quadrupled, in the Southern countries added to the Union. Between 1830, for instance, and 1850, the slaves in Virginia have increased only from 469,757 to 472,528: but in the same time the number in Florida has risen from 15,501 to 39,309, and Texas has acquired 58,161. In 1820 North Carolina had 295,017 slaves: in 1850, the number had been reduced to 288,548 and in the same interval, Maryland had suffered a similar decrease from 107,398 to 90,368: but meanwhile the increase in Alabama had been from 41,879 to 342,892; in Mississippi, from 32,814 to 309,878; in Louisiana, from 69,064 to 244,809; in Arkansas, from 1,617 to 47,000; in Tennessee, from 80,107 to 239,460; and even in Missouri, from 10,222 to 87,422. From a glance at these figures it becomes obvious that a new commerce has sprung up, unhappily restoring a common interest in the "domestic institution" to States, whose unequal agricultural competition was beginning to draw them in different directions. It is as idle to judge of Virginia's prosperity by her field-produce, as to condemn pastures for not yielding corn. She is the grazing-farm for rearing human stock: and so long as her land supplies yearly exports equal in value to the whole exports of the Union to Canada or Cuba, she will hold to the gainful though it be a guilty traffic. The excess of land in one place, and the excess of labour suitable to till it in another, have found each other out; and have created a joint economical interest, too powerful to be reached by moral appeal. Mr. Calhoun no doubt expresses the universal sentiment of the Southern States, when in a despatch of August 12th, 1844, he speaks thus of the effects which would follow the abolition of Slavery:

"To this continent, the blow would be calamitous beyond description. It would destroy, in a great measure, the cultivation and production of the great tropical staples, amounting annually in value to nearly three hundred millions of dollars,-the fund which stimulates and upholds almost every other branch of its industry, commerce, navigation, and manufactures. The whole, by their joint influence, are rapidly spreading population, wealth, improvement and civilisation over the whole continent, and vivifying, by their overflow, the industry of Europe, thereby increasing its population, wealth, and advancement in the arts, in power, and in civilisation." Greeley's History, p. 40.

In order to confirm his estimate of slave-economy, Mr. Calhoun dwells complacently in this remarkable despatch on the reputed failure of the British experiment of emancipation: and in demonstrating our failure, unless Mr. Greeley's History reproduces the paper incorrectly, he understates the sugar-produce of our colonies about 120-fold, confounding perhaps hundred-weights and pounds. "The British possessions," he says, "including the East and West Indies, and Mauritius, pro

duced in 1842, of sugar only, 3,993,771 pounds." Now the official returns for that year show the total amount from these sources entered in that year for home consumption, to have been 4,325,785 cwt. Great as have been and are the difficulties attending the change in our West Indian policy, they have not yet driven us to the mean and wicked course attributed to us by this statesman;-viz. the resolve to ruin our competitors on the American continent by forcing on them the slave-emancipation under which we are smarting ourselves. In truth, the sacrifices entailed by the transition to free labour and free commerce have occasioned us no surprise and certainly no repentance and their limit has evidently been reached. The impression, we believe, prevails among the American planters that the British West Indies are rapidly returning to a state of nature; and especially are fast abandoning the sugar-cane as too much for the energies of free labour. Happily, the commercial returns dispel this ridiculous illusion. Slavery was abolished by the Act of 1833; the system of forced labour being still continued for some years under the name of Apprenticeship, and the monopoly by differential duties remaining unbroken till 1845. If we take the produce of the three years, 1835, 1845, 1855, we shall see at a glance the latest achievements of the slave-system, with protective duties; the result of free labour without free trade; and the most recent operation of a system doubly free. In the first of the three selected years, our slave-colonies (West Indies and Mauritius) furnished, for home-consumption only, 178,000 tons of sugar and molasses; in the second, 180,626; in the third, 211,631. Thus the free produce, instead of dwindling away in obedience to prediction, has increased about 19 per cent. Still, while defending the results of the great British experiment from misapprehension, we are far from denying that the curse of slavery has been redeemed by vast effort and sacrifice. Nor could it be removed from the adjacent continent without still greater and more protracted loss, during the transition to a better system. Under slavery alone do men exist for the mere soil's sake. With freedom, Nature re-asserts her right, and the soil is found to exist for the sake of men and as in Jamaica, so in America, the labourer, left at his own disposal, will be content with the kind and degree of work which suffices to supply his customary wants. It is not reasonable to expect from the African, trained in the worship of idleness, a spontaneous and superfluous industry. The energy which only the competition of numbers extorts from a white peasantry will reserve itself for the same stimulus among the coloured races. It is a waste of time to discuss the relative cheapness or dearness of free labour under

conditions which tempt it to retire from market altogether. Such conditions, we fear, are present over a large area in the Southern States; and constrain us to admit a powerful, though not permanent, economic interest in favour of the existing system.

A strong moral sentiment, however, or a decided political instinct, will find a way through all problems of gain or loss. And if we could see, in reviewing the past seventy years, a growing force of anti-slavery opinion in the Union, we should give little heed to the argument from the balance-sheet. But it is a startling fact that, while there have been repeated Federal contests, at considerable intervals, between the slave principle and the free, the victory has remained, more and more decisively, with the Southern party. A mere enumeration of the successive struggles will show this. They have always arisen when new outlying territory had to be dealt with, and the conditions determined for its transition from mere Public Land to incipient Political organisation. As Land, it is at Federal disposal when settled and organised, at its own. By making the exclusion of slavery a prior condition of political admission, Congress may bespeak the soil for freedom. The "Democratic" party affects to regard such provisions as an improper forestalling of State rights, though never disinclined to obtain a remission of their stringency at the hands of Congress. Three great masses of Territory have furnished the battle-ground of this political dispute the Northwest Territory, from the Ohio to the sources of the Mississippi;--the Louisiana purchase of 1803, from the Gulf of Mexico to the sources of the Missouri; and the acquisitions from Mexico, including Texas, New Mexico, and California.

In 1787, July 13th, Congress unanimously passed the celebrated Ordinance "for the government of the Territory of the United States, Northwest of the Ohio;" which closed with the following "unalterable article:"

"There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall be duly convicted."

Here, then, at the outset of the history, a concurrent voice declares the power of Congress to predestine the "domestic institutions" of future States, and its will to close them against slavery. True, the present Federal Constitution was not ratified till more than two years later,-November 1789. But in the very first session of Congress held under it, the validity of the "Ordinance" was recognised: its provisions being extended to new Territory ceded to the Union by North Carolina and Georgia,—with one unfortunate exception,-of "the article

which forbids slavery." The exception secured Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi to the slave interest; as the Ordinance itself had predetermined to freedom the soil of the future Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Yet even this Northwestern country, being tainted by Virginian settlers, did but sulkily accept its blessing. Between 1803 and 1807, three or four applications to Congress were made by the inhabitants, praying to be relieved for ten years from the prohibition of slavery and twice at least did Select Committees report to the House in their favour. But though the old unanimity was broken, the Legislature had not yet learned the democratic version of "unalterable articles:" and the "Ordinance" was sustained.

For a virgin soil, the seat of no prior rights, the simple veto of this "Ordinance" sufficed. But the Louisiana acquisition had been under the sovereignties of Spain and France, both of which had legalised slavery. It was only, however, at its Southern extremity, formed into the state of Louisiana in 1811 (whence Arkansas was subsequently detached), that the institution had real possession and remained undisputed: and after this portion had politically defined itself, the opportunity was favourable for rescuing the vast residuary region (under the name of Missouri Territory) from a curse which had scarcely straggled into it. Few, however, as the slaves upon it were, the object could not be accomplished without direct provision for the extinction of their actual status, as well as against any further importations. Whether the prerogative of Congress extended to positive, though only prospective, manumission on the public lands, was more open to constitutional doubt than its simply preventive power. Nevertheless, when Missouri applied for admission as a State in 1818, the House of Representatives passed, by small but repeated majorities, a proviso, barring the introduction of more slaves, and freeing at the age of twenty-five all children born after the Act of admission to the Union. The Senate struck out the proviso, and the Bill fell through.

Missouri, however, was not to be kept outside from deference to a political balance: and next year the question of her admission came up again. The same disagreement between the two houses reappeared in spite of repeated manœuvres to evade it the Senate rejecting, the Representatives demanding, an exclusion of slavery from the proposed State. A new feature, however, was introduced into the case by Southern ingenuity, and succeeded in resolving the strife. The Upper House said to the Lower:-"Take away your restriction from Missouri State, and we will agree to put it on the residue of Missouri

Territory." The bait was taken: the reversion of freedom in the future was accepted in compensation for immediate extension of slavery. Missouri got her "institution," with its political consequences; and the North, a piece of paper, with these words:

"And be it further enacted, That in all that territory ceded by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana which lies north of 36° 30′ north latitude, excepting only such part thereof as is included within the limits of the State contemplated by this Act, Slavery and involuntary servitude otherwise than in punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall be and is hereby for ever prohibited."

This is the celebrated Missouri Compromise, carried in February 1820, by a majority of 90 against 87.

Five-and-twenty years elapsed, and the parties in this contest stood face to face again;-not now to constitute their own territory, but to appropriate foreign soil. Dr. Channing, in one of the noblest political pamphlets ever produced, has made the story of Texas universally known. It was notoriously in the Slave-interest that the land was overrun, disturbed, revolutionised, annexed. Due warning was given to the North by many a faithful observer: and, in addition to the hatred of Slave-extension, the crisis must have enlisted whatever feeling there was of national honour and good faith. Yet this new issue, offering so much more vulnerable surface, passed to its decision more easily than any previous one. The majorities were larger in 1845 than in 1820: and the utmost that the freesoil party could achieve was to trace across the new region the magic line of 36° 30', which divides the guilt from the innocence of slavery. A vote of 134 against 77 legalised the gains of usurpation, and out of a territory unpolluted by servitude carved for the future of the Union five States foredoomed to bear the

curse.

Boundary questions springing out of the new acquisition occasioned the Mexican war; which again brought in fresh territorial spoils to be divided between the slave condition and the free. Military distinction having won the President's Chair for an honest man who would not truckle to the South (General Taylor), the free-soil party acquired for a time fresh spirit and hope: and in the discussions respecting New Mexico and California, the Lower House showed an increased disposition to press inhibitions of Slavery. But the pertinacity of the Senate producing a "dead-lock," Mr. Clay interposed and achieved his final act of pacification in the celebrated "Compromise of 1850." Before it passed, he himself had been withdrawn from the Sen