and remember that God is just." But if he is judged not by his sentiments, or even by his efforts, but by what he accomplished, this rhetorical champion of freedom did accomplish one great act, the first link as it proved in the chain of events by which slavery was ultimately abolished. In 1784 the North-West Territory, as it was called, was ceded by Virginia to the old Congress of the days before the Union. Jefferson then endeavoured to pass an Ordinance by which slavery should be excluded from all territory that might ever belong to Congress. In this indeed he failed, for in part of the territory likely to be acquired slavery was already established, but the result was a famous Ordinance of 1787, by which slavery was for ever excluded from the soil of the North-West Territory itself, and thus, when they came into being, the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin found themselves congenitally incapable of becoming slave States.

The further achievements of that generation in this matter were considerable. It must of course be understood that the holding of slaves and the slave trade from Africa were regarded as two distinct questions. The new Congress abolished the slave trade on the first day on which the Constitution allowed it to do so, that is, on January 1, 1808. The mother country abolished it just about the same time. But already all but three of the States had for themselves abolished the slave trade in their own borders. As to slavery itself, seven of the original thirteen States and Vermont, the first of the added States, had abolished that before 1805. These indeed were Northern States, where slavery was not of importance, but in Virginia there was, or had been till lately, a growing opinion that slavery was not economical, and, with the ignorance common in one part of a country of the true conditions in another part, it was natural to look upon emancipation as a policy which would spread of itself. At any rate it is certain fact that the chief among the men who had made the Constitution. had at that time so regarded it, and continued to do so.

Under this belief and in the presence of many pressing subjects of interest the early movement for emancipation in America died down with its work half finished.

But before this happy belief expired an economic event had happened which riveted slavery upon the South. In 1793 Eli Whitney, a Yale student upon a holiday in the South, invented the first machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds. The export of cotton jumped from 192,000 lbs. in 1791 to 6,000,000 lbs. in 1795. Slave labour had been found, or was believed, to be especially economical in cotton growing. Slavery therefore rapidly became the mainstay of wealth and of the social system in South Carolina and throughout the far South; and in a little while the baser sort of planters in Virginia discovered that breeding slaves to sell down South was a very profitable form of stock-raising.

We may pass to the year 1820, when an enactment was passed by Congress which for thirty-four years thereafter might be regarded as hardly less fundamental than the Constitution itself. Up till then nine new States had been added to the original thirteen. It was repugnant to principles still strong in the North that these States should be admitted to the Union with State Constitutions which permitted slavery. On the other hand, it was for two reasons important to the chief slave States, that they should be. They would otherwise be closed to Southern planters who wished to migrate to unexhausted soil carrying with them the methods of industry and the ways of life which they understood. Furthermore, the North was bound to have before long a great preponderance of population, and if this were not neutralised by keeping the number of States on one side and the other equal there would be a future political danger to slavery. Up to a certain point the North could with good conscience yield to the South in this matter, for the soil of four of the new slave States had been ceded to the Union by old slave States and slave-holders had settled freely upon it; and in a fifth, Louisiana, slavery had been safeguarded by the express stipulations of the treaty with France,

which applied to that portion, though no other, of the territory then ceded. Naturally, then, it had happened, though without any definite agreement, that for years past slave States and free States had been admitted to the Union in pairs. Now arose the question of a further portion of the old French territory, the present State of Missouri. A few slave-holders with their slaves had in fact settled there, but no distinct claims on behalf of slavery could be alleged. The Northern Senators and members of Congress demanded therefore that the Constitution of Missouri should provide for the gradual extinction of slavery there. Naturally there arose a controversy which sounded to the aged Jefferson like " fire-bell in the night" and revealed for the first time to all America a deep rift in the Union. The Representatives of the South eventually carried their main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as the "Dough-faces," who all lost their seats at the next election. Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful north of latitude 36° 30', while by tacit agreement permitted south of it.

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This was the Missouri Compromise. The North regarded it at first as a humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for the Northern territories. The adoption of it marks a point from which it became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal American statesmen and the tacit object of every party manager to keep the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in politics. The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.

5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth.

Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several distinct movements in national life

began or culminated. They link themselves with several famous names.

The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great men of their time. Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man. He was always passed over for the Presidency. That was not so much because of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character, as because in days of artificial party issues, when vital questions are dealt with by mere compromise, high office seems to belong of right to men of less originality. If he was never quite so great as all America took him to be, it was not for want of brains or of honesty, but because his consuming passion for the Union at all costs led him into the path of least apparent risk to it. Twice as Secretary of State (that is, chiefly, Foreign Minister) he showed himself a statesman, but above all he was an orator and one of those rare orators who accomplish a definite task by their oratory. In his style he carried on the tradition of English Parliamentary speaking, and developed its vices yet further; but the massive force of argument behind gave him his real power. That power he devoted to the education of the people in a feeling for the nation and for its greatness. As an advocate he had appeared in great cases in the Supreme Court. John Marshall, the Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, brought a great legal mind of the higher type to the settlement of doubtful points in the Constitution, and his statesmanlike judgments did much both to strengthen the United States Government and to gain public confidence for it. It was a memorable work, for the power of the Union Government, under its new Constitution, lay in the grip of the Courts. The pleading of the young Webster contributed much to this. Later on Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take "our Elijah Pogram" to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which Englishmen only

suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good. His greatest speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an event. Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.

Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person. He was apparently the first American public man whom his countrymen styled "magnetic," but a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be set down as an "impossible" candidate for the Presi dency. As a dashing young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America. As an older man he was famed as an "architect of compromises," for though he strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed. of a great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect was typical of his generation. But about 1830 he was chiefly known as the apostle of what was called the "American policy." This was a policy which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the development of the boundless resources of the country. Its methods comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on great public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might chiefly operate to encourage promising but "infant" industries and to tax the luxuries of the rich. Whatever may have been the merits of this policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.

A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed beyond all his con