The Evening critic. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1881-1885, 1881-10-24

NOTWITHSTANDING the brcvity of life,
we undertook to peruse with care the sew
eral columns which our esteemed contempo.
rary, the Post, yesterday devoted to n
hostile correspondence between Mcssrs.
Malone and Early and their friends. dated
some years ago. As nearly as we can make
IL, the object of our esteemed contemporary
in printing this correspondence Is to show
(D that Mr.. Early was q great fighter dur
ing the late unhappy civil strife (2) that
Mr.. Malone was not much of n fighter
(O that Mr.. Malone personally superin-
tended the publication of u bio
graphical sketch calculated to cxtol
immodcrately the few feeble exploits
that he did do, and to accrcdit him with
divers and sundry great exploits that he
did not do (D that in point of fact Early
himself was the man who actually did most
Of the fighting, but that his extreme mod
esty prevented him from calling public
attention to the matter until forced to do
so by the arrant protcnsions of Malone at
his expense.
II W. lllNt lulltll lllO any tIIVI III tHt
above summary, we stand ready to correct
the same upon sufficient information.
Well, what has all this got to do with the
pending political campaign in Virginia any
how? DO we understand our esteemed con.
temporary to hold that because Early was u
Malone, therefore the Democratic ticket
ought to be elected in Virginia for the rca-
son that Early is Democrat?
We do not believe that our esteemed con-
temporary would print q page Of State cor
respondcnce merely for the sake of person
ally vindcating one Jubal Early in pr-
vatc issue with one William Mahone We
assume, in common reason, that the design
was public and political, and that the pur-
pose was to strengthen the cause Of Virgi-
MIA Democracy, of which our L. G. is the
organ.
We therefore, for the sake of argument,
admit all the conclusions which Mr.. Early
and his friends would have the public de-
duce from the correspondence under dis
cussion, which brings us to the burden of
our theme to wit: If there was nothing
else to demonstrate the weakness of the
so-callcd Bourbon cause in Virginia, the
temper in which tho pending canvass has
been carried on would bc ample.
The Old Virginia gentleman has not
learned anything from the events of the
last twenty years. He is now as he always
was, pompous, verbose, opinionated and in
tolerant He considers now us he always
did that divergence from his views is an
outrage and disputation Of his pretensons
an affront. His mode of furnishing the first
is now, as it always has been, social
ostracism, and his method of resenting the
latter is now, as it always has been, an ap.
peal to pistols-with or without percussion
caps-or to voluminous publication of bel
ligerent correspondence the one being
ridiculous and the other bore.
But there is no such thing in his system a
calm, candid discussion of the issues at stake
for the enlightenment of the public.
To an external Observer the spectacle il
Virginia is that of two bands of Bedouin
fighting in the desert for the opportunity o
plundering the next caravan that comes
along. We desire to be fair, but it seems a
this distance impossible to avoid the con
clusion that the Old Virginia gentleman il
the aggressor. If his antagonists meet hin
in the same spirit, it is probably because th
o. V, G. has so firmly fixed tho social cod
under which all things must be done in tina
region that the antagonist has no option. Oh
the whole we should say that, irrespective o
the meiits of the question nominally in is
sue, the sympathics of the enlightene,
Northern public are decidedly with Ma
hone not because he is a Readjuster bu
because he has declared war against cod
and system obnoxious to modern notion
and obsolete in the light of modern sociol
ogy. And that is all there Is to be SAT-
about it,