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THE S' UN.
LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPT. 23, 1862.

In this great war of successes, crisis, and reverses
—of invasions and counter-invasions, no situation of
the belligerents has yet equalled the presont one—
it may, indeed, be no longer present, since the few
days between each departure of news to Europe are
quite sufficient to have brought about a tremendous
decision either way. The Confederates are in Mary-
land, and according to the most probable accounts,
there in considerable force also, they are also in
a position from which they can easily isolate Wash-
ington from Pennsylvania New York and the North,
while M'CLELLAN is gone forth prom Washing-
ton, leaving BANKS to take care of the city, and
determined to offer battle to the renowned " Stone-
wall" JACKSON. It would seem as if the issue of
the contest were staked on the present moves. If
M'CLELLAN were beaten, the North must surely
think it useless to persevere ; if JACKSON were beaten
the Confederates must be ruined for this campaign
at least. On the north side of the Potomac, which
he has crossed chiefly by ferry boats, JACKSON, if
beaten at Frederick City, could hardly return in
safety. If M'CLELLAN were beaten, he could but
fall back again on Washington, while JACKSON and
the Confederates would be free to disport them
selves over all Maryland north of Washington, to
seize the railroad from Washington to
Baltimore, and to leave the PRESIDENT
only the useless city and the lower Potomac down
to the Bay of Chesapeake. The ruin or success of
either cause seems almost to hang on the result of
M'CLELLAN'S move into the field to try conclusions

with JACKSON.
It is of immense importance to the South to make
Maryland the seat of war, instead of Northern
Virginia. The latter district, we learn from Con-
federate sources, has been so stripped by the war
that the few remaining inhabitants are almost
threatened with starvation. It can ill support,
therefore, the large army which must be kept
in front of the Federal army. Maryland is
yet unscathed by war. Her granaries are said to
be well filled with the abundant harvest with which
America has been favoured, and somehow the Con-
federates have managed to come into Maryland
with money enough to pay for all they take. The
Marylanders are also, for the more part, Southern
in their preferences. They still own a large num-
ber of slaves, and the temper of slaveholding is still
the ruling one. By residing amongst them, and
governing by conciliation, instead of severity like
Messrs. LINCOLN and STANTON, they would entirely
add that State to the South ; and the straight line
which separates Pennsylvania from it, and which
terminates at the head of the bay of Chesapeake,
would include that most magnificent estuary of
so many rivers in the Southern territory. By
all accounts, therefore, to get possession of Mary-
land is a grand object for the South. It would
feed her northern army, render Washington worse
than useless to the North, since it would divide
its armies and its strength; and in the
the disad-
vantage future it
would give to the South, though *v, •i
vantage of losing a river boundary—.the Potomac
—the vast advantage of commanding the Bay of
Chesapeake. Such a prize is worth a vl/410 tare, and
the Confederates have been bold enough to' make it.
We await the result with no little solicitude. Fr°-
phesy we dare not, though the skill of the Southern
Generals, their bringing up fresh forces towards ..he
Potomac, and the relative spirit of the two armiesl
after so many victories on one side, and defeats
on the other, we confess augar well for those pets
of fortune—the bold.
But how plainly now is apparent the mischievous
result of the LINCOLN spare-slavery policy ? Here
is Maryland at the mercy probably of the South,
because, having it in his hands, he left it a slave
State, even to executing in its favour the infamous
fugitive slave law. Maryland has somewhat under
100,000 slaves. Suppose Mr. LINCOLN and Con-
gress, as a necessity of war, had liberated all these
slaves, with compensaeion to their masters, what
could the Confederates now have done in Maryland ?

Suppose he had said to the able-bodied negroes,
" Now you, above all, must fight, or do camp
work with the army which is fighting to
secure your liberty," where else would he have found
regiments or servants so determined never to
give in and never to be taken alive ? Where, too,
would be found more reliable scouts, or better
pledges to present to all the negroes in America
that the success of the North meant freedom for the
slave. Suppose he had in the same manner dealt
with Kentucky and Missouri as fast as they came
under Federal power, can it be doubted that the
freed slaves there might have rapidly become the
most efficient allies, the best of Federal soldiers ?
At the same time all the more southern States
would have been paralysed. We should not have
heard of vast armies officered by planters and their
sons, collecting, and taking the field against the
North, they would have had quite enough to do
in watching the negroes on their plantations,
whom the Federal Government had declared free,
and who would have had the pledge of Federal sin-
cerity in the black regiments which were ap-
proaching to liberate them. We shall, of course,
be told that public opinion in the North was not
advanced enough to enable Mr. LINCOLN to take
such a course. Of course it was not. We do not
care to blame him personally, although, had JEF-
FERSON DAVIS and he changed positions, we have
not the least doubt that that able man would
have seen the necessity of the case, would have
whirled round public opinion to it, and have kept
all the South in the Union by means of those very
blacks, to retain whom in their present state for
ever, and to carry whom wherever they listed, was
the cause of the secession. A DAVIS would not
have dawdled away time in coaxing Kentucky to
no purpose, or wasted much of his military strength
in coercing Maryland and Missouri; he would at
once have made them free soil, have thus added
them irrevocably to the North, and then bid the
planting States do as they pleased. He would have
dealt in the same way with Virginia, and have
given that large State other employment than fight-
ing with the North.
Mr. LINCOLN, however, has not capacity to lead;
he was chosen because he was an obscure man, not
like his rival, for unquestionable ability. The re-
publicans of the North are ever afraid of their
ablest men, and prefer some nobody as their
nominal ruler, while they enact the " sovereign
people." To them, therefore, the whole blame of
their present position is due. Let them suffer for
it, we cannot pity them. For half a century and
more they have been nursing the most inhuman
and unchristian sentiments towards the unfortunate
negro, and Mr. LINCOLN himself, the other day,
broadly asserted the fact. It now comes down upon
them with deserved retribution. Their desire to
prevent the extension of slavery is not a noble sen-
timent kindred with anything that glows in every
English bosom, from the labourer to the peer, it is
a mere political calculating Yankee selfishness, that
finds slaves inconvenient, that forbids them to enter
new States, when Yankees migrate from their bar-
ren Eastern States to the rich soils of Illinois and
Kansas; and morally and philanthropically viewed,
therefore, the Republican programme of " no exten-
sion of slavery is no credit to the North." It is politic
selfishness, not patriotism or benevolence. We all
instinctively feel this, and hence our utter indiffer-
ence to the success of the heartless but ambitious
Northerns. With the South and slavery we can
never sympathise, but as little can we sympathise
with the North and negro deportation.
It is said that the. North is being whipped into
emancipation—which we take to be no par-
ticular praise of the subject of this military
teaching. That they will bear a good deal
before their obstinacy is broken down is tolerably
apparent. For if the seven days' thrashing before
Richmond, and the four days beating before
Manassas and Washington, not to mention the
Federal "skedaddling" in Kentucky, will not turn
them, we can hardly tell what will. All they can
say is, that it might have been worse, We learn, in-
deed, from Richmond that much worse was designed
for them ; it was intended to cut Pors and the rest
of them off from Washington. Luckily for them
they escaped this worst disgrace and calamity, but,
as we also know, it was by mere accident. And
the result for the North is, that it is once more re-
prieved, to give it one more chance of repentance.
We lave little expectation, however, of the repen-
tance, and without it, very little hope, indeed, of
the ultimate success of the mighty North.

It would be useless to recapitulate here the full
particulars of that frightful murder in Glasgow, of
which JESSIE 11PLAUCHLAN has just been found
Guilty by a Scottish jury, and for which she has
just been condemned to Death by Lord DEAs. With
the details of this great crime the public at large
throughout the country are already perfectly fami-
liar. Of the peculiar atrocity of the act they have
obtained a very profound impression. Than the
trial, through the medium of which the facts of the
case were deliberately brought to light, one by one
—sifted (comparatively speaking) loosely first of all
through examination, and far more finely and
minutely immediately afterwards through cross-
examination—to be re-sorted later on and placed in
the most favourable light for the prisoner by the
leading counsel , for the defence, and to be after
that examined, each fact in turn, under the
microscopic lens of the Judge's summing
up : than this trial, which has led at last
to a Verdict of Guilty and to a Sentence of Death
nothing could by any possibility have been con-
ducted in a manner more cautious, more deliberate,
or more completely and absolutely dispassionate.
Truth was glaringly great, however, in this present
instance, and more and more clearly as the trial ad-
vanced, it prevailed ! The guilt of the wretched
woman now under sentence of death at Glasgow
became upon every succeeding day of the Trial, more
obvious and undeniabl than upon its predecessor.
Almost from the commencement the impression
which had for some time previously prevailed as to
the entire innocence of old Mr. FLEMING was ren-
dered perfectly visible and transparent. The
bloody footmarks on the back kitchen floor exactly
tallying in size and shape with the footmarks
of the prisoner—the scattered, blood- bedabbled,
Partially-destroyed clothes, known to have be-
longed to and been worn by the prisoner—the
abstracted plate, known to have been pawned (im-
mediatelyafter the perpetration of the murder) by
no other than the prisoner—the stolen clothing of
the deceased made away with, packed up in a box
and sent off for a while, as a blind, by railway, under
the direction of no one else than the prisoner—these
and a variety of other fragments of circumstantial
evidence fitting (with frightful accuracy) in toge-
ther, making at last a clear and consistent, though
first of all a shattered and scattered, « proof posi-
tive"eeird dead against the p
hasrison watcheder !T
theis,here evidence,
perhaps,
,
not a rational being who
who entertains one particle of dbornubtatlalys toant:egni
guilt
of JESSIE M'LAUCHLAN, in barba-
rously
murdering with her own hands, and quite
unassisted, the unfortunate victim, JESSIE MAC_
PRERsoN. The previous
ood character of the mur-
deress certainly tends to render th „witaalianon of the
:'.
e
crime more enigmatical, almost inexplicable.
turns out, this heinous crime ofßut it
her,o to
o have
been

so deliberately planned, and the plan itself to have
been so cunningly carried out, that the recollection
of the fact that the perpetrator had all her life pre-
viously been known as a good sort of an honest,
steady, even apparently religious woman, merely
serves to enhance the atrocity of the deed of blood
now brought home to her with the most damning
distinctness. Yet beyond all these considerations
enhancing our horror at the guilt of this miserable
criminal, beyond the falsification, by that one act, of
all her previous lifetime, beyond even, it might
almost be said, the infamy of the deed of blood
itself, was that appalling incident which marked
the last day of this deplorable trial—an incident
sufficient of itself to blacken the memory of it in-
delibly and conspicuously upon the bloody roll of
the Causes Celebres.

And that incident ? It occurred immedi-
ately after the Foreman of the Jury had
returned (after no more than twenty minutes'
consideration) the very emphatic and uncompromis-
ing verdict—" The jury are unanimously of opinion
that the - Prisoner is Guilty of both Charges of
Murder and Theft, as libelled." During the deli •
very of that verdict the Prisoner, JESSIE
MTAUCHLAN—then pronounced Guilty of Theft
and Murder under circumstances of especial atrocity

—though paler, if possible, than previously, re-
mained tearless and apparently perfectly self-pos-
sessed. Thereupon, while the Clerk of Court was
writing out the formal sentence—Mr. CLARK
(holding in ~his hand a tolerably large
manuscript) addresses himself to the pre-
siding Judge, Lord DEAS, requesting permis-
sion, in the name of the miserable woman
at the bar, that a written statement of her's as to
the crime might be there and then read in open
court before sentence should be pronounced. Per-
mission is graciously given to have this document
read, and it is at once read accordingly. This state-
ment (a very long one) giving an entirely new
story of the whole circumstances connected with
this atrocious murder, a narrative of circumstances
wholly different from those put forward as a
simple relation of the facts in all her pre-
vious declarations. The drift of this New
Confession going directly to throw the whole guilt
of the crime upon o'd Mr. FLEMING, a hale and
vigorous old man, but very little short indeed of
and a man whose innocence
ninety years of age,
has been, as already intimated, clearly, and fully,
and irrefragably established. Upon this point
what says Lord DEAS immediately before pro-
nouncing Sentence of Death upon the murderess ?
Addressing himself to the wretched creature, his
lordship observEs—" Your statement does not con-
vey to my mind the slightest impression. It con-
veys to my mind the impression of a tissue of as
wicked falsehoods as any to which I ever listened ;
and in place of tending to rest any suspicion against
the man whom you wished to implicate, I think
if anything were awanting to satisfy the public
mind of that man's innocence, it would be that
most incredible statement which you have now
made." Shortly after comes the awful Sentence of
Death, during the delivery of which the murderess
sheds, we are told, an abundance of half-strangled
tears—gasping out now and then, " Well, my lord"
—only to stop, however, as if unable to complete the
sentence. Before her infamous statement is read,
she cries out, " I am as inno cent as my child,
which is only three years old !" The little child
with which she had slept the night after this
appalling murder ! As she is being removed from
the Court she exclaims, in a voice barely
audible (echoing one word of the sen-
tenoe just pronounced)— " Mercy ! aye, He'll
hae mercy, for I'm innocent." One reparation the
miserable wretch may yet make. For her own
soul's sake let us hope she will do—what is superflu-
ous for the clearing of the reputation of the aged
man whom she has accused—exonerating, that is
to say, old Mr. FLEMING from any share whatever
in her own brutal murder of poor JESSIE MAC-