which the South would gain, politically, that the admission of Missouri
was distasteful to the North.

It was not till after the Southern politicians had firmly established
their system of governing the country by an alliance with the
Democratic party of the Free States, on the basis of a division of
offices, that they dreamed of making their "institution" the chief
concern of the nation. As we follow Mr. Greeley's narrative, we see
them first pleading for the existence of slavery, then for its
equality, and at last claiming for it an absolute dominion. Such had
been the result of uniform concession on the part of the North for the
sake of Union, such the decline of public spirit, that within sixty
years of the time when slaveholders like George Mason of Virginia could
denounce slavery for its inconsistency with the principles on which our
Revolution had triumphed, the leaders of a party at the North claiming
a kind of patent in the rights of man as an expedient for catching
votes were decrying the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence as
visionary and impracticable. Was it the Slave or the Free States that
had just cause to be alarmed for their peculiar institutions? And,
meanwhile, it had been discovered that slavery was conservative! It
would protect a country in which almost every voter was a landholder
from any sudden frenzy of agrarianism! In the South it certainly
conserved a privileged class, and prevented a general debauch of
education; but in the North it preserved nothing but political
corruption, subserviency, cant, and all those baser qualities which
unenviably distinguish man from the brutes.

The nation had paid ten millions for Texas, an extension of the area of
freedom, as it was shamelessly called, which was to raise the value of
slaves in Virginia, according to Mr. Upshur, and did raise it, fifty
per cent. It was next proposed to purchase Cuba for one hundred
millions, or to take it by force if Spain refused to sell. And all this
for fear of abolition. This was paying rather dearly for our
conservative element, it should seem, especially when it stood in need
of such continual and costly conservation. But it continued to be plain
to a majority of voters that democratic institutions absolutely
demanded a safeguard against democracy, and that the only insurance was
something that must be itself constantly insured at more and more
ruinous rates. It continued to be plain also that slavery was pu