Maryland never attained any higher distinction than plantations, the theocracy of Massachusetts was early overthrown, primogeniture did not last many generations, and the wrenching of Home Rule from the Crown began long before the Revolution. "Liberty and Property" was the slogan of the American patriot. "Liberty to property" would have been more accurate. Nowhere in the world was property so general as it was in the New World, and consequently nowhere was there so much liberty.

Who could keep the people back? There lay the treasure very much as it did in Ali Baba's cave. One had but to say "Open Sesame " and the treasure was one's own. How then begrudge one's neighbour. No wonder then that, in spite of the idealistic theories of freedom, the actual practice in government and in property control as laid down by the colonial governments and by the new Republic itself held contradictions and gaps which, from the point of view of statesmanship, are difficult to reconcile. No safeguard was thought of to prevent a collapse of the free society of the American patriot. To Ali Baba's supposedly inexhaustible cave was left the fortunes of that eternal freedom that was to reign in the New World.

Having successfully gained for himself the special privileges of land and trade which the English Crown had tried to hold, the American launched his new Republic on a system of compromise and bargains which were out of harmony with the ideals he advocated. In the fundamental and all-important problems of representation and taxation he made bargains with the easy conscience of a king who can do

no wrong. In spite of his theories of the rights of man he feared a democratic representation in Congress according to population, and he made a compromise by which the states and not the people were to be equally represented in the Senate, and though representation in the Lower House was given according to population the demands of the people were thought to be effectively blocked by high property qualifications for the suffrage. The answer of the American to any objection to these restrictions was-You have the liberty to acquire property.

As to the matter of slavery, the Constitutional Convention politely and discreetly refrained from mentioning so painful a subject frankly. Slavery was not popular at the time. Louisiana had not yet been purchased, nor had the machine revolution begun, so that the institution seemed to be on the verge of extinction for want of space and use. In the legislature of Virginia itself, only a few years before the revolution, slavery had failed of abolishment by only two votes.

As early as 1774, in the first flare-up of revolution, three states in the association that was formed to boycott English goods-Rhode Island, North Carolina and Virginia-mentioned slaves especially. It happened, however, that the slave markets were overstocked and it was to the interest of the planter to have an interim in which to extricate himself from debt to the merchants. As the boycott succeeded in the good work of causing the slave merchants in Liverpool to fail to the sum of £710,000, slaves became scarce in America and smugglers made fortunes. It is difficult to divide idealism from practicality.

However, the First Continental Congress, following along the ideas of the Association, went so far as to resolve to "wholly discontinue the slave trade." But the virtuous resolution meant nothing, for the strain of the war, which soon brought with it the problem of getting bread for the people, was too great for pure idealism to last long. In the second year Congress began permitting the importation of certain British goods, but held out against the slaves, this time in a temporary resolution, not in a promise as in the year before. By the end of the war the country was in such need of food and money that the Constitutional Convention was ready to make any agreement as long as it seemed to put the new nation on a working basis. Thus, on the question of slavery, though South Carolina and Georgia were the only two states which still held a strong brief for it, the Convention consented to formulate its plans of taxation and representation with the institution as an a priori condition. The North accepted the fact that slaves were property and even haggled over the tax on them. The South would have liked to consider them men as far as votes were concerned. A compromise was agreed upon by which the South paid a three-fifth tax on the slaves provided they had a three-fifth representation in Congress. The compromise was not at all as even as it sounds, for neither the North nor the South meant that the negroes were to have the suffrage or were to represent themselves. The South gained a reduction of their taxes on slaves and the power to count them as electoral material. Thus a man with a thousand adult male slaves might consider his plantation six hundred votes for Congressmen. Of course the planters with a

thousand slaves were few. Even as late as 1850 there were only two whose slaves amounted to a thousand or more. The total number of slaves in the South at the time of the revolution was half a million. The North, in making the bargain, was not very much aroused over the existence of slaves-it was over the subject of the slave-trade that the tug came. Here, they thought, lay the cause of slavery, never having known one without the other.

It was over the third bargain then that the country was stirred. Besides philanthropic reasons, there were practical ones for its hostility to the slave-trade. The commercial interests of the east were very anxious to gain Navigation Acts and the privilege of enacting import duties. The steady increase in slaves might give the South, with its privilege of a three-fifth vote on its slave population, the preponderance of political power. The South, on the other hand, was bent upon denying to Congress any power to pass Navigation Acts except by a three-fifths vote, and refusing it the right to tax exports. It was finally agreed upon that the slave-trade should be prosecuted for another twenty years, and that Congress be empowered to pass Navigation Acts. Thus in the name of freedom to property and economic opportunity for all was the New Republic hastily put together and launched.

Yet the constitutional contradictions which bound the nation together were not of such an insurmountable nature after all. Lying inherent in this new land were factors which actually made possible the ideals of freedom and democracy despite the hesitation of the Congressmen who sat behind closed doors and made

their bargains in secret. As a guarantee of life and freedom to the New Nation the original thirteen colonies gave over to the Federal Government the keeping of the vast stretches of land to the West which had been theirs by the original charters. To this new Western world the people surged and built for themselves a free society. They had looked upon this land as theirs, even before the Revolution. One of the grievances against the king had been the attempt to hold a monopoly of these Western lands and to prevent emigration. But the valleys of the Mohawk and the Monongahela were being peopled by the mass of pioneers, and before a plan of government could be made for the nation at large, this West came demanding that some plan for its own organization be agreed upon. It had to live and grow and could not wait for bargains. The North-west Ordinance had to be passed quickly, and when, in the parlance of the American, it was " dedicated to freedom," the immigrant and the Continental soldier, and the already disappointed farmer from the rocky New England soil, could, by pushing along the borders of Lake Champlain and by going down the Mohawk and Genesee rivers come upon rich land open to all. Though the land speculator was there ahead he could not disinherit them to the same degree as could the large landlord with his slaves.

True, the older states, watchful of their privileges, took advantage of their constitutional rights. Quickly South Carolina and North Carolina ceded strips of land to Congress, so that a South-west territory that was slave-soil might be formed to preserve the southern equilibrium in the New Republic. But the westward