either or both privileges might be withheld temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently, as might seem expedient, and the progress in civilisation which might justify such an extension of rights.  These, and any other modifications of the state of the black population in the South, would require great wisdom to deal with, but their immediate transformation from bondsmen to free might, I think, be accomplished with little danger or difficulty, and with certain increase of prosperity to the Southern States.

On the other hand, it is not impossible that, left to the unimpeded action of the natural laws that govern the existence of various races, the black population, no longer directly preserved and propagated for the purposes of slavery, might gradually decrease and dwindle, as it does at the North—­where, besides the unfavourable influence of a cold climate on a race originally African, it suffers from its admixture with the whites, and the amalgamation of the two races, as far as it goes, tends evidently to the destruction of the weaker.  The Northern mulattoes are an unhealthy feeble population, and it might yet appear that even under the more favourable influence of a Southern climate, whenever the direct stimulus afforded by slavery to the increase of the negroes was removed, their gradual extinction or absorption by the predominant white race would follow in the course of time.

But the daily course of events appears to be rendering more and more unlikely the immediate effectual enfranchisement of the slaves:  the President’s proclamation will reach with but little efficacy beyond the mere borders of the Southern States.  The war is assuming an aspect of indefinite duration; and it is difficult to conceive what will be the condition of the blacks, freed de jure but by no means de facto, in the vast interior regions of the Southern States, as long as the struggle raging all round their confines does not penetrate within them.  Each of the combatants is far too busily absorbed in the furious strife to afford thought, leisure, or means, either effectually to free the slaves or effectually to replace them in bondage; and in the meantime their condition is the worst possible for the future success of either operation.  If the North succeeds in subjugating the South, its earliest business will be to make the freedom of the slaves real as well as nominal, and as little injurious to themselves as possible.  If, on the other hand, the South makes good its pretensions to a separate national existence, no sooner will the disseverment of the Union be an established fact than the slaveholders will have to consolidate once more the system of their ‘peculiar institution,’ to reconstruct the prison which has half crumbled to the ground, and rivet afresh the chains which have been all but struck off.  This will be difficult:  the determination of the North to restrict the area of slavery by forbidding its ingress into future territories