy,
and the calling for a truce and parley in the name
of all that is dear both to civilized man and to
Christian—does more and more appear to us a thing
inevitable. In those more and more outraged in-
terests of mankind at large, mediately and immedi-
ately in the respective hemispheres, we are beginning
to yearn every day more fervently that that inter-
position which we believe to be inevitable, at last
may be adventured upon sooner rather than later,
Reasons enow for this aspiration might be found
only too abundantly, by any one who listed to go
in quest of them, strewn in ghastly guise far and
wide over that bloody chaos of slaughter—the
utterly fruitless, and yet hideously destructive
battle-field upon and around the now tainted
heights of Gettysburg. A battle-field littered
over by forty thousand mangled victims
of the war, a struggle that lasted almost
uninterruptedly during from three to four days and
nights, and where four hundred cannon (200 on the
side of the Confederate assailants, and at least 200
on the side of the Federal defenders of those heights
of Gettysburg) thundered, sometimes almost simul-
taneously, during many consecutive hours—a spec-
tacle so dreadful of its kind, and so absolutely boot-
less, as leading to no result one way or the other :
this last event of the war alone, this one isolated
incident in it, would really seem to clamour for the
intervention at last of European diplomacy. For
what is the diplomacy of Europe waiting ? For the
prospect of some natural termination to the war
itself ? The struggle has now lasted, with varying
results, for more than two years past. The contend-
ing armies have been struggling to and fro, north-
wards and southwards, eastwards and west-
wards, in fierce and deadly strife—now in
one state, now in another. And now, after
all these vicissitudes of the war, after these
two years and upwards of its continuance—with
the fury of it still perpetually increasing—
now, in the Autumn of 1863, the war between the
Federal and Confederate States of North America,
appears to be farther away from any prospect of
a conclusion then ever. Thousands, and tens of
thousands are perishing through it. Millions
upon millions of dollars are squandered upon it.
The so called ministers of religion, like this
wretched Dr. TING
mentioned in the Telegrams,
seem disposed to hound on the North to the pro-
secution of an implacable war (as Dr. TYNG says,
to all eternity "), and this
in the prostituted
name of Emancipation. In heaven's name, let us
effort may at last be made
hope that some tardy
towards putting an end to these dreadful abomi-
nations.

The news brought by the last mail from New
Zealand is'more encouraging than might have been
expected. It could not be hoped that 'war had
been averted; and, indeed, it was scarcely to be
desired, after the flagrant conduct of the Maories.
The murder of the English solditrs in May last Was
an outrage which no civilised Government could
pass over, and certainly Sir GEORGE GREY cannot
be accused of too great haste for war, when he
waited for such a catastrophe before he commenced
hostilities. In fact, the Gaverner has been censured
in many quarters for having shown too much in-
dulgence to the natives, and it is probable that a
due admixture of firmness and c:nsideration might,
at the very instant, have prevented the outbreak.
The 3,laories are, undoubtedly, a troublesome
race to deal with. They are sharp-witted, and
possessed of a degree of civilisation which enables
them to oppose' the assaulters with their own
weapons, while they maintain all those features of
a guerilla warfare which make a campaign against
savages so wearying end unprofitable. Presuming
on these improved notions of justice and humanity
which make Englishmen of the present day shrink
from exterminating the aborigines of their colonies,
the Maories have shown themeel,ree in all their