he migration or importation of such persons as any
of the States now existing, shall think proper to admit, shall not be
prohibited by the Congress, prior to the year one thousand eight
hundred and eight: but a tax or duty may be imposed on such
importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.

Art. 4. Sec. 2. No person, held to service or labor in one State,
under the laws thereof, escaping, into another, shall, in consequence
of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or
labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due.

Art. 4, Sect. 4. The United States shall guarantee to every State in
this Union a republican form of government; and shall protect each of
them against invasion; and, on application of the legislature, or of
the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened) _against
domestic violence_.

The first of these clauses, relating to representation, confers on a
slaveholding community additional political power for every slave held
among them, and thus tempts them to continue to uphold the system: the
second and the last, relating to insurrection and domestic violence,
perfectly innocent in themselves--yet being made with the fact
directly in view that slavery exists among us, do deliberately pledge
the whole national force against the unhappy slave if he imitate our
fathers and resist oppression--thus making us partners in the guilt of
sustaining slavery: the third, relating to the slave trade, disgraces
the nation by a pledge not to abolish that traffic till after twenty
years, _without obliging Congress to do so even then_, and thus the
slave trade may be legalized to-morrow if Congress choose: the fourth
is a promise on the part of the whole Nation to return fugitive slaves
to their masters, a deed which God's law expressly condemns and which
every noble feeling of our nature repudiates with loathing and
contempt.

These are the articles of the "Compromise," so much talked of, between
the North and South.

We do not produce the extracts which make up these pages to show what
is the meaning of the clauses above cited. For no man or party, of any
authority in such matters, has ever pretended to doubt to what subject
they all relate. If indeed they were ambiguous in their terms, a
resort to the history of those times would set the matter at rest for
ever. A few persons, to be sure, of late years, to serve the purposes