The Sun.
London, England, 1865-05-25 00:00:00

TEE UNITED STATES.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, May 12.
To such a hopeful and energetic people as the
Americans the task which has devolved upon Presi-
dent Johnson does not appear very arduous.
Foreigners may see immense dangers in the future,
and difficulties of which the contemplation might
appal the bravest and distress the wisest of men;
but the Americans stand upon so high a vantage
ground of self-confidence that they see nothing but
the glorious lights of the landscape and none of the
shadows. Their country is so vast, their resources
so ample and so imperfectly developed, and they are
so enormously strengthened by the continually in-
creasing immigration from Europe, that, in the
pride of youthful vigour, they believe they can suffer
with impunity trials and reverses which would make
an end of more ancient and more cramped nationa-
lities. They are strong with the strength of ado-
lescence, and see nothing before them but pleasure,
success, and power. "The Union," they say, is re-
stored. That one fact is sufficient. The effort to
restore it has developed an amount of strength and
heroism on both sides which have somewhat asto-
nished ourselves, and we are proud to believe have
somewhat alarmed the world. The one great object
achieved, and the Civil War being virtually, if not
entirely, at an end, all that remains to be done is
easy of accomplishment. What is mainly wanted
magnanimity, and no fuss upon the part of the
new President, as if he thought himself better,
wiser, or more powerful than anybody_else. If he
will refuse to make -any martyrs in the South; if
he will not render the tenure of land insecure and
perilous in the States that produce cotton, rice,
tobacco, and sugar, by persisting in the policy
of confiscation, sanctioned by the last Con-
gress ; if he will issue a broad, generous
proclamation. of amnesty to all but Mr. Jefferson
Davis, and perhaps three or four others, and make
their punishment exile and not death ; if he will act
as if the Union had never been dissolved, either de
jure or de facto; and if he will strictly adhere to
the spirit and letter of the Constitution, and call
upon the combined people of all the States to elect
a National Convention for the legal amendment of
the Constitution, he will do all that is necessary.
The result of such Convention will be a better and
more durable Constitution than the last—inasmuch
as slavery and the right of secession will be formally
and for ever abolished. No reconstruction is neces-
sary where there has been no destruction. The
Union lives, because it never died ; and the South,
benefited more than the North by the fiery ordeal
through which it has passed, will enter upon a new
and more splendid career than, under slavery, was
possible for it. The freed negroes must work for
wages, and therefore more cheaply to the planter
than when they were enslaved ; or, if refusing to
work, they must be elbowed out of the country by
more energetic men, or left to starve, as all deserve
to do who will not put their shoulders to the task
appointed for them by God and Nature. As for
the money cost of the war, great as it is, we have
resources more than sufficient to meet it. We have
in California, in Colarado, and in Nevada alone
mines of gold and silver that only need half a mil-
lion of men to work them, to pay off our debt of
$3,000,000,000, not in greenbacks but in specie, in
less than ten years. And we shall do it. Look
only at the immigration to our shores. Every able-
bodied man or woman in the prime of life who
arrives from Europe into our Atlantic ports,
and thence betakes him or herself to the fertile
prairies of the West, capacious enough to welcome
a hundred millions of them, is worth a thousand
dollars to the State. Last year, at least 300,000 im-
migrants, mostly young and healthy people, with
children destined, like their fathers and mothers, to
aid in the development of the agricultural, mineral,
and commercial resources of our country within a
dozen years, arrived on our shores. They alone, if
they brought no other capital with them than their
labour, represent at the rate of $l,OOO per pair of
hands a sum of 300 millions. This year the immi-
gration promises to be still more extraordinary.
One vessel arrived last week, bringing 1,178 souls,
the largest human cargo ever imported in one ship,
and if the influx continue in anything like the same
ratio the European immigration of the next 10 years
alone will be worth to the Union the whole estimated
amount of the National Debt at the present hour.
These are cheering facts, and not to be disputed.
And what is equally cheering, our people of all
classes and pursuits have the most thorough and im-
plicit confidence in the value of our institutions
and the stability of our Government. They are
pouring their savings into the coffers of the State
with a liberality and rapidity unprecedented in the
history of civilisation. No less than $17,000,000
of the Seven-Thirty Loan were subscribed for yes-
terday, in addition to $15,000,000 the day before,
and as many to-day. The whole loan of $600,000,000
is nearly taken up, and would be taken up if the
Government were in need of the money, even if
the amount of the loan were doubled. South
and North will never be antagonistic any more.
Nothing is left for them to quarrel about, and
_ having got rid of slavery the North will forget
and the South forgive the war, as a necessary
evil that produced a superabundant good ; and
both will unite in greater harmony and concord
than ever." Such is a brief abstract of the
opinions and feelings of the moment, as heard
among men of all parties. It is not to be supposed,
however, that there are no dissentients, and none who
take a gloomier view of the present and the future ;
but simply that the vast bulk of the people talk or
think in this way, and are so pleased, elated, and
hopeful as to see and admit no evil, and indulge in
no anticipations but the brightest and most exhila-

rating.
No one, however, who is not an American—how-
ever much ho may have become Americanised by
contact with and length of residence among so hope-
ful and impulsive a people—will deny that this pic-
ture is too brightly drawn, and that the dangers
which still menace the republic are neither few nor
serious. A great deal too much depends upon the
individual action of the President to justify the ap-
prehension that his will and not the ordinary laws
of the land, or the opinions and wishes of thepeople,
may impress a fatally wrong direction upon the
whole policy of the State. Mr. Johnson boasts that
he is a plebeian ; that in early life he gained his
honest bread as a journeyman tailor, and that he
had strength enough of intellect and of will to
emerge from that position into the higher one of an
orator, a statesman, a military governor, and a Pre-
sident of the United States. These boasts are by no
means unwarrantable, and no one has a right to com-
plain of them. But when Mr. Johnson, the plebeian,
in his capacity of President of the United States, has
it in his power, by virtue of the Confiscation Act
Passed by the last Congress, subject to the par-
doningprivilege of the Chief Magistrate, to carry
out the ante-aristocratic theory of land ownership
by
which during his whole political career he has
been (1-4• •
hed, it will easily be seen that
without infringement of the laws he has it in his
power to inflict
an immensity of mischief, and to
inaugurate, if not
to complete, an agrarian revo-
lution in the South. It
his recorded conviction—
recorded a thousand
times in Congress and on the
" stump"--that large landed estates are an aristro-
cratic institution incompatible
with the liberties and
a Democratic rights of the people in
Republic, and
that it would be for the interest both of the North
and South if the large cotton and sugar plantations
were all parcelled out into small farms of 50 or 100
acres, to be owned and worked either by white men
or by black. He asserts that had it not been for the
aristocratic planters, owning large estates in the
South, there would have been no war, and that every
such planter, without exception, was a rebel. Mr.
Lincoln had no such theory, and, had his innocent
life been spared, would in all probability have par-
doned all such rebels—with, perhaps, two or three
exceptions--on the disbanding of the last armies of
the Confederacy, and on the sole condition of their
taking the oath of allegiance.
Another circumstance which causes apprehension,
not only among foreign observers of events, but
among Americans, is the determination-of Mr. John-
son, aided and incited as it would appear by Mr.
Stanton, to try the alleged conspirators against the
lives of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward before a secret

military tribunal. This is in direct violation of the
Constitution, and is denounced by every respectable
newspaper in the United States, whatever may be
its political bias. The Democratic World and the
philosophical 7ribnne are agreed upon the impro-
priety of such a course of procedure ; even the New
York Times and the Evening Post, which have seldom
since the war began found an occasion to say a
word in opposition to the policy of Mr. Lincoln's
or of Mr. Johnson's Administration, are unspar-
ing in the expression of their displeasure at so

unconstitutional as well as so unnecessary
and invidious a mode of trial. The Court,
or Commission, has been in session for three
days, and not a word of the evidence has been per-
mitted to transpire. The counsel nominated by the
several prisoners to defend them, or see that they
have a fair trial, have each and all refused to accept
the office, some pleading pre-engagements, and some
flatly refusing. It does not appear that the, Com-
mission has appointed any one on behalf of either of
the prisoners, some of whom, if not all, may perhaps
be innocent, to cross examine the witnesses, or take
care that the forms of justice be preserved. And
what must be considered a suspicious, or at best an
unfortunate feature in the case, is that the War De-
partment, or the Military Commission it has created
for the purposes of this trial, has appointed as its
sworn stenographer and reporter, pledged to secrecy,
a person known to fame as the impudent forger of a
proclamation by Mr. Lincoln. For this offence or
crime Mr. Joseph Howard, jun., was committed by
authority of the late President and Mr. Stanton to
Fort Lafayette. A person so branded in the eyes
of the public should not have been entrusted with
functions like these, or with any functions what-
ever in the gift of the Government.
The question of the immigration of the disbanded
soldiery of North and South into Mexico has lost
none of its interest within the last few days. On the
contrary, it has excited much speculation as to whe-
ther the President, known to be a thorough devotee
to the Monroe doctrine, has either stimulated the
movement, or designs to give it any encouragement.
There can be no doubt that the idea is exceedingly
popular, and that with slight effort such a rush for
Mexico could be organised as would seriously
threaten the relations of the United States with
the Emperors Napoleon and Maximilian. Under
the circumstances it is gratifying to know, not
only for his own sake, but for that of the peace
of the world, that Mr. Seward is rapidly recover-
ing from the combined effects of his severe
accident and the infamous and cowardly attack
upon his life, and that he is already in a position to
advise the President on the affairs of his department.
Mr. Seward, like Mr. Lincoln, has always been of
opinion that one war was enough at a time, and does
not, it is asserted by his friends, admit that the time
has yet come when the Federal Government can de-
vote other than its whole attention to its own affairs,
to the mighty task of a reconstruction of the Union,
and the obliteration by wise statesmanship of the in-
evitable ill feeling and animosities engendered by a
war of such bitterness and duration as that which is
not even yet at an end throughout its whole territory.
It is understood that some assurance of this kind has
already been given to the new French Ambassador,
the Marquis de Montholon, and that the President is
preparing a *proclamation to warn the people of the
illegalityof any invasion of Mexico, under the pretext
of aiding President Juarez to restore the Republic—
or any other whatever. If Mr. Johnson will go a step

'urther, and formally recognise the Government 0:
_ _

the Emperor Maximilian, by despatching an ac-
credited Minister to his Court, he will do more to
satisfy Mexico and France of his peaceable intentions
than even by .the issue of a proclamation.