bringing Missouri
into the Union by storm, and by bullying a majority of the House into a
minority. The only result was disorder and tumult.

"On the 23d of February, the Missouri question being still undecided, on
a motion of Mr. Clay, the House of Representatives chose by ballot a
committee of twenty-three members, who were joined by a committee of
seven from the Senate. Their object was a last attempt to devise a plan
for admitting Missouri into the Union. On the 26th, the committee
proposed a _conditional_ admission, upon terms more humiliating to
the people of Missouri than it would have been to require that they
should expunge the exceptionable article from their constitution; for
they declared it a fundamental condition of their admission that the
article should never be construed to authorize the passage of any law by
which any citizen of the states of this Union should be excluded from
his privileges under the constitution of the United States; and they
required that the Legislature of the state, by a solemn public act,
should declare the assent of the state to this condition, and transmit a
copy of the act, by the first Monday of November ensuing, to the
President of the United States. But, in substance, this condition bound
them to nothing. The resolution was, however, taken up this day in the
House of Representatives, read three times, and passed by a vote of
eighty-seven to eighty-one. On the 28th of February, the Senate, by a
vote of twenty-eight to fourteen, adopted the resolution.

"This second Missouri question was compromised like the first. The
majority against the unconditional admission into the Union was small,
but very decided. The problem for the slave representation to solve was
the precise extent of concession necessary for them to detach from the
opposite party a number of antiservile votes just sufficient to turn the
majority. Mr. Clay found, at last, this expedient, which the slave
voters would not have accepted from any one not of their own party, and
to which his greatest difficulty was to obtain the assent of his own
friends. The timid and the weak-minded dropped off, one by one, from the
free side of the question, until a majority was formed for the
compromise, of which the servile have the substance, and the liberals
the shadow.

"In the progress of this affair the distinctive character of the
inhabitants of the several great divisions of this Union has been shown
more in relief tha