The Sun.
London, England, 1862-02-13 00:00:00

THE WEATHER.—SUN OFFICE, FEBRUARY 13, 1862,
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADE.
43—highest since noon yesterday.
34—lowest this morning and during the night.
36—this day at noon.
BAROMETER-30.10.
WIND—N.-Westerly; light, with cold hazy weather.

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T E SUN.
LONDON, THURSDAY, FEB. 13, 1862.

Just at this moment we have three sets of
prophets, surrounded by appropriate actors, before
us. The Washington prophets and their armies
and navies; the Richmond and Southern prophets
and their armies, and the prophets of New York
surrounded by the Priests and Levites of the money
and cotton market. i

The Washington gentlemen, of course, retain all
their confidence in the might of the Union. General
M'CLELLAN may not be able to vanquish mud, or
think it safe to rely on frost, which may prove
such a temporary terra firma ; but let the drying
winds of spring begin to blow, and the days to
lengthen a little and he is soon to teach
the South what the natural superiority of
Northerners, when acting under the advan-
tages of long drill, can do. The panic next
time is to be on the other side. Just now things
look somewhat brighter ; the victory in Kentucky
has just reversed the great Southern idea In that
state the South was to have broken the military and
naval cordon surrounding it, and to have made a
conquering irruption across the Ohio. Instead of
that, the North has broken the Southern cordon, and
crossing the Cumberland is moving on to Tennessee.
Another naval expedition has also just weathered,
though with much damage to cargoes, a tremendous
storm, and has now probably landed its troops by
the River Nuse, in North Carolina, intending to
take possession of the small town of Newbern.
What it is intended to effect thence does not seem
to be clear. Like Beaufort expedition it seems
too far south to menace the rear of the Confe-
derates at Manassas, and it does not seem pos-
sible unless a force much larger be sent,
to think of marching inland, and by union with the
army of Kentucky to cut off Virginia from the
Confederate States. Still from Missouri to the
Chesapeake, along the whole line, and on the sea
coast, the North is just now the successfully at-
tacking party. And it may be as they say, that
natural impediment,
are the only ones which
they are waiting to see removed. For this they
must of course have patience, till Dame Nature
takes her usual course.
The South, on the other hand, is
feeling the

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vernmen t is freely accused of incapacity,
and of substituting the tyranny of JEFF. DAVIS
for the tyranny of ABE LINCOLN. Who would
have thought that a Richmond paper dare confess
that "the South had made at least eight great
blunders. "1. In firing upon Fort Sumter. 2. In
believing there would be a divided North and an
apathetic Federal government. 3. In believing
they would have the hearty sympathy of Europe.
4. In believing that the bonds of their Confederacy
would readily be taken in Europe. 5. In believing
that the military power of the North would be
directed in a crusade against slavery rather than
employed for the overthrow of treason, and the
establishment of the Union and the constitution. 6.
In believing that Northern courage and physique
were no match for Southern ; or that in battle one
Southerner equalled five Yankees, 7. In believing
that the flag of the Cotton Oligarchy would wave
above the Capitol at Washington, and the roll of
slaves be called on Bunker Hill. 8. In believing
that the fancied omnipotence of cotton would domi-
nate-the commerce of the world."

And not only in the Virginian capital, but in the
far west of the slave States, from the town of
Memphis on the Missisipppi, we hear the same
lamentations. The Memphis Argus describes the
Southerns as checkmated in Kentucky and para-
lysed in Missouri. Differing widely enough from
Southerns and their friends in England, it says :
" The blockade is unbreakable by us yet. In one
word, we are hemmed in. Day follows day, and
in lieu of being weakened, we find the Federal
armies, at all points, being strengthened. Almost
every article of manufacturing and domestic
necessity is quadrupled in price, and our money
will soon be exceedingly scarce for lack of paper
wherewith to make it." The Argus, like most of the
Southern papers we have seen, throws the blame
of their ill success on the inertness of their generals.
Three times, it is affirmed, the North might have
been invaded and brought to terms—instead
of which the armies of the Confederacy are allowed
to rot in idleness, while the country is subjected to
fabulous prices for every article of manufacture, and
peace seems farther off than ever. "We ask why
the year has passed, and we further than ever from
recognition at home or abroad ? We ask why we
are fifty -fold worse off ,than when the war com-
menced ? Indirectly every mouthful we eat is taxed,
our babies wear taxed caps and shoes, our boys write
on taxed paper, our girls wear taxed calicoes, our
men do a taxed business, and hopelessly ride in a
taxed hearse to a taxed grave, and we, forsooth, are
hurting ' the cause' if we dare to turn from Messrs.
MASON and SLIDELL to look at the country we were
born and bred in, and, having looked, we are hurt-
ing the cause if we dare tell what we see."
We might quote much more to the same purport
—so plain is it that whatever the North may suffer
the South is suffering fifty times more.
.Indeed, the
North can scarcely be saidto have felt any individual
privation yet. Its taxation has been hardly felt,
for nearly all the money has been raised by loan,
and the most oppressive taxes are those which have
been laid to exclude British goods from competition
with native manufacture. If we turn, then, to
New York, we find ourselves there under the
guidance of a very good authority. Distrusting, as
we must, the ravings and exaggerations of the
press, we look with a little confidence on the busi-
ness reasonings for business purposes of Messrs.
NEILL BROTHERS. They have at least a character
to maintain, and their decided business opinion is,
that which it has always been, that the struggle
will be a protracted one. They think our dealers
in cotton and our manufacturers very unwise if they
act on any other supposition than that the war will
last till both parties are exhausted. Without
foreign intervention they, see no end to the struggle.
meas measure
re theuf t
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spirit
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Having illustrated the immense difficulty of con-
queringt
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North they ask—" Upon the other hand, can it be
supposed that such a people as the twenty millions of
Northerners will lightly confess themselves beaten
by one-third of their numbers, and consent to their
magnificent country, the very extent of which has
been their greatest source of pride, being reduced
so that its breadth at one point will be under a
hundred miles ?—allowing their hostile Southern
neighbours almost to shake bends with Canada
across the very heart of their territory ?—allowing
the Mississippi, which is naturally the highway of
the Great West as the Irish Channel is that of Lan-
cashire, to pass into hostile hands ?—allowing an
antagonistic, arrogant, and inevitably hostile nation
to be established on their borders, with a thousand
miles of contiguous territory, along the whole
extent of which the irrepressible slavery question
and discrepant tariffs, with the constant temptation
to smuggling, would be a never-ending cause of
warfare, not to speak of the boastful taunts which
would have to be endured for generations after their
defeat, by a people who have hitherto had all the
boasting to themselves."

Messrs. NEILL explain the coolness with which
the New York press contemplates the financial diffi-
culties of the Government from its knowledge of the
tax-paying capabilities of the country. £40,000,000
per annum, which would make the Government
Stocks perfectly secure, would be only lid. a-day
for each individual, and that in a country in which a
dollar a day are ordinary wages. Besides, Messrs.
NEILL contend that, after all, few if any wars of
this kind have:ever been stopped by want of money.
Thus, with a hopeful though insolvent North, and
a desponding, long insolvent South, we have a high
authority, and impartial one, pronouncing that the
North and the South have years of strife before
them.

M. VEUILLOT'S friends had surely better look
after him. He most certainly has gone clean mad.
Not merely daft, observe, or crazy, but raging
raving mad. The ex-editor of the Univers, it ap-
pears, having some time since been compelled to
drop his pen as redacteur, has resumed it as homme
de lettres. Within the last few weeks he is under-
stood to have issued from the press a couple of
duodecimos, entitled, rather oddly, Parfuna de
Rome. And assuredly if this be a specimen of the
Parfum, it must be one that will infallibly stink
in the nostrils of Europe. Than the outpourings
of M. VEUILLOT'S wrath upon his opponents
generally, through the medium of these two
volumes, we never met with anything more fright-
ful, in the way of gross and brutal vituperation, than
the specimens we have read in the shape of choice
quotations. The chief object of this demented
writer's scorn and abhorrence appears to be the
now very well known Padre PASSAGLIA. Of
Father PASSAGLIA the Paris correspondent of our
chief contemporary, writing as recently as yester-
day (in reference to M. VEUILLOT'S objurgations
upon him) remarks that he, "as you are
aware, has published a work proving that
the temporal power is not a dogma of the
Church." And--beyond one moment's doubt—sup-
posing that to be the drift of Father PASSAGLIA'S
argument, where can there be any where discover-
able in all Christendom one sane Catholic who will
assert that the learned Jesuit is i error? Differ