SIR:—Hitherto I have refrained from addressing communications to the newspapers upon _any_ subject of interest to the community, feeling better satisfied in reading the comments of persons other than myself. The course of the prosecution towards the unfortunate Mr. Branch leads me, for the first time, to speak to the public through the columns of a public journal, and suggests to me a number of ideas which, I think, bear upon the subject. I am not a personal friend of Mr. Branch, never having had half a dozen words of conversation with him. I look upon the prosecution (or, more properly speaking, the persecution) of Mr. Branch as a wholesale violation of the rights and privileges of the citizens of New York, and a violent outrage upon the spirit and tenor of our laws. For the first time in the history of our criminal jurisprudence, we find a man charged with the commission of an offence against our laws, arrested, indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, and placed in the vilest servitude, all within the space of two short weeks. In this extraordinary trial we see, and painfully too, the establishment of a precedent to take away our rights and subject our persons and property to the ruthless grasp of an interested prosecution. ’Tis true that the prosecutors in the case of Mr. Branch were _wealthy and in positions of influence, and it was therefore to be expected that justice should lean toward them_, to the taking away of the rights of a citizen who could not boast of _wealth_. I assert, and without fear of truthful contradiction, that two-thirds of our community to-day sympathize with Mr. Branch, and look upon the course of the prosecution as a gross violation of their own individual rights, and such a violation as loudly calls for the indignation of the people; and it is indeed pleasant to reflect, that to-day the persecutors of Mr. Branch are entitled to, and willingly receive, the supreme contempt and unmitigated scorn of every lover of justice; and I tell you, sir, _that_ scorn and contempt will manifest itself at the ballot-box to such a degree, that _certain persons_ will wither beneath the loud condemnation of the honest citizen; and the time will come when justice shall not be thwarted by the mere wink of two or three _self-interested_ individuals, who cannot boast of any _particular merit_. I take the position, that whether Mr. Branch be guilty or _not_ guilty, the trial was unfair and the sentence unjust; and no evidence appears to my mind causing me to doubt but that Mr. Branch’s assertions were correct. Would it not have been much better, in order to the proper vindication of the character of the person against whom the charges were made by Mr. Branch, that all the circumstances connected with the affair should have been brought to light by an even-handed, above-board trial? Then, if the charges were false, the prosecution would have established their honor and integrity