Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy, in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent Kennedy very harshly--aware that _something_ needed to be done to prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable "pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period. A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred against him--that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal, which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a question,--as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being "defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were very different from those contemplated in their erection,--just as the forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles" for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper. Many of the prisoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous, and brought them at last to their end.