The Sun.
London, England, 1862-01-29 00:00:00

must remember the strange observation of Mr.
SEWARD, that " If the safety of this Union required
the detention of the captured persons it would be
the right and duty of this Government to detain
them," and his proceeding to remark " That the
waning proportions of the insurrection, and the com-
parative unimportance of the captured persons them-
selves, forbid him from resorting to that defence ;"
in other words, that the surrender was made, be-
cause, according to Mr. SEWARD'S belief, it would
do him no harm to let them go. On this Lord RUS-
SELL observes with his usual point, " Mr. SEWARD
does not here assert any right founded on interna-
tional law, however inconvenient or irritating to
neutral nations ; he entirely loses sight of the
vast difference which exists between the exercise of
an extreme right and the commission of an unques-

tionable wrong. His frankness compels me to be
equally open, and to inform him that Great Britain
could not have submitted to the perpetration of that
wrong, however flourishing might have been the in-
surrection in the South, and however important the
persons captured might have been." The style and
manner throughout Lord RUSSELL'S dispatch is as
courteous as his former one. It has, however, the
the same defect as Mr. SWARD will doubtless
think it—it will leave him but one answer—" I
have been wrong."

The awful accident at the New Hartley Coal Pit
is not likely soon to fade out of public recollection.
The harrowing incidents that have attended its
more complete realisation from day to day down in
the immediate neighbourhood, the actual scene of
this appalling catastrophe, are of a kind so pro-
foundly touching, that it is impossible to read of
them, to speak of them, to think of them,
without a deep and tender emotion.
The affecting record pencilled in the memorandum-
book found in the pocket of the overman Amoun,
dated " Friday afternoon, half-past two," mention-
ing So-and-so "took extremely ill," and telling of
" a prayer meeting" just holden, came out of that
pit of death literally like a Voice from the Grave;
it was for all the world like one of those tearful
fragments of the jetsom and flotsom of the Great
Deep—a scrap of paper enclosed in a bottle,
washed ashore among shells and seaweed, telling
the sad tidings of some dreadful shipwreck. And
since then other records of a kindred nature have
been found, other voices from that huge grave have
become as audible. Here, scratched on a tin can,
" Friday, my dear SARAH—I leave you"—on
another—(in what dire anguish !)—" Mercy, 0,
GOD." The mere mention, in the accounts last
coming to us from the Pit-mouth, of the tear-blinding
search made by the poor widows among the water
bottles, candle boxes, leathern hats, and other lit-
tered chattels of the dead celliers, now drawn to
the surface from that subterranean scene of destruc-
tion—the mere mention of the mournful search
going on there, for some last sad memorials of the
lost husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers now moul-
dering into dust together, in about two hundred
graves hard by, serve very vividly and painfully
to realise the poignancy of the affliction which
has so abruptly desolated that little ill-fated
village.