Daily Intelligencer

Our attention has been called to a letter from Wheeling, published in the Ohio Statesman, dated August 4th, which gives the outside world, we are sure, a very tremendous idea of matters and things here in West Va. The letter commences in this wise.

"We of West Virginia, and especially of Wheeling, have become inured to every species of petty despotism, espionage, outrage, abuse and oppression."

Would anybody, living here, suspect such a state of things? "Go from home to hear the news," is an old proverb. We are probably so inured to the state of things described by the author that we have ceased to be conscious of it.

The letter is chiefly devoted to the cases of Messrs. Baker and Long, late editors of the Register. It is written in their interest almost entirely. Mr. Baker has some sort of connection with the Statesman, and hence his case is a personal matter with the paper.

It is stated that he and Mr. Long are "buried alive in the Atheneum, the filthiest dungeon in Virginia." It is also stated that "no one has been able to communicate with them: no one, not even their wives, have been allowed to see them: and we have only the authority of another person recently relieved for asserting that they are alive."

The nature of the offence for which Messrs. Baker and Long were committed to prison is not known to the writer, but he infers that it was for what they said about the movements and condition of Gen. Hunter's command after its return from the Lynchburg raid, and especially for their remarks upon Hunter himself.

"For this offence," says the writer, "these two men are confined in the same room with the confederate prisoners of war, and, during most of the time they have been there, two hundred men have crowded the small room which is ill ventilated, and produced imminent danger of pestilence and suffocation."

The letter goes on further to speak of the insufficiency of the prison fare, and its bad quality, and with such recitals occupies the best part of a long column. How far there is any foundation in truth for the statements contained in the letter, we do not know. We have yet to know that the management of the Atheneum is conducted on inhuman principles. We are sure that the government would not permit it to be so managed, and we do not believe it is. As a matter of course, confinement in it is not enviable. No one is sent there because it is an agreeable place, but, if anything, its opposite. It cannot be a very sweet scented place, seeing that all kinds of rebel trash are daily received there, en route for Camp Chase. As to why Messrs. Baker & Long are there, we have no more information than the balance of the community. We presume that the writer gives the correct reason, viz: their comments on Hunter as a man and a soldier during the Lynchburg raid. Perhaps their whole copperhead course here as editors was an additional reason. We presume it was. We said at the time that we regarded their arrest as a picayune business on the part of Hunter, and calculated to make a mountain out of a mole hill, for the reason that the paper was on the verge of the grave and had no force or ability whatever to give it influence.

So long as such papers as the chief copper-head sheets of the country are allowed free circulation, and so long as Vallandigham and Voorhees and Ben Wood and such treason-mongers are allowed to do pretty much as they please, it is simply ridiculous to be making examples and martyrs out of such small fry as the editors of the Register. Gen. Hunter, in our opinion, proved his incompetency as much in taking any notice of them as he did in his military mismanagement, for which he has been happily superseded at last.

The writer of the letter makes a brutal attack on Captain Over, commandant of the prison and the post, accusing him of all sorts of iniquities. We would not defile our types by repeating the epithets employed. Among other things the Captain is charged with giving the prisoners only "quarter rations," and these of "sour bread, salt pork, and something miscalled bean soup." The writer also charges that the Captain is in partnership with the sutler of the prison, from whom "supplies of coffee, tea, sugar, and other eatables must be purchased at exorbitant prices."

We have no means of knowing anything as to these charges, but we have no idea that there is any truth in them.