Year: 1861

"The dissensions which arose some months aoo in the United States of North America have unfortunately assumed the character of open war" Such is the tranquil comment of the royal speech upon the event in the New World which have fallen so unexpectedly upon the ear of Europe Our Queen has reflected with an excellent fidelity the feelings of her people. After the first surprise was over, and when the !" God bless mel you don't say?" had been said, we think we never heard of @ battle in which 75, ,000 men seem to have been engaged on each side. and which fell so blank upon the public ear, and engaged so little European interest. The fact Is, that we do not like to laugh, and the sense of the ridiculous comes too strong over us, when we would be seriOus It IS a great battle without the dignity of danger or the painful interest of great carnage. There are all the ridiculous incidents of stark fear and rapid terror, without much real peril and with very little actual suffering. We begin to feel that we have been cheated out of our sympa- thes.

 When this war broke out we English all pict- ured to ourselves two earnest sections of the same population interlaced in mortal combat, warning to the knife and to the death. We re- ceived by every mail little samples of an atmos- phere ofblood and thunder and war and wounds. All America appeared to us, poor dupes! like a fresh exploded mine-all smoke, and fragments, and torn limbs. We fanced our kinSmcnS geek less, furious, flying at each others throats, and careless of their ol their own safety. At the same time that they were shaking their knives at each other they were shaking thelr hStS at us. We trembled for what we were fated to sec We held our breath for the first shock ot battle between these two young giants We shut our eyes against the deadly struggle. We are calm CT now. We are satisfied with these, warlike athlets, who were issuing such dire threats against any one who should dare to offer to separate them, are not so very reckless. Since their dissensons have assumed " the character of open war they have been carried on upon strictly humanitarian principles.

 If we are to believe the American press, an American battle has never yet been so danger ous as an American passenger boat, and not much more so than an American railway. The hostile forces shell each other out of strong for tresses without losing a single life. They hght a battle in Western Virginia, which determines the fate of district, at the expense of less than a score of casualties; and Q great stand up pat tie is fought between l50,000 men, ending m a panic and a twenty miles run; and when the ''grand army of the Potomac reaches Alex andria. the New York Herald reports that the kllI6u OH our sue VIII Ut DCI"COii 'A4A " ''- = hundred"

 It is very difficult to guage the solidity ofany- thing American-even of great battle. We know that there was great rout Tn front ol that gap which runs up into the hills, tor we were represented in the ruck, and may say that we saw it with our own eyes and heard 1t with our own ears. There is a probability, also, that the number of men present at the battle mounts to the high figure of l5O,OOO, for both accounts seem to agree upon ths.~@s Beyond these facts, however, everything seems vague and uncer- tain.

 The advance of the grand army of the Po- tomac" reads in the American papers like a burlesque of the progress of Aexes to the Hell espont. The great federal victory of Bull kun, which was flashed over the northern States and recorded in the northern papers, was thing lowering for hours, while yet in print, upon the confines Of fancy and possibility. The abject rout, the ultimate reality, was what we could have least believed. Perhaps we ought to have anticipated that the same ferocious men who had eaburnt up the homesteads on their line of march, would speed back over the embers with pale faces in their panic flight. But this never did occur to us. It requires the testmo ny of the Americans themselves and the witness of our own correspondent to suggest to us that