s from the labor done on them or in their neighborhood,
except that it depends also upon the amount of labor which must
necessarily be expended in transportation.

It is the fashion to speak of the immense opportunity offered to any
race by a virgin continent. In one sense the opportunity is indeed
great; but in another sense it is not, for the chance of failure is very
great also. It is an opportunity of which advantage can be taken only at
the cost of much hardship and much grinding toil.

The Ordinance of 1787.

It remained for Congress to determine the conditions under which the
settlers could enter the new land, and under which new States should
spring up therein. These conditions were fixed by the famous Ordinance
of 1787; one of the two or three most important acts ever passed by an
American legislative body, for it determined that the new northwestern
States, the children, and the ultimate leaders, of the Union, should get
their growth as free commonwealths, untainted by the horrible curse of
negro slavery.

Several ordinances for the government of the Northwest were introduced
and carried through Congress in 1784-1786, but they were never put into
operation. In 1784 Jefferson put into his draft of the ordinance of that
year a clause prohibiting slavery in all the western territory, south as
well as north of the Ohio River, after the beginning of the year 1801.
This clause was struck out; and even if adopted it would probably have
amounted to nothing, for if slavery had been permitted to take firm root
it could hardly have been torn up. In 1785 Rufus King advanced a
proposition to prohibit all slavery in the Northwest immediately, but
Congress never acted on the proposal.

The next movement in the same direction was successful, because when it
was made it was pushed by a body of well-known men who were anxious to
buy the lands that Congress was anxious to sell, but who would not buy
them until they had some assurance that the governmental system under
which they were to live would meet their ideas. This body was composed
of New Englanders, mostly veterans of the Revolutionary War, and led by
officers who had stood well in the Continental army.

When, in the fall of 1783, the Continental army was disbanded, the
war-worn and victorious soldiers, who had at last wrung victory from the
reluctant years of defeat, found themselves fronting grim penury. Some
were worn with wounds and sickness; all were poor a