unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on their part, and without suspicion on the part of those who were inoculated by their presence, the exact mould and pressure of their own slaveholding opinion. To this extent, and in this subtile and ethereal way, the North had imposed upon it, unconsciously, a certain respect, amounting to veneration, for what may be called the sanctity of slavery, as it rests in and constitutes the aromal emanation from every Southern mind. Hence not only did we begin this war with the feeling of tenderness toward the Southern man and the Southern woman as brother and sister in the common heritage of patriotism, but, superadded to this, with a _special_ sentiment of tenderness toward that _special_ institution for which it is known that they, our brethren, entertain such _special_ regard. Now all this is rapidly changing; the outrages inflicted on citizens of the North residing at the South at the opening of the war--hardly paralleled in the most barbarous ages in any other land;--their reckless and bloodthirsty methods of war; their bullying arrogance and presumption; the true exposition, in fine, of the Southern character as it is, in the place of a high-toned chivalry which they have claimed for themselves, and which the people of the North have been tacitly inclined to accord--are all awakening the Government and the people to some growing sense of the real state of the case. Still, however, we are so far dominated by these influences of the past, that we are not fighting the South upon anything like a fair approximation to equal terms. They have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest amount of evil; the _animus_ of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight an unwilling fight, with a constant _arriere pensee_ to the best interests of the people whom we oppose--not even as _we_ might construe those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of delicacy, for those interests as _they_, from their point of view, conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most vital and defenceless point, while they forbear _in nothing_, and have no purpose of forbearance.