The supposition has, until quite recently, extensively prevailed in the Northern mind that slavery is or was regarded at the South as a necessary evil, borne because it was inherited from the past and because its removal had become now next to impossible. A certain school of Northern philanthropists, headed, we believe, by Elihu Burritt, had gone so far, previous to the war, as to form a society and appeal to the Northern people for aid to enable their Southern brethren, through such aid, and finally, perhaps, through the interposition of the General Government, to rid themselves of this monster evil. This handful of kindly individuals must soon have discovered, had they come into actual contact with the prevailing sentiment of the South, that their whole movement was based upon a misapprehension of that sentiment. Thirty-five years ago, and before the Northern abolition movement had taken root in the land, it was a pleasant fiction for the Southern mind to speak deprecatingly of the blame which they otherwise might seem to incur in the mind of mankind for adhering to their barbarous institution; to plead their own conviction of its entire wrongfulness, and to commiserate themselves for their utter inability to free themselves from its weight. A certain considerable freedom of discussion in relation to its abstract merits was allowed, with the tacit condition imposed, however, just as really though not as consciously as now, that slavery itself must not be disturbed. Talk which had in it any touch of genuine feeling in favor of active exertion to rid the country of the institution as an evil, was then as effectually tabooed as it is to-day, with some minor exceptions on the borders of the slaveholding region, in Baltimore, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, etc., and with the further exception when Virginia was terrified for a few weeks or months by the results of a desperate insurrection. On the strength of these few exceptions, it has been claimed at the South, and still more persistently by Southern sympathizers at the North, that the whole drift and tendency of things at the South prior to the commencement of the abolition agitation at the North were toward gradual emancipation, and that they would have ultimated at an early day in that result. This, too, is a pleasant fiction with the least possible percentage of truth at the bottom of it.