row,
that rich country now known as Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New
Mexico. This region, late gained by war from Mexico, soon to be
increased by purchase from Mexico on the South, was still of
indeterminate status, slavery not being prohibited but permitted,
by _federal_ action, although most of this territory had been free
soil under the old laws of Mexico. Moreover, as though
sardonically to complicate all these much-mingled matters, there
thrust up to the northward, out of the permitted slavery region of
the South, the state of Missouri, quite above the fateful line of
thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, where slavery was permitted
both by _federal_ and _state_ enactment.

Men spoke even then, openly or secretly, of disunion; but in full
truth, there had as yet been no actual union. In such confusion,
what man could call unwise a halting-time, a compromise? A country
of tenures so mixed, of theories so diverse, could scarcely have
been called a land of common government. It arrogated to itself,
over all its dominion, the title of a free republic, yet by its own
mutual covenant of national law, any owner of slaves in the
southern states might pursue what he called his property across the
dividing line, and invoke, in any northern state, the support of
the state or national officers to assist him in taking back his
slaves. As a republic we called ourselves even then old and
stable. Yet was ever any country riper for misrule than ours?
Forgetting now what is buried, the old arguments all forgot, that
most bloody and most lamentable war all forgot, could any mind, any
imagination, depict a situation more rife with tumult, more ripe
for war than this? And was it not perforce an issue, of compromise
or war; of compromise, or a union never to be consummated?

Yet into this heterogeneous region, from all Europe, itself
convulsed with revolution, Europe just beginning to awaken to the
doctrine of the rights of humanity, there pressed westward ever
increasing thousands of new inhabitants--in that current year over
a third of a million, the largest immigration thus far known. Most
of these immigrants settled in the free country of the North, and
as the railways were now so hurriedly crowding westward, it was to
be seen that the ancient strife between North and South must grow
and not lessen, for these new-comers were bitterly opposed to
slavery. Swiftly the idea national was growing. The idea
democratic, the idea o