slate on navigation as on
other subjects. The report coming into the convention, South Carolina
was still unsatisfied. "Eight more years for the African trade, until
1808," said Pinckney, and Gorham of Massachusetts supported him. Vainly
did Madison protest, and Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey
vote against the whole scheme. The alliance of New England commerce and
Carolina slavery triumphed, and the African slave trade was sanctioned
for twenty years.

For the compromise on representation it might be pleaded, that by it no
license was given to wrong; there was only a concession of
disproportionate power to one section, fairly outweighed in the scale of
the public good by the establishment of a great political order. But the
action on the slave trade was the deliberate sanction for twenty years
of man-stealing of the most flagitious sort. It was aimed at the
strengthening and perpetuation of an institution which even its
champions at that time only defended as a necessary evil. And this
action was taken, not after all other means to secure the Union had been
exhausted, but as the price which New England was willing to pay for an
advantage to her commercial interests.

At a later day, there were those who made it a reproach to the
convention, and a condemnation of their whole work, that they imposed no
prohibition on slavery as it existed in the States. But if such
prohibition was to be attempted, the convention might as well never have
met. The whole theory of the occasion was that the States, as individual
communities, were to be left substantially as they were; self-governing,
except as they intrusted certain definite functions to the general
government. When only a single State, and that almost without cost, had
abolished slavery within itself, it was out of the question that all of
the States should through their common agents decree an act of social
virtue wholly beyond what they had individually achieved. Any human
State exists only by tolerating in its individual citizens a wide
freedom of action, even in matters of ethical quality; and a federated
nation must allow its local communities largely to fix their own
standard of social conduct. At the point which the American people had
reached, the next imperative step of evolution was that they unite
themselves in a social organism, such as must allow free play to many
divergencies. For the convention to take direct action for the abolition
of slave