The Sun.
London, England, 1861-06-13 00:00:00

T "

6, OXFORD-STREET.

I discriminately—among the least sanguine, as well
as among the most sanguine, All alike look
forward with confidence to the ultimate restoration
to life of the Polish Kingdom, not merely with all
her ancient glories revived, but with her new
born liberties confirmed and multiplied. It is
only a question as to when the hour shall strike
which is to be the signal for her resurrection. Old
though Prince ADAM CZARTOYSKI is, that vene-
rable and illustrious patriot may yet live to rejoice
in it—may yet live to see resurgam erased from
the national escutcheon of Poland, and replaced by
resurrexi.

Both the Federalists and the Secessionists are
non-plussed with the peculiar property of the South.
Mr. WALTER, the member for Berkshire, last
night, said that capacity to take an .oath was the
distinction between man and beast. We should be
inclined to take another test just now in the States
—namely, the capacity to distinguish the army
which would give freedom from the one that fights
for slavery. And judging by this criterion, a con-
siderable number of creatures held to be, like
quadrupeds and feathered bipeds, mere pro-
perty by the Southerns, are proving themselves,
according to PLATO'S definition, to be men—veri-
table men. They use their two legs to run off to
the Federal army, not to escape work—for they ap-
pear to work zealously enough to erect works
against those who supposed them to be mere pro-
perty—but to escape work under the lash.
General BUTLER was puzzled at first. Though a
Northern commander, yet from the training of
Fugitive Slave Laws, and a long pro-slavery
Government, he could not get rid of the notion
that beings running away for personal freedom
were really property, so he quite civilly sent the
property back to the very men he was fighting
against. Being, however, rebuked for this by his
own State Government, he discovers that property
so fond of freedom was "contraband of war." Re-
garding it as property, he was most certainly
right. No property could serve the objects of his
opponents so well as that which could throw up
fortifications for them, leaving its masters, free
from fatigue, to man the works. None could they
so ill afford to lose as that, the want of which
would compel them to do their own work, and
lighten the toil of General BUTLER'S soldiers. Nor
could the General more distress the enemy than by
letting it be known that all negroes, to whatever
part of Virginia he came, would be welcome to
fall back into the rear of his troops, with the cer-
tainty of protection from their old masters.
Eastern Virginia, where the slaves are as nume-
rous as the whites, would soon be deserted of half

its population.
But here arises the embarrassment of Northern
complicity with slavery. The North has in its
hands the power to terminate the strife in a very
short time, but it wants the boldness. How miser-
able, in such a crisis, is the policy of even ABRA-
HAM LINCOLN. Just as at first he and Mr. SEWARD
ignored the rebellion, so they now ignore the posi-
tion in which it places them in regard to Slavery.
General BUTLER tells the Government what he has
done. The Government replies, quite right. You
will keep " such persons " as run away to you;
keep an account of their earnings and the cost of
their maintenance, and what we shall do with them
finally must be subject for future consideration.
That is—if their masters return to us we will re-
turn their slaves to them ! And what is the reason ?
Because " we cannot recognise the rejection by any
State of its federal obligations ; nor can we refuse
the performance of the federal obligations resting
on the Government."
This seems like the blindness of infatuation;
butin regard to the Union, the Republican
party are infatuated. The Union is their
God. Right and wrong, Slavery and Free-
dom, are nothing compared to the Union. They
are as proudly determined on this subject as the
South are on Slavery. We believe that, legally—
that is, viewed by the light of the Federal Consti-
tution—the South is utterly wrong. Yet no one
can deny that it has much common sense on its
side when it says, " If the tempers of the Free and
the Slave States do not admit of pleasant co-opera-
tion, then let them separate." The South does not
care about a big Union--one big enough to bully
every foreign Power with whom it has intercourse ;
it is content to be, in the military sense, a small
State. The North cannot brook this. It cannot
endure the loss of half the territory of the Union,
and a third of its population. Hence the object
of the North is to get back the States
again just as they are, as much Slave
States as ever ; to receive slavery again,
with all its abominations, into the bosom of the
Union, to enforce fugitive slave laws, and to
abolish personal liberty laws, that slavery may
have full swing.
Now this may be all well enough from the purely
technical point of view—but it- is childish in 'evo-
lutions to base action on technicalities. America
now wants a master mind to grasp the whole case.
Plainly the existence of slavery is the curse both
of the North and of the South. It is a hideous
wrong and evil, and will give neither side any rest
intil it is crushed out of being. The present
crisis offers the opportunity, if LINCOLN and the