The Sun.
London, England, 1865-06-29 00:00:00

had succeeded in vindicating their right of seceding
from the Union. When an insurrection, assuming
it to have been so, assumes the magnitude of that
which has been now suppressed in America, it is an
outrage upon common sense for the established
Government to act towards the vanquished on the
assumption that its authority has at no time been
called in question except by an isolated few. In the
work of reconstruction the negro, as was anticipated,
stops the way. Mr. Wendell Phillips and the leaders
of the Abolitionist party could never be brought to
understand that liberty, in its true sense, can no
more be conferred by gift on an untutored savage
than can civilisation. A large portion of the slaves
have been emancipated, but unless they are also
entrusted with an elective franchise, Mr. Phillips
declares that the freedom given to them is not worth
having. Whether the right of voting would mate-
rially ameliorate their condition may well be doubted,
but one thing is tolerably evident—namely, that
those who have received manumission do not con-
sider that they have benefited by their change of
condition. Mr. Johnson has received a deputation
from the freedmen of Richmond, imploring him
either to suspend the existing military regime or to
restore them to the bonds from which they have
been freed. In the cities of the North the antipathy
to negroes has sensibly increased since the termina-
tion of the war, and not a day—indeed we might say
not an hour—passes that the unfortunate men are
not submitted to outrages and indignities at the hands
of their white fellow-citizens which they would at all
events have been spared as slaves in the South. If
they venture to enter the dining-room or the bar of a
public hotel they are forthwith kicked out, if they
enter a public conveyance they are ignominiously
expellacl,...v.--if, plague-stricken, they tainted the
atmosphere ; nay, even in the same churches they
are not permitted to bend the knee to Rim whom
Abolitionists are never tired of telling us is equally
the white man's and the black man's God. • Those
who, ere this unfortunate civil war broke out, had
made themselves familiar with negro life in the
slave-holding States, considered that as large a
share of happiness and contentment was enjoyed
by the slaves as by similar classes of labourers in
countries where servitude did nut exist, but assuredly
no one visiting New York at the present, or indeed
we might say at any other time, would be inclined
to consider the position occupied there by the negroes
as one which any of God's creatures, no matter
what their complexion, would be at all envious of
sharing. It would be unfair to blame the Ameri-
can Government for the deplorable condition of
things at present existing in the Southern States. A
mighty war cannot be terminated, and the status
quo ante restored, by an Order in Council. The
evils engendered by a contest such as that which
has raged on the American Continent for the past
four years do not pass away with the rapidity of
the cannon smoke which hovers for a time over the
field of battle, and then, vanishing, displays in all
their ghastliness the horrors which for a brief period
it served to conceal. The population of Georgia
may be in that starving condition in which they are
represented to be, but the fault cannot (abstracting
the question of the justice of the war) be fairly
ascribed to the Government of the North. But Mr.
Johnson and his advisers would probably lay them-
selves open to reproach if they inaugurate a policy
which has a tendency to enhance instead of relieving
existing evils. It has already been shown to de-
monstration that the great mass of slaves cannot on
their emancipation be brought to labour for hire,
and the invariable result of what we may term vio-
lent acts of manumission has been an amount of
destitution of which only eye-witnesses can form an
adequate idea. It is perfectly idle to say that it is
a negro's fault if he will not work in order to save
himself from starvation. A slave cast upon the
world to work for himself is as helpless and as un-
reasoning as a child. Besides, in a large majority
of cases, work is not provided for the freedman, or,
if provided, the wages are in the hands of a man un-
acquainted with the value or the use of money,
utterly insufficient to provide for his wants. Mr
Johnson is not without experience ; he will there-
fore have no excuse if, with the knowledge which
he now possesses, he should at one fell swoop con-
, sign the entire coloured population of the South to
what will be almost tantamount to a condition of
hopeless destitution.