then read; and while they were reading the
journal, the clerk of the house carried the bill as passed by the house
to the Senate; so that, when Randolph, after the reading of the journal,
renewed his motion, it was too late, the papers being no longer in the
possession of the house. "And so it is," said Mr. Adams, "that a law
perpetuating slavery in Missouri, and perhaps in North America, has been
smuggled through both houses of Congress. I have been convinced, from
the first starting of this question, that it could not end otherwise.
The fault is in the constitution of the United States, which has
sanctioned a dishonorable compromise with slavery. There is henceforth
no remedy for it but a reoerganization of the Union, to effect which a
concert of all the white states is indispensable. Whether that can ever
be accomplished is doubtful. It is a contemplation not very creditable
to human nature that the cement of common interest, produced by slavery,
is stronger and more solid than that of unmingled freedom. In this
instance the slave states have clung together in one unbroken phalanx,
and have been victorious by the means of accomplices and deserters from
the ranks of freedom. Time only can show whether the contest may ever,
with equal advantage, be renewed; but, so polluted are all the streams
of legislation in regions of slavery, that this bill has been obtained
by two as unprincipled artifices as dishonesty ever devised. One, by
coupling it as an appendage to the bill for admitting Maine into the
Union; the other, by the perpetrating this outrage by the Speaker on the
rules of the house."

Mr. Calhoun, after a debate in the cabinet on the Missouri question,
said to Mr. Adams that the principles avowed by him were just and noble,
but in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were
always understood as applying to white men. Domestic labor was confined
to the blacks; and such was the prejudice that, if he were to keep a
white servant in his house, although he was the most popular man in his
district, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined.
Mr. Adams replied that this confounding the ideas of servitude and labor
was one of the bad effects of slavery. Mr. Calhoun thought it was
attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all sorts
of labor; not, for example, to farming. He, himself, had often held the
plough. So had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was