The Sun. — 1865-04-27 (London, England)

POST.—The startling intelligence which has reached us from America will excite but one sentiment in the minds of all, no matter what their political predilections. Northerner and Southerner, European and America, slaveholder and abolitionist, must equally concur in reprobating the dastardly crime which has just been consummated. The President of the United States of America has, in the moment of what he at least considered to be victory, and at the very instant when he had reason to believe that the gigantic enterprise to which he devoted himself was on the point of being crowned with success, fallen by the hand of an assassin. The event is so astounding that it is with difficulty we can bring ourselves to realise its occurrence, much less to estimate its consequences. It is but a few short days since the great and crowning events of the civil war took place, since Richmond was evacuated and the army of Virginia laid down its arms, and since Mr. Lincoln, boasting once more to be not only de jure but de facto President of the entire American Republic, proclaimed it to the civilised world, and appointed a day of general thanksgiving to inaugurate the commencement of a new and happier era. On Sunday, the 9th of the present month, General Lee capitulated ; on the following day Mr. Lincoln congratulated his fellow-citizens on the happy issue of the arduous struggle in which they had been so long engaged, and besought their co-operation in that no less arduous work of reconstruction to which he purposed devoting the second period of his official career, and on the Friday following he was brutally murdered. In the annals of history there are to be found but too many instances in which the chief magistrate of a State has fallen by the assassin's hand, but we doubt if there is one which, by its surrounding circumstances, will retain a deeper hold on the memory of posterity than the murder of the American President. What Mr. Lincoln might have been, and what he might have accomplished, must always remain matters of speculation ; but that he should have been arrested midway in his career, and that the wishes of a great nation should be frustrated by the will of a rabid fanatic, points a moral of the futility of all human projects, which, however trite, is not uninstructive. At the very time when most persons would have concurred in approving the policy of the Northern States in again electing Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential office, and would have gladly seen him endeavour to reconstruct the edifice which has been so cruelly shaken, he is suddenly carried from the scene. " The king is dead. God save the king." As it is in monarchies, so it is in republics. The same mail that tells us of the assassination of Mr.  Lincoln informs us of the accession of his successor,  It is said that every tragic picture if carefully examined has its ludicrous side, and it must have been- not a little humiliating to the American nation that when the body of their late chief magistrate was still warm, the drunken rowdy, whom in a moment of inadvertence they elected to a sinecure office, should have been solemnly invested with all the attributes of the supreme executive power.