With the gradual decline of this remnant of slavery in the Northern Union, and with the thousand contingencies threatening its perpetuity in the Southern States, after the sustaining influence of the North in its behalf should have been finally withdrawn, the anticipation would not have been without high grounds of probability, that the institution, as a whole, would have hastened more or less rapidly to its final dissolution; and that, one by one, the States of the South, ridding themselves of the incubus of slavery and its comcomitants--oligarchic, mobocratic, and military despotism--would have sought, for their own protection and happiness, to reenter the original Union as Free States. Such an issue of the conflict might at the commencement of the war have been looked forward to as almost fortunate, and as perhaps that which Providence had in store for us as a people. That larger measure of success, the entire destruction of slavery throughout the land, now rapidly coming to be a foregone conclusion in most minds, was then hardly hoped for by the most sanguine, although, as will appear by what follows, that alternative was then anticipated by the writer. Finally, in case the war should have proved a drawn game between the two sections, with no special advantage on either side, some middle ground of adjustment between the two last suppositions might have been sought out, and an irregular line, running anywhere between Mason and Dixon's line and the Ohio, on the one hand, and the Blue Ridge and the Tennessee river on the other, might have been forced upon us. In that event, a long-continued border warfare would have been to be anticipated, with innumerable complex difficulties from expenditure in the protection of the irregular and imperfect boundary, the collection of the revenues, and the like.