o the north of which
its slave rival was never to settle. Maine was also admitted to preserve
the _status quo_ and balance of political forces between the sections.
Alas! however, for the foresight of statesmen who build for the present
only, and are too much engrossed by the cares and fears of a day to see
far into national realities, or to follow beneath the surface of things
the action of moral and economic laws and to deduce therefrom the trend of
national life. The slave wall of 1820, confidently counted upon by its
famous builders to constitute thenceforth a permanent guarantee of peace
between the rivals, disappointed these calculations, for it developed
ultimately into a fresh source of discord and strife. And in view of the
unavoidable conflict of our counterexpanding systems of labor, their
constant tendency to encroach the one upon the other in the operation, and
the bitter and ever-enduring dread and increasing demands of the weaker,
it was impossible for the compromise of 1820 to prove otherwise.

The South, under the leadership of Calhoun, came presently to regard the
Missouri arrangement as a capital blunder on its part, and from the
standpoint of that section this conclusion seems strictly logical. For the
location of a slave line upon the Louisiana territory operated in fact as
a decided check to the expansion of slavery as a social rival and a
political power at one and the same time, while it added immensely to the
potential strength of the rapidly expanding forces of modern
industrialism in its contest for social and political supremacy in the
Union.

In the growing exigency of the slave industrial system, under these
circumstances, the reparation of this blunder was deemed urgent, and so,
in casting about to find some solution of its problem, the attempted
abrogation of the compromise law itself not being considered wise by
Calhoun, the slave power fell upon Texas, struggling for independence. An
agitation was consequently started to correct the error of the Missouri
compromise by the annexation of a region of country described in the
graphic language of Webster to be so vast that "a bird could not fly over
it in a week." What the South had lost by the blunder of the slave wall of
36 deg. 30' was then expected, barring accidents of course, to be restored to
it in the new slave States, and in the large augmentation of slave
representation in the general government, which would eventually ensue
from