were turning their faces toward the Promised Land.  The whole background of Latin culture was different from the Teutonic, and yet the people of Southern as well as of Northern Europe somehow became a part of the life of the United States.  In this life was it also possible for the children of Africa to have a permanent and an honorable place?  With their special tradition and gifts, with their shortcomings, above all with their distinctive color, could they, too, become genuine American citizens?  Some said No, but in taking this position they denied not only the ideals on which the country was founded but also the possibilities of human nature itself.  In any case the answer to the first question at once suggested another, What shall we do with the Negro?  About this there was very great difference of opinion, it not always being supposed that the Negro himself had anything whatever to say about the matter.  Some said send the Negro away, get rid of him by any means whatsoever; others said if he must stay, keep him in slavery; still others said not to keep him permanently in slavery, but emancipate him only gradually; and already there were beginning to be persons who felt that the Negro should be emancipated everywhere immediately, and that after this great event had taken place he and the nation together should work out his salvation on the broadest possible plane.

[Footnote 1:  IV, Section 3.]

Into the agitation was suddenly thrust the application of Missouri for entrance into the Union as a slave state.  The struggle that followed for two years was primarily a political one, but in the course of the discussion the evils of slavery were fully considered.  Meanwhile, in 1819, Alabama and Maine also applied for admission.  Alabama was allowed to enter without much discussion, as she made equal the number of slave and free states.  Maine, however, brought forth more talk.  The Southern congressmen would have been perfectly willing to admit this as a free state if Missouri had been admitted as a slave state; but the North felt that this would have been to concede altogether too much, as Missouri from the first gave promise of being unusually important.  At length, largely through the influence of Henry Clay, there was adopted a compromise whose main provisions were (1) that Maine was to be admitted as a free state; (2) that in Missouri there was to be no prohibition of slavery; but (3) that slavery was to be prohibited in any other states that might be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 deg. 30’.

By this agreement the strife was allayed for some years; but it is now evident that the Missouri Compromise was only a postponement of the ultimate contest and that the social questions involved were hardly touched.  Certainly the significance of the first clear drawing of the line between the sections was not lost upon thoughtful men.  Jefferson wrote from Monticello in 1820:  “This momentous question, like