OCTOBER 31ST.—If it be not a Yankee electioneering trick to operate at the election in New York, on the fourth of November, the Northern correspondence with Europe looks very much like speedy intervention in our behalf.
Winder has really dismissed all his detectives excepting Cashmeyer, about the worst of them.
If we gain our independence by the valor of our people, or assisted by European intervention, I wonder whether President Davis will be regarded by the world as a second Washington? What will his own country say of him? I know not, of course; but I know what quite a number here say of him now. They say he is a small specimen of a statesman, and no military chieftain at all. And worse still, that he is a capricious tyrant, for lifting up Yankees and keeping down great Southern men. Wise, Floyd, etc. are kept in obscurity; while Pemberton, who commanded the Massachusetts troops, under Lincoln, in April, 1861, is made a lieutenant-general; G. W. Smith and Lovell, who were office-holders in New York, when the battle of Manassas was fought, are made major-generals, and the former put in command over Wise in Virginia, and all the generals in North Carolina. Ripley, another Northern general, was sent to South Carolina, and Winder, from Maryland, has been allowed to play the despot in Richmond and Petersburg. Washington was maligned.
