The Jackson news.
The telegraph has been unusually silent for the last day or two. Apparently, it thinks the work of last week entitles it to a short holiday and really we are very much of that opinion ourselves. The last news it gives us from Jackson is encouraging, as far as it goes, but the public taste has been so highly stimulated of late by accounts of wholesale slaughter in pitched battles and the surrender of entire armies, that it will scarcely endure any narrative which deals with less than five or six thousand corpses and an equal number of captives. A few years ago, when we thought Bethel a great pitched battle, and the carnage of Manassas not second to the carnage of Waterloo this narrative would have electrified the Confederacy. But the taste for blood prows with indulgence, and men become every day more like wolves, as they give way to the growing appetite. We should much rather have heard that one hundred thousand Yankees had been slain than that a poor, paltry thousand had bitten the dust. If men accuse us of Lycanthropy for expressing such a sentiment, we care not a farthing. We are getting savage, with the rest of our countrymen, and we confess to a special delight in hearing of piles of Yankee corpses, no matter how high or how broad, or how long. For prisoners we have not the same weakness. They are troublesome to guard, and must be fed. But dead men attempt no escapes, create no disturbances, sat no bread, cost no money. We had rather hear of one hundred thousand dead Yankees than of one single Yankee prisoner.There is but one thing in this telegram which is displeasing to us. It is the little sentence "The Yankee wounded and dead were still lying in front of our entrenchments." --There is an awful Vicksburg twang throughout this sentence. When we read it we seem to be carried back three weeks, and to have before the works of Vicksburg the attacking army of Grant and the defending army of Pemberton. It will be recollected with what unction the telegraph rolled the sweet morsels under its fiery tongue — how it told of piles of Yankees lying dead before our works — how it discoursed of the horrid stench exhaling from their petrifying carcases — how we were continually repelling the barbarians and reddening the earth with their gore — how with scarcely a change of tone, it suddenly told us that Vicksburg was fallen, that its garrison were prisoners, that all its gallantry and all its pertinacity had been vain. We think of all this, and we shudder when we read of the slain and wounded lying in front of our works.--Let us, however, hope for the best. This is, at any rate, a good beginning, and if it be pushed to a conclusion, that conclusion may be the fortunate event of our political life — the turning point in the great drama of this unparalleled Revolution.
