The Sun.
London, England, 1861-07-15 00:00:00

BAROMETER-29.73.

WlND—South-Westerly; light, with fine sunshiny
weather now, but it rained heavily all the morning. This
is St. Swithin's day, but, like an unwelcome visitor, his
prototype came some days ago as a forerunner—weeping
for harvest.

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THE SUN.
LONDON, MONDAY, JULY 15, 1881.

The Africa has cheated us by a day. She
brings news, little enough to be sure, up to the
3d, and on the 4th the President was to deliver
his Message. Perhaps it may after all be very
much like our Queen's speeches in one respect,
that all its points will have been anticipated.
Money and men will almost certainly be its two
great demands; but we need not expect any details
of warlike plans. High ground will doubtless be
taken, but the when and the where of action will
be left in the minds of General SCOTT and the Pre-
sident. We are only told that there is much uncer-
tainty and speculation respecting the administration
not making any forward movement, those who are
on the spot therefore do not seem to have much
the advantage of us.

The North is feeling the effect of the war
doubly. It has to pay heavily, and business is at
a standstill. The banks of New York have a
larger amount of specie in hand than they ever
had—upwards of £8,000,000. The consequence is
that the war fever is somewhat less hot, or at
least there are lucid intervals. A correspondent of
a contemporary writes :—" The ' stars and stripes'
wave in New York in as great profusion as
ever, bnt there certainly are signs of the war
enthusiasm abating. People are as patriotic
as they were a month ago, but the voice
of reason is beginning to make itself heard, and
many of the Northern journals are beginning to
dare to hint that ' le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle.'
The candle is alight at both ends, for while thou-
sands of men are under arms, supported at an enor-
mous expense, the working men who remain have
too often no work to do and no bread to eat. In
Baltimore the greatest distress prevails. In Phila-
delphia a monster meeting of working men has
been held, at which it was stated that 5,000 able-
bxlied men are out of employment. One of the
speakers said,' We have men in our midst who have
not tasted meat for months—men who have not
received two meals a day for months.' "

In New York it is almost as bad ; though such
numbers have enlisted there is great want of em-
ployment, and people are anticipating that actual
war, and winter will make things yet worse. The
Democratic press is also again taking heart in pro-
portion as the inconveniency of war begins to tell
on the people. Their journals protest " that if the
Union is to be continued it can only be by the
voluntary consent of its members ;" they throw
the blame of the present state of affairs
on " the exercise of unconstitutional powers
by the present chief magistrate." They con-
(lernn the Morrill tariff as " enriching the
few at the expense of many." They say that the
war, the standing army, and the tariff are "de-
structive to the liberties and material interests of
the Northern States ;" and that " the attempt to
muzzle the Democratic press by mobs and terrorism,
to prevent citizens from expressing their honest
opinions, calls for, and deserves, the strongest con-
demnation of every true friend of liberty and
order."

Probably the South is not better off than the North
in respect to th© military qualifications of its sol-
diers and officers, but the North certainly appears
to need all the time General SCOTT is taking to per-
fect its drill. Hire is the account of an eye-witness:
"In spite of the very large number of troops
round Washington, there was hardly ever a
brigade field-day. On several occasions three
or four corps were assembled for inspection
by the President ; but I only once succeeded in
seeing a regular brigade drill which resulted in the
most hopeless 'club' I ever witnessed, and I have
had the pleasure of assisting at some very complete
ones nearer home. Every one seemed to have
got into a state of utter confusion, and a few
hundred cavalry might have done what they
not the fault of the men;
pleased with them. It is
drill, as far as it goes,
they have picked up their
with wonderful quickness, but many of the
officers are disgracefully inefficient. Bence
arise
bitter complaints on the part of the men. When
they find that their officers cannot go through a
tow simple movements correctly, they are notlikely

to have much confidence in them in the field. In
many of the regiments the very worst feeling
against their commanders prevails; and in action,
without confidence in their commanders, they are
certain to be unsteady. Finer material for soldiers,

if they were decently commanded, could be found
nowhere."

We saw a few days ago that the South could
give no better account, not, indeed, so good a
one of the companies it was sending north from
the Mississippi, and the best conclusions we can
draw from all the accounts we haVe noticed, is
that the Southerners will not equal General
SCOTT'S men, at present, in field operations, while
behind batteries it is plain that they have fought
with considerable skill and courage. Money will
doubtless be even scarcer in the South than in the
North. They will be unable to turn their stocks
into money at all. Our readers will see, in a very
interesting letter from the South, an account of a
a planter on a princely scale who has no chance
whatever of converting the vast produce of his
6,000 acres of land. And we remark by the
way that they will be interested in the
impartial descriptions of negro slavery in Mr.
RUSSELL'S letters. Southern hospitality, and
meeting with kind masters do not alter his
English perceptions. The mirth of the free
feathered tribes suggested to him the sadnesss of
the bondsman. When my eyes," he says,
" uncurtained the early morning " I might have
imagined myself in the magic garden of Cherry
and Fair Star, so incessant and multifarious
were the carols of the birds, which were the only
happy coloured people I saw in my Southern
tour, notwithstanding the assurances of the many
ingenious and candid gentlemen who attempted to
prove to me that the palm of terrestrial felicity
must be awarded to their negroas."

It seems dismally appropriate upon o drenching
ST. SWITHIN's to have occasion to comment upon
one of the wettest reviews that even the Devil's
Own has had experience of since the inauguration
of the Volunteer Movement. Saturday, the 13th
of July, having now been thoroughly soaked into the
memory of our Riflemen on Wimbledon Common,
will not very speedily, we should imagine, be lost
to their recollection. Yet, full of discomfort though
the day itself must have been to the various corps
there collected together, the result of the day must
be allowed to have been eminently satisfactory
nevertheless. It has brought to a dripping con-
clusion certainly, but also, it must be allowed, to
a very brilliant close as well, the whole of the
lengthened and interesting proceedings connected
with the great annual meeting of the National
Rifle Association. And as if in indication that
1861 is really to be regarded as an advance upon
1860—the crack rifle shot of last year has this
year come off second best. It is very probable
that Mr. Ross in his recent contest
should have been labouring under grievous
disadvantages. It is just possible that he may not
have met with the generous and manly fait play
which was certainly due to that keen-eyed, firm-
handed young Rifleman—though in regard to
the rumoured lack of this fairplay towards
him, we are sanguine that the account ex-
tracted into our :impression of Saturday from the
columns of a northern contemporary, the Edinburgh
' Courant, may prove, upon further inquiry, to have
been, in some measure, founded upon error, or, at
any rate, greatly exaggerated. However the facts
may be, in other particulars, in the instance of Mr.
Ross, the Rifle Champion of England last year—
Rifle Champion of England now no longer—it
must assuredly be regarded as little short of the
miraculous if—while suffering (as it is stated that
he was suffering) from inflammation of the eyes,
particularly from inflammation of the right eye,
inflammation so severe as to require the application
more than once of blisters to relieve the excessive
irritation—he could, nevertheless, contrive to hold
his ground as he did so well with his eventually
successful competitor, Mr. PETERKIN.
To Cambridge it must certainly be a matter of
interest to remember that the two rival crack shots
for what may be called the Rifle Derby were both
of them from that university. The challenge match
between the two great universities having been
shot off at the commencement of the
proceeding on Saturday, between Mr. OWEN and
Mr. NORSWORTHY for Oxford, and Mr. Ross and
Mr. PETERKIN for Cambridge. Thrice—as it is
known in these kind of contests—came the compe-
tition : that is to say the firing took place at three
different ranges ; first at 800 yards, then at 900,
and lastly at a thousand. Saving, in this latest
range, the range of a thousand yards, the superiority
of the Cambridge over the Oxford representatives
was sufficiently remarkable. Yet even there the
successful hits of Messrs. OWEN and NORSWORTHY,
when clubbed together, only exactly equalled those
of Mr. PETERKIN alone. It was the falling off in
the firing of Mr. Ross in that, the third stage of
competition, that lost him his chance altogether.
For until then he had actually the advantage over
his competitors. At the outset, it is true—viz., at
the first range (that of 800 yards) Mr. PETERKIN
was a-head of him by one—but at the next range
(that of 900 yards) Mr. Ross had not only made
good the difference, but was four beyond the
score of the man who had just threatened to be,
as he immediately afterwards proved to be, in
fact, his conqueror. It was consequently by being
the very lowest upon the list of all the four
competators at the range of 1,000 yards—when
his sight, but recently recovered from severe
1 inflamation, had by that time been taxed to the
veryerniitieinsat the
eiost—that Mr. Ross lost in this year's
pre-eminence
predecessor. Altogether -emineneehe
Ahiat hdewton so ve
ry
brilliantly
the n
test here referred to is one of so singularly interest-
ing ceory
bouuy n i
a character to all Riflemen throughout the
country, that we here give the score precisely as it
has been officially recorded:—

CAMBUIDGE.
Yards.

800 9001,000 Total.
E. Ross .. .. 11 13 2 29
15 9 7
Peterkin • . .. • • 31
OXFORD.

Norsworthy .. 4 7 4 •• 15
Owen .. 8 1 3 • • 12

It was after this competition in a challenge match
between the rival universitfes had been brought to
a conclusion, that the proceedings of the day may
be said to have commenced in real earnest. It was
at three o'clock that his Royal Highness the Com-
mander-in-Chief appeared there upon the dais pre-
pared for the occasion, the Duke being surrounded by
a splendid staff of officers, including amongst them
Gen. SCARLETT and Sir RICHARD AlREv—and that
his Royal Highness, after addressing the assembled
Volunteers, distributed the prizes to the number of
93 altogether. About the most satisfactory as-
surance that could possibly have been given to the
Riflemen assembled on Saturday, either to partici-
pate in or simply to witness this distribution, was
the one given to them in the following sentence by
His Royal Highness :—" There has been a great
number of prizes shot for, but almost to the very
last the competition has been so close that it has
not always been certain that those who have lost
have of necessity been the worst shots, although,
unhappily, not successful." Several of the compe-
titors, it will be observed from the catalogue of