EDITOR'S TABLE

The President's Proclamation is based mainly on the act of Congress to which he refers. That act was passed with great approach to unanimity among unconditional Unionists, and met their approbation throughout the country. That the rebel States, as a military question, must be deprived of the 'sinews of war,' which, with them, are the sinews of slaves, is quite certain. They have boasted, as well before as since the rebellion, that their great strength in war consisted in their ability to send all the whites to battle, whilst the slaves were retained at home to cultivate the lands and provide subsistence for armies. Take from the South its slaves, and the necessary supplies must cease for want of laborers in the field, or the whites must be withdrawn from the armies to raise provisions. In either event, the rebellion must terminate in defeat. There are thousands then, who, under ordinary circumstances, would oppose emancipation, yet who will support this measure as a military necessity. As regards the Border States, the President still adheres to his original programme: emancipation with their consent, compensation by Congress, and colonization beyond our limits.

As regards the seceded States, the proclamation only applies to such of them as shall persist in rebellion after the first of January next, and even in those States compensation for their slaves is to be made to all who are loyal.

The friends of Secession in Europe, and especially in France and England, have contended that slavery was not the cause of the rebellion, and it has been suggested that the rebels would themselves adopt a system of gradual emancipation. Even now it is alleged that if Mr. Lincoln had not issued this proclamation, we should have had something very similar from Jefferson Davis.

However this may be, these professions of the friends of the South in Europe, and particularly of their friends in France and England, will soon be tested.

If the South objects to emancipation, and denounces this proclamation, they will make this contest, on their part, still more clearly a war for the maintenance, perpetuity, and unlimited extension of slavery.

If, under such circumstances, England continues to support the rebellion, she must do so as the open and avowed advocate of slavery. What is to be done with the slaves when they are emancipated? is a grave question, which we shall discuss at a future period. There can be little doubt, however, that emancipation, on a scale so extensive, would give a great impulse to the cause of colonization.

There are, however, three classes of States in which this proclamation will have no effect on the 1st of January next:

1st. The Border States. 2d. Such of the rebel States, and such parts of them, as shall return to their allegiance before that date. 3d. Such of the rebel States, and such parts of them, as shall not then have been conquered.

In the mean time there may be rebel States, or portions of them, where the apprehended loss of their slaves, as a consequence of persisting in the rebellion, may induce a return to the Union, and thus hasten a successful conclusion of the war.

How far this proclamation, merely as such, would avail to change the status of slaves in such seceded States as may not be occupied by us and conquered before the first of January next, may be more appropriately discussed when, if ever, such a contingency shall happen.

In the mean time, whatever may be the effect of this proclamation upon the institution of slavery, which was the cause of the war, let us all unite in its vigorous prosecution, and in carrying, promptly and triumphantly, the flag of the Union throughout every State, from Richmond and Charleston to Mobile and Savannah. Our next campaign must witness the final overthrow of the rebellion.

THE REBEL NUMBERS.

The whole number of males in the rebel States, by the census of 1860, between 15 and 60 years of age (excepting East Tennessee and Western Virginia), is less than one million; of whom, from physical disability, sickness, alienage, &c., at least 100,000 are not available. Of the remaining 900,000, at least 200,000 have been withdrawn by death, wounds, sickness, parole, capture, &c., reducing the number to 700,000; of whom, for indispensable pursuits, at least one third must remain at home, reducing their present maximum forces to 466,000. Now, if these disappear no more rapidly in the future than in the past (although the war will be prosecuted with much more vigor), their numbers would be diminished at the rate of at least 12,000 a month. Therefore, as there are no means of obtaining new recruits, it is clear that the rebellion must soon fail for want of troops to meet our immense armies. It is true no allowance has been made for recruits from the Border States; but these (greatly overestimated) would be more than counter-balanced by the inability to obtain troops from that large portion of the Rebel States occupied by our forces, such as all the coast from New Orleans to Norfolk, nearly all the Mississippi River, and considerable sections of West and Middle Tennessee, North Alabama, North Mississippi, and Arkansas. The days of the rebellion, then, are numbered.

Sharpsburg is a name which will be long remembered, and is destined to be found in many a lay and legend. Among the earliest written commemorating it, we have the following, from one whose lyrics are well known to our readers:

THE POTOMAC AT SHARPSBURG.

BY H. L. SPENCER.

Once smiling fields stretched far on either side, Where bowed to every breeze the ripening grain; But now with carnage are those waters dyed, And all around are slumbering the slain. Patriots and heroes! unto whom in vain Ne'er cried the voice of Right,—their names shall be Graved on a million hearts, and with just pride Shall children say, 'For Truth and Liberty Our fathers fought at Sharpsburg, where they fell— They bravely fought, as history's pages tell.' Not for the fallen toll the funeral bell,— Their rest is peaceful—they the goal have won. Let the thinned ranks be filled, and let us see Complete the glorious work by them begun.

Yes—forward! onward! Let it be complete. Scripta est—it is written, and it will be done. After going so far in the great cause which has become our religion and our life, it were hardly worth while to retreat. Life and fortune are of small account now in this tremendous opening of new truths and new interests. And we are only at the beginning! With every new death the cause grows more sacred, and the North more grandly earnest. 'Hurrah for the faithful dead!'

MRS. H. BEECHER STOWE AND THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND.

My Dear Mrs. Stowe:

Your great work, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' will no longer circulate in England. Mr. Mason, the Southern ambassador, has convinced us all that slavery is a divine institution, that whipping and branding are really good for the negro, and education dangerous. Indeed, we dare not educate our own working classes. We begin to perceive the truth of the corner stone principle of the Southern Confederacy, that capital should always own labor, whether white or black. Then we would have no more strikes, or riots, or claims for higher wages, or for the right of suffrage, and all would be peace. You see my opinion of slavery has changed; and so has that of England in church and state, except the working classes, who wish to vote, and such pestiferous democrats as Bright and Cobden.

This rebellion came just in the right time for us. In a few years more of your success, we should have been compelled to establish free schools, give the vote by ballot, and extend the suffrage, until the people should rule here, as with you. But now that your rebellion has proved the failure of republics, we shall yield no more. Slavery, in dissolving your Union, has accomplished all this for us, and therefore must be a good institution. Some one has sent me one Edmund Kirke's anti-slavery novel, entitled, 'Among the Pines.' Your people seem to have gone crazy over it; but it will have no readers here. Is this Kirke a Scotchman? I had a tenant called Kirke, who was evicted for avowing republican opinions. Can this be the same man? I told the Confederate minister, Mr. Mason, that if some Southron would write a good novel in favor of slavery, it would have a great circulation here; and he said he would name this in his next despatch to his Government. He has a fine aristocratic air, and could scarcely be descended from the women (imported and sold as wives for a few pounds of tobacco to the Virginians) who were the mothers of the F. F. V.'s. But Mr. M. says slavery will soon build up a splendid nobility in the South.

Jefferson Davis is very popular here, and was lately cheered in Exeter Hall; but Yancey and Wigfall are idolized. Our great favorite in the North is Ex-President Buchanan. When did the head of a Government ever before have the courage to aid a rebellion against it, so gracefully yielding it the national forts, ships, mints, guns, and arsenals? But what we most admire is his message, in which he proved you have no right to coerce the South or suppress rebellion. This was a splendid discovery for us, as it demonstrated how superior our Government is to yours. If Mr. Buchanan would come here, we would raise him to the peerage, and, in commemoration of his two great acts, would give him the double title of the Duke of Lecompton and Disunion. Floyd, Cobb, and Thompson should each be earls. Thompson should be called Earl Arnold, in gratitude for the services to us of the celebrated Benedict Arnold.

I told Mr. M. how much we had condemned his fugitive slave law; but he convinced me that it was a most humane and excellent measure. Fugitives from the kindest masters, and ungrateful for all the blessings of slavery, why should they not be brought back in chains? He reminded me of Generals Shields, Corcoran, and Meagher, Irishmen commanding Irish troops for the North, and said they should be brought back to Ireland and hung on Emmet's scaffold. You know we keep that scaffold still standing, as a terror to Irish rebels, although we admire so much rebellion in America. Mr. M. spoke also of Sigel, Heintzelman, Rosecrans, Asboth, and expressed his surprise that the Bourbon princes would fight side by side with the mudsills of the North.

In a few years, Mr. M. said, the South would establish a monarchy, and that a son of the Queen should marry a daughter of Jefferson Davis, and thus unite the two dynasties by kindred ties. It was his opinion that the South would limit the right of suffrage to slaveholders, numbering about two hundred thousand; that they would have a house of peers, lords temporal and spiritual, composed (including bishops) of all who held over five hundred slaves; but that their Archbishop of Cantingbury should own at least one thousand. He thought the number requisite for the peerage would be enlarged after the reopening of the African slave trade, which would soon furnish England cheap cotton. His remarks on this subject reminded me how large a portion of my fortune was accumulated, during the last century, by the profits of the African slave trade. Mr. M. told me the King of Dahomey would furnish the South one hundred thousand slaves a year, for twenty dollars each, and that England should have the profits of the trade as before, and Liverpool again be the great slave port. He alluded to the Continental Monthly, which he said was an abolition journal, and denounced Kirke, Kimball, Leland, Henry, Greeley, Stanton, and Walker. He was specially severe on Walker and Stanton, charging them with the defeat of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, and the consequent accession of Kansas and all the Territories to the free States, He said Walker and Stanton had no right to reject the Oxford and McGee returns, although they were forged. And now, dear Mrs. Stowe, if you would only change, as we all have here, and write, as you only can, a great novel to prove the beauties of slavery, its circulation here would be enormous, and we would make you a duchess. Adieu until my next.

P.S.—I have invested all my United States stock in Confederate bonds.

The style of the foregoing letter would point to the Duchess of Sutherland as the author, but such a change would be miraculous. Was the copy of the letter found in an intercepted despatch from Mr. Mason to Jefferson Davis?

FOOTNOTES