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Two Bishops

--Pro and Con the War--The Metropolitan Record, Archbishop Hughes' New York organ, publishes a correspondence between that famous ecclesiastical dignitary and Bishop Lynch, of Charleston, on the subject of the secession of the Southern States and the war. The correspondence is too long for publication in our columns, and is devoted to a discussion of the merits of the issue which has been debated, ad infinitum until now there is no longer room or time for debate. It must be settled by the arbitrament of the sword. Words are now of no avail: blood is more potent than rhetoric, more profound than logic. But it is, nevertheless, interesting to know on what side these religious dignitaries are arrayed.

Bishop Lynch addresses a long letter to the Archbishop, and the latter replies in one of course equally long; for the Archbishop does not generally allow an adversary to exceed him in length of an argument, and, indeed, not often in ability. Bishop Lynch takes the Southern side. He reasons it very ably, presenting in strong light the injuries inflicted on the South, her concessions, the failure of all efforts at redress, and the consummation of Northern tyranny in the sectional triumph by the election of Abraham Lincoln on the Chicago platform. He refers to the commercial interests of the North, the vast productive power of the South, and portrays the immense injury the North must sustain in the separation it has forced upon the South. He displays his abiding confidence in the power of the South to sustain herself, and shows that the North must be the greatest sufferer by the war. The South, he contends, has resources in men and means to carry on a long war more successfully than the North. In provisions, he is satisfied there will be enough gathered in the crops of the present year for two years supply. Clothing, though of rude texture, is abundantly made, he says; and there are some $25,000,000 of specie in the South as the basis of that paper medium, which will readily answer our purposes. The Government will have, he contends, two and a half million of bales of cotton the spinal column of our financial system) as a basis for its credit. If exported at once, they will be as good as gold for $100,000,000; and, if not so exported, a security undoubted for that amount. The blockade, he reasons, has been beneficial to the South, as it has forced her to manufacture a great many things she has heretofore gotten entirely from the North.

Upon this reasoning, he assumes that the South must triumph. He concludes:

‘ "The separation of the Southern States is un fait accompli. The Federal Government has no power to reverse it. Sooner or later it must be recognized. Why preface the recognition by a war equally needless and bloody? Men at the North may regret the rupture, as men at the South may do. The Black Republicans overcame the first at the polls, and would not listen to the second in Congress, when the evil might have been repaired. They are responsible. If there is to be fighting, let those who voted the Black Republican ticket shoulder their muskets and bear the responsibility. Let them not send Irishmen to fight in their stead, and then stand looking on at the conflict, when, in their heart of hearts, they care little which of the combatants destroys the other."

Archbishop Hughes, in his reply, does not undertake to answer Bishop Lynch's reasoning upon the causes which have led to the war. He declares that he was a friend of peace until the war began, but does not now dare to hope for peace until he can see some solid ground upon which to establish it. He reasons that the South begun the war — that it had no right to secede or separate, no matter what its complaints, except in the mode provided by the Constitution. The election of Lincoln was not sufficient ground, he contends, since so many Southern Presidents had filled the Presidential chair. He denies the right of secession in a State more than a county or a town from a State. (He seems to have been a pupil of the profound Dr. Lincoln.) In short, he is an out-and-out Federalist — is against the cry of peace — for the vigorous prosecution of war; but declares that the North is not fighting for subjugation, but to bring back the seceded States to their organic condition before the war. The only peace suggestion that he thinks practicable at the present moment is the holding, during the progress of hostilities, of two conventions--one in the seceded States, and the other in the loyal States--where, in the former, a statement of grievances and reclamations might be prepared, and in the latter a reconsideration of the points in which the Constitution may have proved inadequate to meet the present difficulties, the whole to be submitted to a convention of delegates from all the States as soon as a common agreement can be effected for that purpose.

Thus much for the controversy between the Bishops. It is marked by much ability. The Archbishop adds ingenuity to his essay, in the employment of which he is not over-scrupulous. For instance, he quotes from Mr. Russell the remark of some Southern men hostile to foreigners as an illustration of Southern feeling towards them. He confesses that the gentleman quoted by Mr. Russell is no true representative of the gentlemen it was his fortune to meet in the South. ‘"But no matter,"’ he says, ‘"if it be true, it shews that for Irish and foreigners in general the South is nearly as unfriendly as the North can be."’-- He has not the hardihood, even if it be true, to say that the South is as ‘"unfriendly"’ as the North; for he could not ignore the fact that the South has protected foreigners, while the North has mobbed them, burnt their churches, sought their disfranchisement, and even invaded the property and authority of the Bishop himself. But, nevertheless, he chooses to give the North what advantage he can by quoting Mr. Russell's anecdote, and saying ‘"if it be true,"’ &c., knowing that with his admirers it will have the same effect as if it were true. This is the meanest act we ever knew of the Archbishop, and shows what men, with some reputation, for fairness, may descend to in maintaining a bad cause.

It is passing strange that a learned and ardent Irishman like the Archbishop, who desires the separation of Ireland from Great Britain, should throw his influence in behalf of the coercion of the Southern people to an alliance with those whom they loathe, and the sovereign Southern States into a union to which they will never submit. It may, in a measure, be accounted for by the fact that the Arch bishop is an intimate friend of the arch-fiend Seward. It is not the first time that the route of the ‘"devil's walk"’ was through a Bishop's palace. Again, whatever be the Archbishop's motive, it is certain that after his coercion letter, Erastus. (ye rascal) Brooks would hardly attack his prerogative and property, in the New York Senate; and there can be no doubt that the Archbishop feels, now that he has espoused the Northern tyranny, vastly more secure than when a few years since appealing to the public against the persecution of that Know-Nothing wolf.

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