and States has been considered by the slaveholders a wrong, and a danger justifying a bloody civil war; inasmuch as, if under those circumstances they did not abolish slavery themselves in a given number of years, it would infallibly abolish them by the increase of the negro population, hemmed with them into a restricted space by this cordon sanitaire drawn round them.  But, bad as this prospect has seemed to slaveholders (determined to continue such), and justifying—­as it may be conceded that it does from their point of view—­not a ferocious civil war, but a peaceable separation from States whose interests were declared absolutely irreconcileable with theirs, the position in which they will find themselves if the contest terminates in favour of Secession will be undoubtedly more difficult and terrible than the one the mere anticipation of which has driven them to the dire resort of civil war.  All round the Southern coast, and all along the course of the great Mississippi, and all across the northern frontier of the Slave States, the negroes have already thrown off the trammels of slavery.  Whatever their condition may be—­and doubtless in many respects it is miserable enough—­they are to all intents and purposes free.  Vast numbers of them have joined the Northern invading armies, and considerable bodies of them have become organised as soldiers and labourers, under the supervision of Northern officers and employers; most of them have learned the use of arms, and possess them; all of them have exchanged the insufficient slave diet of grits and rice for the abundant supplies of animal food, which the poorest labourer in that favoured land of cheap provisions and high wages indulges in to an extent unknown in any other country.  None of these slaves of yesterday will be the same slaves to-morrow.  Little essential difference as may yet have been effected by the President’s proclamation in the interior of the South in the condition of the blacks, it is undoubtedly known to them, and they are waiting in ominous suspense its accomplishment or defeat by the fortune of the war; they are watching the issue of the contest of which they well know themselves to be the theme, and at its conclusion, end how it will, they must be emancipated or exterminated.  With the North not only not friendly to slavery, but henceforward bitterly hostile to slaveholders, and no more to be reckoned upon as heretofore, it might have been infallibly by the Southern white population in any difficulty with the blacks (a fact of which the negroes will be as well aware as their former masters)—­with an invisible boundary stretching from ocean to ocean, over which they may fly without fear of a master’s claim following them a single inch—­with the hope and expectation of liberty suddenly snatched from them at the moment it seemed within their grasp—­with the door of their dungeon once more barred between them and the light into which they were in the act of emerging—­is it to be conceived, that