expounded as a pro-slavery instrument and those who advocated the limitation of slavery were guilty of unconstitutional acts; the South in upholding slavery was, so it now believed, adhering to the original conception of constitutional government in America; the South embodied the true national idea, it was the North that was guilty of violating the principles of the Union. Thus the decision put the burden of good behavior upon the North, for the South had always claimed what the Court now declared was the supreme law of the land.

But all the North was not hostile to slavery; indeed down to the day of Abraham Lincoln's election as president no political party hostile to slavery can be said to have embodied the opinion of the North.

The North did not love the negro; even the people of the old free States discriminated against him. New York allowed him to vote, but under a contingency which reinforced by public opinion kept all but a few negroes from the polls. In 1860, when the Union consisted of thirty-three States of which eighteen were free States, twenty-seven State constitutions eliminated the negro from citizenship. The free States tolerated the free negro but refused to treat him as a citizen; even in New England no one proposed electing a negro to the humblest office. The new free States of the -West, beginning with Ohio and ending with California, Minnesota and Oregon, refused to make the negro a citizen when they prohibited slavery in their constitutions. In a direct vote, could one have been cast throughout the North on the day Lincoln was elected president, a proposition to abolish slavery in the United States would have been defeated. The majority of the people at the North, in 1860, looked upon slavery as an established institution, objectionable, it is true, but yet established. They considered it distinctively a Southern institution and as such wholly an affair of the South except as an effort might be made to extend slavery into new States and Territories: and even on this point public opinion at the North was divided. Lincoln

stood as the candidate of a political party one of whose propositions was that slavery ought not to be extended into new Territories and by this the North understood to be meant Territories directly west of the free States. While there was hostility to slavery in the minds of thousands of individuals at the North in 1860, the attitude of the whole people of the North at that time cannot be said to have been a demand that slavery should be abolished at the South: that hostility was rather a demand for the limitation of slavery by keeping it out of new States and Territories at the North.

The reason for this attitude of the North must be sought in the opinion which the North as a whole held of the negro. It inclined to take the estimate of the South concerning him. Thousands of men who in November, 1860, thought that comfortable slavery was good enough for the negro were fighting on southern battle-fields, three years later, to abolish slavery, and, as matters turned out, to enfranchise the former slave.

During the seventy years from the founding of the Union to the outbreak of the Civil War the area of the United States increased from 830,000 square miles to 3,044,479 square miles; and the population from less than four millions (3,929,214) to over thirty-one millions (31,433,321). In 1789 both the area and the population of the United States were about equally divided between free soil and slave soil, between a slaveholding and a non-slaveholding people although there were slaveholders in every State save one. In 1860, by legislation of Congress and by the Dred Scott decision the entire area of the country was lawfully slave soil but nearly seven millions more people resided in the free States than in the slave States. The whole land had been declared lawful slave soil but only two-fifths of the entire population lived in slave States, of whom nearly onethird were slaves. Three-fifths of the entire population were in the free States.

If we are justified in believing that climate favored slavery at the South and contributed to produce that opinion

there which pronounced slavery the natural condition of the negro and demanded the nationalization of slavery, we must also attribute to the law of climate the absence of the negro from the greater part of the North and also that growing public opinion and moral sentiment against the rightfulness of slavery. During the seventy years of the United States under the Constitution Congress had at times restricted slavery, as by the Ordinance of 1787 and by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and, subject to a contingency, even by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854. But in 1857, all these attempts at limitation of the institution were pronounced null and void and the supreme law of the land was declared to be the chief defense and support of slavery.

At the South slavery compelled a uniform system of industry and developed agriculture, though in a wasteful manner, the exhaustion of the soil by the system compelling the South ever to demand a new area for slavery. Labor at the North was diversified; her people were heterogeneous like her industries. The South was willingly isolated, was confident that her institutions were the ideal institutions for a Republic and seemed able to conceive no substitute for her slave system. The North was divided, the South was united as to slavery. Thus, in 1860, the soil of all America. from Canada to Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific was slave soil, yet seven millions fewer people lived on actual slave soil than on actual free soil. The actual white population of the South was considerably less than half of the population of the North.

It might seem, then, that the ultimate fate of slavery might not rest in the hands of the white people of the South, but might be bound up with other issues, political, industrial and moral. Life at the North tended to individualism, to action, to unhampered thought, to a varied industry; life at the South tended to independence, to indolence, to restricted thought, to agriculture. The North and the South had been growing apart. Foreign immigration by which nearly twice as many people had come for homes to

the North as lived North and South in 1789 gave impetus and strength to free institutions. The South had few cities; the North had many. "We have an ameliorated country population," so wrote a distinguished Southerner, "civilized in the solitude, refined and conservative in social habits. We have little associated but more individual wealth. We have no mechanical arts. Our labor is better employed than in manufacturing implements for ourselves. We have no commerce but we supply its pabulum. We have slaves under a benign domestic rule, and masters having leisure to cultivate morals, manners, philosophy, politics."

"Yes," replied the North, "but you have slavery."