r industrial domination developed logically in an
industrial republic into one for political domination. It was unavoidable,
under the circumstances, that the strife between our two opposing systems
of labor should gather about the federal government and rage fiercest for
its possession as a supreme coign of vantage. The power which was devoted
to the protection of slavery and the power which was devoted to the
protection of the new industrialism here locked horns in a succession of
engagements for position and final mastery. It seems to have been early
understood by a sort of national instinct, popular intuition, that as this
issue between the contesting systems happened to be decided the Union
would thereupon be put in the way of becoming eventually either wholly
free or wholly slave, as the case might be. Wherefore the two sections
massed in time their opposing forces for the long struggle at this quarter
of the field of action.

It has already been noted that certain advantages had accrued to the South
from the original distribution of political power under the national
Constitution, and from sundry cessions of territory to the general
government after the adoption of that instrument. But while the South
secured indeed the lion's share of those early advantages, the North got
at least two of considerable moment, viz., the Constitutional provision
for the abolition of the African slave trade, in 1808, which imposed,
after that year and from that source, a check upon the numerical increase
of slaves within the Union, and, secondly, the Ordinance of 1787, which
excluded forever the peculiar labor of the South from spreading into or
taking root in the Northwest territory, and, therefore, in that direction
placed a limit to its territorial expansion. Together they proved
eventually of immense utility to free industrialism in its strife with the
slave industrial system, the first operating in its favor negatively, and
the second positively in the five populous and prosperous commonwealths
which were subsequently organized out of this domain, and in which free
labor grew and multiplied apace.

The struggle over the admission of Missouri into the Union terminated in a
drawn battle, in which both sides gained and lost. The slave system
obtained _in esse_ an additional slave State and two others _in posse_,
out of the Louisiana territory, while free industrialism secured the
erection of an imaginary fence through this land, t