From Washington.
[Special Correspondence of the Dispatch.]This is the no-paper day of the year. At breakfast this morning, I could but think of Hood's November lines.
‘ "No sun, no moon, no star." &c.
’
You know the people of Washington are entirely dependent on the Baltimore Sun; and, now-a-days, a morning paper is as necessary a stimulant as the bitters and tansy drams of our fathers used to be in old times. We shall have the "Star" at dinner, perhaps.
In telegraphing to you that Bailey was innocent, I was actuated by the fact of seeing him discharged on the trifling bail of $3,000. Today, the report is that he is guilty. I am told that he gave up the bonds to Russell in order to shield Gov. Floyd, whose niece he married. But Gov. F. bitterly repudiates the idea, while Bailey himself says that the Honorable Secretary of War was entirely ignorant of the transaction, which was known to three persons only — himself, Russell, and another party, whose name he gave to Secretary Thompson, who immediately put the police on his track.
I feel like an astronomer who has discovered a planet, and just after verifying his calculations receives a dispatch telling him it was discovered a month before in another quarter of the globe. Returning last Thursday or Friday night from a visit to our Virginia Senators, my friend, Washington, who accompanied me said he had been far enough South to see the Southern Cross. It immediately struck me that the Southern Cross would be an appropriate banner for the Southern Confederacy. And last night's Herald brought a picture of it — showing that the idea had already suggested itself to the people of South Carolina. My arrangement of the stars is different. Instead of a cross of single lines of stars, as in the South Carolina flag, I had a cross of double lines — thus:
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As the religion of Christ has been spurned by the Abolitionists, the adoption of the Cross on the Southern banner is eminently fitting. I have embodied the idea in an article for an other journal.
Every Congressman who could get away is gone. No strangers are here during these distracted times. The Pittsburg row, which promised to be the battle of Lexington of the second revolution, has ended in smoke. So you may imagine how dull we are to-day.
The few Southern members who remain manifest some anxiety to know the limits of the Middle Confederacy which Gov. Letcher advocates in his forthcoming Message, according to a dispatch in the Herald. If he means to cut off New England on the one side and the Gulf States on the other, it strikes me it will be like lopping off the roots and then the branches of a tree — a proceeding which would hardly enure to the benefit of the trunk.
Hon. Charles L. Scott's able letter to his constituents, printed in a recent issue of the Constitution, shows how true the sons of Virginia are to their native State, and proves that the South is not without friends — numerous and strong friends — in California. Mr. Latham's mercenary pronunciamento of California's willingness to side with the North, for the sake of the Pacific Railroad and without regard to principle, is effectually "set back" by this manly letter. Zed.
