"In pursuance of said order, the Second Massachusetts negro infantry, 700 strong, Col. Draper, a white man, commanding, with one hundred white cavalry, from the Fifth and Second regulars, started for the Northern Neck, landing at Kinsale. Four hundred negroes (with white commissioned officers) and fifty white cavalry, proceeded to devastate Westmoreland County, destroying everything in their line of march.

"Among the great sufferers was Mr. Brown, near the Hague. Everything but his house was destroyed. Mr. Ben. English, after hav ing everything destroyed, was stripped, tied up, and given thirty-nine lashes with the cowhide. And, more horrible, but only too true, twentyfive or thirty ladies were violated by this party of negroes. I could give names, but deem it not best. Neither age nor color was spared by these demons, who were encouraged by their white officers

"The rest of the regiment, 300 strong, with 50 white cavalry, under the immediate command of Col. Draper, marched to Richmond County. On the route six negroes vinlated the person of Mrs. G. eleven times, she being the wife of a soldier of the Ninth Virginia cava'ry, being also sick at the time, with an infunt six months old at her breast. This is only one instance out of twenty others of a like

outrage.

In their march, no age nor condition was exempt from their desolating hand. Piunder and lust stimulated and marked all their movements. No appeal nor supplication could turn them from their beastly purposes and brutal excesses.

"You can

"In vain did the mother beseech and the daughter shriek. My paper would blush did I attempt to write in full detail the scenes that were enacted. Where they went they were led by their officers and told, go loose and do as you please." And verily they did go loose and do as they pleased, as many a heartbroken parent and ruined daugh ter will testify."

This disgusting detail has been widely circulated in the North; but, in the Lincoln press, as a simple item of war news, without calling forth an exclamation of horror, or even SO much as a rebuke from "the supporters of the Administration." How dead is the moral sense! How brutalized

the public and the private heart! All this kind of depravity has the official and social support of Mr. Lincoln. A President who was not himself steeped in vulgarity and obscenity would quickly clean his skirts from all connection with such abominations. But vulgarity and obscenity are controlling forces in Mr. Lincoln's mind. They belong to him as mange to dogs, or meazles to swine. The fœtid moral atmosphere which he has spread abroad over the land has gone out as naturally from him as the deadly vapor from the upas tree. Can we endure four years more of this demoralizing rule, without sinking beneath the accursed ruiu of Sodom and Gomorrah? Four years more! Spare us, oh, God, the calamity! One of the most accomplished English authors, Dr. Price, said: "Licentiousness and despotism are more nearly allied than is commouly imagined." Four years of Lincoln's rule have convinced us of the truth of this remerk. Spare us a further proof! It will be a quarter of a century before our country will recover from the moral shock it has already received by four years of such fatal rule. Shall we make it half a century by re-electing this mountebank-this social and moral pestilence, as well as public calamity? Rather let us ask, shall we suffer him to re-elect himself, in violation of the rights and liberty of the people? If it must be so, let that question be answered with powder and ball!

THE first duty of the patriot is to stop this war. The second, to get rid of its consequences. To obliterate that baneful military spirit which is the curse of any nation. There is no such foe to popular liberty as a general diffusion of military tastes and habits. The tendency of society ever is, as fast as it ceases to rely upon reason, to govern by violence. Those who have the sword in their hands have almost invariably refused to wait for the slow operation of argument. The sword cuts away all opposition. No troublesome contradiction, no unwelcome truth, will impede the progress of him who uses the ratio ultima regum, and mows down all obstacles with the scythe of power. Hence all enemies to universal freedom, and all friends of aristocratical prerogative, always delight in war. Not satisfied with fighting foreign nations, and keeping up an army even in times of peace, they seek, after they have once corrupted the mass of the people, to render a whole nation military. Those who have great armies at their back haughtily bid defiance to the unarmed. philosopher and politician who brings into the field truth without a spear and argument unbacked by artillery.

This military spirit always tends to Gothicise a nation, to extinguish the light of learning and philosophy, and to raise thick fogs of ignorance and superstition, which are the bane of all happiness and the very element of despotism.

The strict discipline which is found

necessary to render an army a machine in the hands of its directors, requiring, under the severest penalties, the most implicit submission to absolute command, has a direct tendency to familiarize the mind to civil despotism. Men, equal to their commanders by nature, and often superior, are bound to obey the impulse of authority, and to perform their part as mechanically as the trigger which they pull to discharge their muskets. They cannot, indeed, help having a will of their own; but they must suppress it, or die. They must see, if they see at all, with the eyes of others. Their duty is not to have an opinion of their own, but to follow blindly where they are led. They become living automatons -the self-acting tools of despotism. Their minds are soon broken down to the yoke. The energy of independence weakened, the manly spirit tamed, like animals that once ranged in the forest, delighting in liberty, caught in snares, confined in cages, and taught to stand upon their hind legs and play tricks for the entertainment of the idle. They obey the word of command given by the keeper of the managerie, because they have been taught obedience by hunger, by the lash of the whip, and by every mode of discipline consistent with their lives. But they are degraded, contemptible animals-as a soldier is a degraded man. Suppose the masses of a people thus tamed and broken down by having served in the armythus made the tools of whatever de

us of the source of the debt that crushes us. It must cause the widow's heart to curse the profession that has sacrificed her husband. It must teach the orphan to despise the tinselled booby who struts before him in the gaudy habiliments of tape and feathers. All things that remind us of this most atrocious war must be an abomination to our eyes, as the first evidence that we are in a hopeful way of finally redeeming ourselves from the curse that has fallen upon us. Το

bring these bloody ensigns into disrepute and contempt is the first duty of a patriot. To sweep into political and social oblivion all the guilty tools of the cruel despotism should be the labor of the statesman and the philanthropist. A satrap of Abraham Lincoln should evermore be looked upon as a death's-head in society-an emblem of murder, a remembrancer of rape and arson! Let him walk among men like Cain, with the mark of felon on his brow!

WHY will we hug this delusion? Why will we cheat ourselves with falschoods of our own creation, about the capacity, or rather the non-capacity of the South to hold out as she has been going on during the progress of the war we wage upon her? Northern journals tell the people that the South is almost exhausted, when the real truth is that we are almost exhausted, while the South is just beginning to show the mighty depth of her capacity, and to assert a haughty self-reliance which is wonderfully in contrast with the shallow and unfounded pretension put on by us. At which point does the South, at the present time, exhibit the signs of exhaustion? At which point do we not exhibit them? Where is there a sound point in our resources for the continuance of the war? If proclamations and 'military orders were men, if partizan bragging editorials were finance, we could go on with this war until the whole creation should lie subjugated at our feet. But we have only a single step more to go, and we shall find ourselves bankrupt both in money and men. Are we such cowards that we dare not face the truth? We must face it some time. Why not to-day? Why not own that we must give up the conflict, and continue evermore to eat the bitter bread of repentance and regret for the folly and crime we have committed against liberty, and against the fundamental principles of

our Constitution? Underrating the resources of the South does not improve our own. A leading Republican editor starts the theory that the South must soon give up because she must see that she is running herself down to a point of exhaustion from which she can never recover, in a condition of independence. So she will soon give up in order that the North may assist her to recuperate. Strange to say, men who are yet out of bedlam believe this theory, and forthwith subscribe largely to the war fund, to give this finishing stroke to the "rebellion." Almost a majority of the northern people have been made to believe in the natural poverty and inferiority of the southern States. They suppose those States to have been in a wretched condition before the war, and are, of course, easily persuaded to believe that their future is indeed hopeless. Now, in order to prick this bubble, let us take Arkansas, the poorest and most despised of all the Confederate States, (except Florida,) and see what she was before the war, and what her prospects are for the future. We were told some months ago that Gen. Banks did not think Arkansas worth holding. We invite his attention, and that of the North generally, to some points in the history, growth, and resources of this most despised of the Confederate States. The popu lation of the State was,