titution.
The attack on the time-honoured Missouri Compromise rallied such men to
the opposition, for it appeared to them clearly that theirs was now the
legal, constitutional, and even conservative side, and that the Slave
Power was now making itself responsible for a revolutionary change to
its own advantage.

Nor was the change on the whole unjust. The programme to which the South
committed itself after the direction of its policy fell from the hands
of Calhoun was one which the North could not fail to resent. It involved
the tearing up of all the compromises so elaborately devised and so
nicely balanced, and it aimed at making Slavery legal certainly in all
the new territories and possibly even in the Free States. It was,
indeed, argued that this did not involve any aggravating of the evil of
Slavery, if it were an evil. The argument will be found very ingeniously
stated in the book which Jefferson Davis subsequently wrote--professedly
a history of the Southern Confederacy, really rather an _Apologia pro
Vita Sua_. Davis argues that since the African Slave Trade was
prohibited, there could be no increase in the number of slaves save by
the ordinary process of propagation. The opening of Kansas to Slavery
would not therefore mean that there would be more slaves. It would
merely mean that men already and in any case slaves would be living in
Kansas instead of in Tennessee; and, it is further suggested, that the
taking of a Negro slave from Tennessee, where Slavery was rooted and
normal, to Kansas, where it was new and exceptional, would be a positive
advantage to him as giving him a much better chance of emancipation. The
argument reads plausibly enough, but it is, like so much of Davis's
book, out of touch with realities. Plainly it would make all the
difference in the world whether the practice of, say, the Catholic
religion were permitted only in Lancashire or were lawful throughout
England, and that even though there were no conversions, and the same
Catholics who had previously lived in Lancashire lived wherever they
chose. The former provision would imply that the British Government
disapproved of the Catholic religion, and would tolerate it only where
it was obliged to do so. The latter would indicate an attitude of
indifference towards it. Those who disapproved of Slavery naturally
wished it to remain a sectional thing and objected to its being made
national. But the primary feeling was that it was the South t