Telegraphic lies.
The unfounded and extravagant stories that have been transmitted recently by the telegraph, occasion wide spread complaint.
The press and the public have been annoyed past endurance by them.
From the
Southwest we have had message after message that was, if not incredible upon its face, contradicted by subsequent information.
Milliken's Bead has been taken several times, yet we have never had possession of it.
Kirby Smith,
Magruder, and
Dick Taylor have been made to cross over the
Mississippi and do a great many things which they never have done — and have been rapidly moved from one point to another at a great distance in an incredibly short space of time.
Magruder one day is marching upon New Orleans, when it is not probable he is outside of the boundaries of
Texas.
Everything is received with doubt that comes from that direction.
The last report that
Dick Taylor had crossed the
Mississippi and was joining
Gardner at
Port Hudson, had completely routed
Banks, and marched on to reinforce
Johnston of course must be received with the incredulity that the questionable ter of everything by telegraph from that quarter is so well calculated to inspire.
But all at once the telegraphers from the
North appear to be ambitions of outstripping their contemporaries of the far
South, and with one bound go a long way ahead of them.
We are informed from
Martinsburg that
Gen. Lee, by an adroit move, has captured
forty thousand of the enemy, and they "refuse to be paroled! " The number of prisoners are finally reduced to
four thousand, and some have been charitable enough to imagine that there was a mistake in transcribing the sum, by which
four was magnified into
forty. But the signs of the telegraph do not admit of such a mistake.
Yet again, if this were not so, the particularity with which the message described the movement of the falling back of the centre, and the enveloping the enemy by the closing in of the two wings of our army, leaves no loop hole for explanation.
It is true the telegrapher may, and no doubt did, hear a flying rumor to the effect of what he wrote; but is that the sort of information to be gravely transmitted to the press and War. Department?
Reverses are had enough without having added to them the sickening depression of being let down from the elation of a reported brilliant victory to a veritable retreat of our army, after a series of the most sanguinary combats of the war.
Some measures ought to be adopted to protect the public and the
Government from these unreliable and false messages.
The matters to which they relate are too important to be submitted to such untrustworthy sources of intelligence.
