The Sun.
London, England, 1862-06-02 00:00:00

upon wheels drawn by the leanest " moke" of a
used-up donkey—just one of those assinine anato-
mies that SAM WELLER speaks of as ridden out of

the slaveholders, so lon g and criminally petted by
the North, at lengen tut ned against her.
But what is the preset it prospect P At first, per-
haps, most thought. the South would never go to
war—then that th a North would soon crush it.
Fort Sumter soon dispelled the first illusion, and
Bull's Run the se(:ond. Then, as the spring came
on, confident pro phecies of eisty and ninety days
i as the period of the war were t►zlked of. Even Lord

RUSSELL vaticinated in this style• in the Lords, sent
down thereby the price of cotton at Liverpool, and,
caused countermanding and discouraging orders to
be sent to India ! Alas ! the ninety days for the
end of the war are now contemplated by the noble
prophet, much as Dr. CUMMING must contemplate
his outlived predictions of the end of the world.
We can hardly say, perhaps, that the war makes no
sign of an end, but it at least makes quite ns many

of long continuance. A succession of Federal suc-
cesses seems at first sight as if the end was near.
We have little doubt that all the Confederate
seaports, including Charleston and Fort Sumter,
will soon be in the hands of the Federals. Indeed,
by this time Charleston may well be the only one
outstanding; Mobile and Savannah having pro-
bably fallen. At the same time, two mighty armies,
one in Virginia, and one in Tennessee, confront the
two of the Confederates. Yet it may well be that the
Confederate strength is condensed, not broken. We
should not be surprised, any day, to hear that
BEAUREGARD had beaten HALLECK, able soldiers,
as both of them are, or that he had retreated to an-
other more southerly position which he is reported
to be making very strong, leading HALLECK a
Fabian dance after him, till yellow fever will do
more than his artillery. In Virginia, we should
conjecture the chances of victory in a pitched battle
to be greatest in favour of M'CLELLAN. But if
they are visibly so, we may be almost certain that
Richmond will be left as a barren conquest to the
North ; that prestige will not weigh with the South
against strategy; and that the Confederate army
of the. North-East will retire yet further south, and
inland, where it will bid defiance to the North
till the semi-tropical heat makes fighting impossible
for the Northerns.
Not expecting, therefore, as more than a mere
possibility an early termination of the war, what
may we expect from the occupation of all the Con-
federate ports by the Federals ? Two of them have
already been opened under not unreasonable restric-
tions. No contraband of war can of course be
admitted ; but it is likely that, to insure the good
will of Europe, and to render the Confederates
unpopular there, the export of cotton will be
encouraged. Cotton, the property of individuals,
and all bought by foreign agents, will, we may
assume, so far as the Federals are concerned, be quite
safe, and the payment for it in money, or in ordinary
commercial articles, subject to the Northern duties
of the Morrill tariff, will not be obstructed. Will
the Confederates sell their cotton thus ? That they
would destroy it rather than the North should seize
it, is certain ; but if families which, for nearly
twelve months, have been deprived of almost all
imported comforts, should gain a safe opportunity of
obtaining them again, the temptation will be strong
to sell the cotton and take the comforts. Public
feeling is, however, a mighty master, and it may
be deemed unpatriotic. Besides, the Morrill Tariff,
as a badge of Northern domination, is justly more
odious to the South than to civilisation generally,
and we should not be surprised to find the South
resolute to purchase nothing which has paid tri-
bute under that disgracefully selfish Act. In the
stories of cotton burning, we have not much faith.
None will be burnt which can be sold to Europe,
though all leAbe, which it is feared the Federals
would seize.-Bren, however, under the most fa-
vourable circumstances, it will be slow work to get
the crop of 1861, all unginned and unpacked as it is,
fit for the market, and then to get it to market.
As to the actual stock of eottnn in England it
was probably never so low at the present time of
year. We gather from " Neill Brothers' Circular"
that the stock in hand in March, 1862, amounting
to 190,000 bales, is but slightly above a tenth of
what we had in hand at the same time last year,
and consequently the price is already doubled. At
Havre a similar state of things exists—lndia, we are
informed, appears to have been cleared out by the
shipments of last year ; and the stocks of
Indian cotton, both in England and afloat,
are smaller than last year; the shipments this year
being a hundred thousand bales less, since the first
of January, than they were last year. The real
cause of all the difficulty we take to be the uncer-
tainty whether the American crop of 1861 may not
reach us unexpectedly soon. But for, this greater
efforts would be made not only in India but in
other parts of the world. But surely the certainty of
its reaching us but slowly even were preliminaries
of Union or Separation arranged to-morrow, might
encourage those most interested to push their
energies in every direction ; the far greater pro-
bability being that it will be years before the old
trade can be ie-organized with the cotton States of
A merica.

Two or three points of considerable interest at-
tract attention in the American papers this morning.
Foremost of them we must place the engagement of
the gunboats with the battery on what we now
learn is termed Ward's or Drury's Bluff, eight miles
below Richmond, on the St. James River. It will
be remembered that we assigned strong reasons for
thinking it impossible that the Federal loss in five
gunboats, none of them even large boats, could be
1,100 men. Our contemporaries, however, seemed
to take for granted the correctness of the telegram.
But to-day we have the official reports of the Com-
mander of the Galena, the largest boat, the Nauga-
tuck, whose 100-pounder burst, and of the famous
little Monitor. From two only, the Aroostook and
the Portßoyal, we have no particulars. The Galena,
which bore the brunt of the fire, and received
eighteen shots, lost 13 killed and 11 wounded. The
Naugatuck, notwithstanding the accident, had but
two wounded ; and the Monifor lost none. Of course,
the whole crews of the other two would not
have come near to 1,100 men. From one to two
hundred would have been their greatest number.
The Monitor's iron casing, though she could not
elevate her guns sufficiently to touch the fort, proved
invulnerable to three shots which hit her—the
Galena's coating being pierced by eighteen shots
must therefore be due to the inferiority of her mail.
On the whole, seeing this was an engagement of
four hours' duration, that the boats had to anchor,
and could not avail themselves of their grand ad-
vantage, relatively to fixed forts, that of keeping
in motion; that the mail coating of one was ob-
viously of very inferior quality ; that the battery
two hundred feet above the water could maintain
a plunging fire, thus hitting the deck, the least
protected part ; and, lastly, that the loss was after
all so inconsiderable—taking all this into consi-
deration, we can only argue that forts in elevated
situations may
have, at pretty close range, the ad-
vantage of any ships. We may remember how
, at Sebastopol the " Wasp Fort," as our sailors
named it,
perched on the hill, annoyed the ships
re than
all the forts, placed as those at Spit-
head would be, on
a level with the shore.
The reports from
reach to the 20th nltt.heTFheedyershalowartmhye iandvVainrgceinoiaf
miles from Richmond, and
3,_l!CkEgatN_ ab?ut tcn