nullification, as if it had accomplished its object.  But, in its real intent, it had failed wretchedly.  It had asserted State sovereignty through the State’s proper voice of a convention.  When the time fixed for the execution of the ordinance arrived, Jackson’s intention of taking the State’s sovereignty by the throat had become so evident that an unofficial meeting of nullifiers suspended the ordinance until the passage of the compromise tariff had made it unnecessary.  For the first time, the force of a State and the national force had approached threateningly near collision, and no State ever tried it again.  When the tariff of 1842 reintroduced the principle of protection, no one thought of taking the broken weapon of nullification from its resting-place; and secession was finally attempted only as a sectional movement, not as the expression of the will of a State, but as a concerted revolution by a number of States.  It seems certain that nationality had attained force enough, even in 1833, to have put State sovereignty forever under its feet; and that but for the cohesive sectional force of slavery and its interests, the development of nationality would have been undisputed for the future.

New conditions were increasing the growth of the North and West, and their separation from the South in national life, even when nullification was in its death struggle.  The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 had been followed in 1807 by Fulton’s invention of the steamboat, the most important factor in carrying immigration into the new territories and opening them up to settlement.  But the steamboat could not quite bridge over the gap between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi.  Internal improvements, canals, and improved roads were not quite the instrument that was needed.  It was found at last in the introduction of the railway into the United States in 1830-32.  This proved to be an agent which could solve every difficulty except its own.  It could bridge over every gap; it could make profit of its own, and make profitable that which had before been unprofitable.  It placed immigrants where the steamboat, canal, and road could at last be of the highest utility to them; it developed the great West with startling rapidity; it increased the sale of government lands so rapidly that in a few years the debt of the United States was paid off, and the surplus became, for the first time, a source of political embarrassment.  In a few years further, aided by revolutionary troubles in Europe, immigration became a great stream, which poured into and altered the conditions of every part of the North and West.  The stream was altogether nationalizing in its nature.  The immigrant came to the United States, not to a particular State.  To him, the country was greater than any State; even that of his adoption.  Labor conditions excluded the South from this element of progress also.  Not only were the railroads of the South hampered in every point by the old difficulty