The North was forced, reluctantly and unwillingly, into this war: with her as yet it has hardly become a matter of earnest. She has endeavored to carry it on considerately and tenderly, for the well-being of the South as well as of the North, much in the spirit of a quiet Quaker gentleman unexpectedly set upon by a drunken rowdy, 'spoiling for a fight,' and whom in his benevolence and surprise, he is anxious indeed to restrain, but without inflicting on him serious injury. In an especial degree was this tenderness felt on the part of the Government and people of the North toward that peculiar institution of the South which is distinctively known to be, in some way, fundamentally related to this unprovoked and unreasonable attack. While the South was attributing to the whole North a rabid abolitionism; while the North itself was half suspecting that it had committed some wrong in the excess of its devotion to human rights; the simple fact on the contrary was, that the whole North had been and was still 'psychologized' into a positive respect for slavery, and for slaves as property, which we feel for no other species of property whatsoever. The existence of this sentiment of veneration for what our Abolition apostles have for some years been denominating the 'sum of all villanies,' is a curious fact in the spiritual history of our people, which had very generally escaped critical observation. At the South, the individual planter, owning and possessing ten slaves, of an aggregate value, it may be, of ten thousand dollars, ranks higher, socially, is regarded indeed, in some subtile way, as a richer man, than the merchant or banker who may be worth his hundred thousand or half million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is by virtue of this mystical _prestige_ of the institution itself; which couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites throughout the South, whose direct interests are wholly opposed to those of the slaveholding class, and ends by subjecting them, morally and spiritually, and binding them in the bonds of the most abject allegiance to the oligarchy of slaveholders. It is in this way that the South is made a unit out of elements seemingly the most incongruous and radically opposed. For a series of years past, the South has sent forth its annual caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own