The iron is at last entering the rebels' soul. The blustering braggarts who insulted the spirit of the age by attempting to destroy the noblest Government on earth, and to rear up on its ruin a hideous deformity modeled on the pattern of the kingdoms of Ashantee and Dahomey: the sham chivalry who sickened Christendom by their pretensions, while they were living on the labor of 4,000,000 unpaid servants: the barbarous creatures, who thrust our prisoners into new Black Holes of Calcutta, and dug up our dead soldiers' bodies to make rings and drinking-cups and keepsakes of their poor bones: these monstrous products of the system of slavery are at length realizing the gulf into which they have plunged. Ordinary language fails to provide expletives for their wrath: there is no precedent in history fierce enough for the policy they are going to adopt. They call Mr. Lincoln an "ape," a "fiend," a "beast," a "savage," a "highwayman." Their Congress is resolved into a dozen committees, each trying to devise some new form of retaliation to be inflicted upon United States citizens and soldiers, if we dare to carry the proclamation into effect, and tamper—to use the words of the Richmond Enquirer—with "four thousand millions' worth of property!" They are going to hoist the black flag. They are going to put to death not only soldiers on the battle- field, but every Northerner found on Southern soil. Some they are going to try by courts-martial. But it doesn't seem that that is to benefit them much; for the end of the trial is to be death. No one has yet suggested torture before execution; but that will probably come. It will be nothing new in parts of the South.

Well: all this fuss and fury over, what then? As to the black flag, the rebel soldiers will have something to say about that. At the recent battle of Antietam a Louisiana Regiment was almost exterminated. One of our soldiers explained the circumstance to a visitor. "You see, Sir, the other day at South Mountain that regiment charged with the cry of 'No quarter;' so when our boys met them again we let them have it a little hotter than usual, and there was hardly a corporal's guard of 'em escaped." A lesson or two of this kind will show these insane warriors in the rebel Congress that departures from the regular laws of warfare cut both ways. If the game of murder is to be played, there will be two parties to play at it, and twice as many players on our side as on theirs.

As to negro insurrections. When this war first broke out it was commonly supposed that the negroes would rise at the South. This expectation has not been fulfilled. There have been negro insurrections. But they have been so promptly and so thoroughly suppressed that they exercised no appreciable influence on the war. The very fact of the war, and of the wholesale military organization of the Southern people, have rendered insurrection much less likely to be successful than it ever was. The slaves are unarmed and unorganized; the whites are under arms and thoroughly organized. Every town and village at the South contains more or less companies of armed troops—amply sufficient to put down insurrection in the neighborhood. Now the proclamation will no more alter this state of things than the Pope's Bull altered the course of the comet. What it will effect will be to destroy utterly and forever the legal tenure of slavery in the rebel States, and to deprive the slaveholders, wherever our armies go, of the peculiar property on whose behalf they made war upon us, and for whose protection they desire to erect a separate government. In point of fact, the slaves, when freed, are much more likely to trouble us than their old masters. We shall have to feed them until some new organization of their labor can be effected. They are not at all likely to attempt to massacre their old masters—unless, indeed, those masters should be foolish enough to try to massacre them. All the bugaboo stories about the slaughter of women and children are mere moonshine, intended to affect opinion in Europe. Even in San Domingo the negroes did not begin to kill the whites until they were satisfied the whites intended to exterminate them. If the rebel leaders are so afraid of their wives and children being massacred, why did they publish the proclamation in their papers? If there was really any danger of the kind, does any body believe that the negroes would have been so openly invited to commence the work of massacre?

The thing, the only thing, which the rebels do fear is the loss of "four thousand millions of property." The chivalry see that after 1st January, if the rebellion lasts, they will have to work for their living, instead of fattening on the unpaid labor of four millions of blacks. This is the awful prospect which unmans them. It is this which convulses the rebel newspapers, and has thrown their Congress into paroxysms of anguish.