The Sun.
London, England, 1865-08-08 00:00:00

has, as might have been expected, excited the indig-
nation of those whose sympathies were given to the
Confederate cause. The correspondent of the
Times, writing from the United States, is fairly
entitled to represent what he believes to be the tone
of the society in which he moves ; but it may well
be doubted whether any journalist ever committed
himself to more reckless assertions on matters
seriously affecting the life and reputation of a man
daily expecting to be put upon his trial on a
capital charge than was done by the Times' cor-
respondent on the occasion to which we refer.
Whether the Federal prisoners of war in the hands
of the Confederates during the late war were
treated with gross inhumanity ; whether they were
butchered in cold blood, or mercilessly exposed
without protection to the rays of a tropical sun ;
whether the hampers of viands sent to them by
their friends in the Northern States were placed
so that they could be seen but not touched by the
unfortunate prisoners, whilst the latter received
such scanty rations that only the most robust suc-
ceeded in keeping body and soul together ; and
whether these and similar atrocities were com-
mitted not only with the knowledge, but with the
approval, of Mr. Davis and of General Lee, and
must have been constantly witnessed by the former,
are all questions which may admit of being answered
in the affirmative or the negative. But as, up to
the present time, no judicial investigation has been
instituted the result of which has been to prove that
such things took place, much less that they did so
with the cognisance of Mr. Davis, it is trenching a
little too far on the liberty of journalism to assert
that the evidence upon which those charges of cruelty
rest is overwhelming and unanswerable, and to throw
out a hint that Mr. Davis's friends ought to con-
sider him fortunate if he died a natural death in
Fortress Monroe. Our contemporary has, whether
justly or not, acquired the reputation of invariably
throwing its weight into the balance against those
on whom fortune has laid a heavy hand, and it is
not surprising that the present should be pointed to
as an instance of an established practice. The let-
ter of a correspondent stands on a different footing
from a leading article, but in a journal like the
Times the difference of authority on which the two
rest is to the bulk of readers unappreciable. Our
contemporary would never have published a com-
munication from a correspondent in an assize town
to the effect that the evidence to be adduced against
a prisoner awaiting his trial was unanswerable, arid
that the best thing that could happen him would be
to die in gaol ; and one should have thought that
much stronger reasons would have applied in refer-
ence to charges against the late chief magistrate of
six millions of people—charges which most persons
on this side of the Atlantic believed to be infamatls
calumnies. Assuming the possibility of the allega-
tions being true, it is surely not asking too much to
demand that they shall not be declared to be so un-
til they have been judicially proved. Many of the
statements are grossly inaccurate, and notably that
of the murder of Colonel Dahlgren in a Confede-
rate prison—that officer having fallen on the field of
battle. The narratives of all the English travellers
who visited the Southern States during the war are
at complete variance with the accusations now made,
and certainly we shall require something more than
the bare assertion that the evidence is " overwhelm-
ing and unanswerable" to believe that Mr. Davis
and General Lee have so completely belied the cha-
racter they acquired for themselves by their public
acts.