march of men kept increasing year by year, and the great converging highways led always to the North, from Kentucky, from Tennessee, along the Cumberland and the Ohio. Very early the population of the free North outnumbered the slave South. To maintain its power the South needed only land, not men. Tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, these made new lands continually profitable. Besides a need for territorial expansion for its economic growth, it needed land for its political growth. Here came in for the South the value of the work which the framers of the Constitution had accomplished. The slave South kept creating as many states as the free North, so that despite the disparity in population a political equality could be maintained. So earnest was the South in its desire to enlarge itself that the slave-states were almost invariably brought up for admission before the free, the latter generally following a year later. Before the year 1808 came, when the slave-trade was actually abolished by law, Louisiana had been bought, the cotton gin had been invented, and the slave-holding emigrant of the southwest found land and opportunity for his institution. By 1820 he had pushed himself towards the Gulf, had so intrigued and fought in Florida, that it was sold to him for a song by Spain, and was about to cross over the Mississippi and establish himself there. But there the dangerous rivalry began to be felt, and when Missouri was ready for admission into the Union a two-years' struggle ensued in which were heard the threats of secession and the arguments for strict limitations of Congress which were to be the motifs of the great drama of 1860.

Though the North-west and the South-west were friends, the products of one going to the markets of the other down the great artery of the Mississippi, and though both were alike in a spirit of aggressive democracy, in a suspicion of central power and of class rule, their friendship could only last as long as there was no encroachment of the one upon the territories of the other. Already the plantation system in the South had extended from the tide-water to the uplands. The non slave-holding white was pushed into the barren sand-hills and pine regions of the South, or, to extricate himself, was forced to migrate into the free lands of Indiana and Illinois. To permit slavery to cross the Mississippi was to permit it to exclude him from his right to the land for which he had defied the regulations of the central government and all the titles of the Indians. But with the characteristic constitutional mind of the American he made a bargain which, as bargains go, and with the future still undisclosed to him, must have seemed pretty well done after all. "There," he said to the slave-holder, we will put a line (very far down, if you please) below which shall be slave-land, and above which shall be free." The line was 36°30', which would have been the southern boundary of Missouri, and would have left very little which was not already slave territory to be considered as such. The Northerner lost somewhat in the bargain by permitting Missouri, which had the institution already well established within it, to be admitted as a slave state. To preclude an overbalance in the nation, Massachusetts ceded her western lands, and Maine was created, free of course. Thus in the Union, in 1820, there were eleven free states, and eleven slave

states, and, west of these, what is known as the Missouri Compromise Line, which seemingly left very little more to slavery towards the south and gave a vast tract of land leading up to the Canadian border to freedom.

This would not have been so bad a bargain between brothers who understood one another and were really friends at bottom, had not the miracles of the future come in such numbers and in such quick succession. The Compromise of 1820 came when the transition era was hardly a decade old and its import was not yet felt. Steam appeared upon the Northern waters in 1811 and by 1820 there were already two and a half million souls in the trans-Alleghany States, while the older sections remained almost stationary. The rush westward kept increasing. In 1820 land could be bought in lots of eighty acres at $1.25 an acre instead of as heretofore, in one hundred and sixty acre lots at $2.00 an acre.

The constantly-improving transportation not only sent the emigrant westward in increasing numbers, but created an internal commerce of a wide radius. The surplus production was sent down the Mississippi and along the roads of the East. Pork, flour, tobacco, whisky, the raw materials of primitive agriculture, but to the value of many millions, were the products of this vast colonial society. It needed money and it took to itself the right of banking, destroying the National Bank through its first emissary into the National Government, President Jackson; it needed internal improvements and it took the revenues of the Government, supplemented them with the paper currency and promissory notes of its own states, and went into the business of better transportation; it

needed home markets and it created for itself the

American system" of tariff protection, under which the young industries of the East joined with the infant cities of the West.

Had there been no possibility of land expansion in the very noonday of their power, the democracy of the North-west and the democracy of the South-west could have travelled along side by side, growing towards an adjustment to each other without much regard to the problem of negro slavery. But the very factors which drew the North-west and South-west together for a score of years separated them in the succeeding score. By 1840 a new South and a new North were in existence. The marvellous inventions in cotton machinery and the improved transportation had turned the South into a homogeneous whole. Though the plantations shifted towards the Gulf states, the tidewater states became the slave-breeders for them, and a strong feeling of solidarity resting on a mutual interest existed in this section.

What is known as the Cotton Kingdom arose, which, alert and self-conscious, no longer apologized for its peculiar institution," but justified it economically, politically and morally. Its whole social order was arranged and specialized to feed its one great industrycotton. The slave-holders did not compose more than one-sixth of the population of the South, but they knew the art of class-rule and successfully dominated their section. While the society of the North was coming more and more to rest on manhood suffrage and the free homestead, suffrage in the South was extended only with the extension of the slave-holders, and power in the legis