ought to be secured as far as possible." The only "peculiar"
interest, however, belonging either to citizens or States, that was
imbedded in the Constitution, was slavery.

So Wilson of Pennsylvania asked: "Are they [the slaves] admitted as
citizens--then why are they not admitted on an equality with white
citizens? Are they admitted as property--then why is not other property
admitted into the computation?" He was willing, however, to concede that
it was a difficulty to be "overcome by the necessity of compromise."

Never, probably, in the history of legislation, was there a more serious
question debated. Compromise is ordinarily understood to mean an
adjustment by mutual concessions, where there are rights on both sides.
Here it meant whether the side which had no shadow of right whatever to
that which it demanded would consent to take a little less than the
whole. It was the kind of compromise made between the bandit and his
victim when the former decides that he will not put himself to the
trouble of shooting the other, and will even leave him his shirt. It was
not difficult to understand that horses and cattle could be justly
counted only where property was to be the basis of representation. Yet
the slaves, who were counted, were, in the eye of the law, either
personal property or real estate, and were no more represented as
citizens than if they also had gone upon all fours. Their enumeration,
nevertheless, was carried, and it so increased the representative power
of their masters that inequality of citizenship became the fundamental
principle of the government. This, of course, was to form an oligarchy,
not a democracy. Practically the government was put in the hands of a
class, and there it remained from the moment of the adoption of the
Constitution to the rebellion of 1860; while that class, including those
of so little consequence as to own only a slave or two, in its best
estate, probably never exceeded ten per centum of the whole people.

There was, if one may venture to say so, a singular confusion in the
minds of the venerable fathers of the republic on this subject. They
could not quite get rid of the notion that the slaves, being human,
ought to be included in the enumeration of population, notwithstanding
that their enumeration as citizens must necessarily disappear in their
representation as chattels. Slaves, as slaves, were the wealth of the
South, as ships, for example, were the wealth of the Nort