and peace around a
sinful world. The sun of knowledge and liberty is already high in the
heavens--it is peeping into every dark nook and corner of the earth--and
the African cannot be always excluded from its beams.

The advocates of slavery remind me of a comparison I once heard
differently applied: Even thus does a dog, unwilling to follow his
master's carriage, bite the wheels, in a vain effort to stop its
progress.

CHAPTER IV.

INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON THE POLITICS OF THE UNITED STATES.

_Casca._ I believe these are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.

_Cicero._ Indeed it is a strange disposed time:
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

JULIUS CAESAR.

When slave representation was admitted into the Constitution of the
United States, a wedge was introduced, which has ever since effectually
sundered the sympathies and interests of different portions of the
country. By this step, the slave States acquired an undue advantage,
which they have maintained with anxious jealousy, and in which the free
States have never perfectly acquiesced. The latter would probably never
have made the concession, so contrary to their principles, and the
express provisions of their State constitutions, if powerful motives had
not been offered by the South. These consisted, first, in taking upon
themselves a proportion of _direct taxes_, increased in the same ratio
as their representation was increased by the concession to their slaves.

Second.--In conceding to the small States an entire equality in the
Senate. This was not indeed proposed as an item of the adjustment,
but it operated as such; for the small States, with the exception of
Georgia, (which in fact expected to become one of the largest,) lay in
the North, and were either free, or likely soon to become so.

During most of the contest, Massachusetts, then one of the large States,
voted with Virginia and Pennsylvania for unequal representation in the
Senate; but on the final question she was divided, and gave no vote.
There was probably an increasing tendency to view this part of the
compromise, not merely as a concession of the large to the small
States, but also of the largely slaveholding, to the free, or slightly
slaveholding States. The two questions of slave representation with a
proportional increase of direct taxes, and of perfect equality in
the Senate, were a