The Southern Enterprise

THE CHANGE OF COMMANDER. While good may come of these changes, the result is at best doubtful. The excitement, unrest and anxiety attendant upon these changes, is prejudicial in its effect on the peace, the business and prosperity of the country. We are not prepared to defend indiscriminately the administration of Gen. Sickles. We believe that he has issued many wise orders, and again believe he has passed others that were both unwise and tyrannical. In the latter category we would place the notorious bag of order of April 27, 1867; also the order deposing Mr. Zealy, of Columbia, from his office as Magistrate, which we believe was hasty, harsh, and altogether unjust. So also the sentence of the two young men engaged in the late barroom broil in Columbia. So the recent fining of Mr. McNelty for not selling a first class ticket to a colored woman; so the late order animadverting in severe and altogether unjustifiably harsh terms upon gentlemen of unblemished honor in the case of the Bank and Confederate Cavalry fund. Nor must we forget to mention the arbitrary decision in the case of the Charleston Savings Institution still fresh in the memory of all our readers. There may have been other orders of Gen. Sickles, meriting censure perhaps more even than those we have enumerated. But these will suffice for the present.

He has been more often blamed, however for General order No. 10; and yet we believe that he issued it in good faith, with the firm conviction of its necessity at the time, and of its beneficent effect upon the people at large in North and South Carolina. We have always been opposed to every species of stay law, but we can see many extenuating circumstances in the present case, in the fact, that Gen. Sickles advised with the first men in his District on the subject. He consulted the Governors, the Chief Justice, and many other distinguished men in both States, all of whom urged upon him the passage of such an order. Gen. S. himself has set this forth at length in his recent reply to the Charleston Board of Trade,—Charleston News.