with good conscience yield to the South in this matter, for the soil of four of the new slave States had been ceded to the Union by old slave States and slave-holders had settled freely upon it; and in a fifth, Louisiana, slavery had been safeguarded by the express stipulations of the treaty with France, which applied to that portion, though no other, of the territory then ceded.  Naturally, then, it had happened, though without any definite agreement, that for years past slave States and free States had been admitted to the Union in pairs.  Now arose the question of a further portion of the old French territory, the present State of Missouri.  A few slave-holders with their slaves had in fact settled there, but no distinct claims on behalf of slavery could be alleged.  The Northern Senators and members of Congress demanded therefore that the Constitution of Missouri should provide for the gradual extinction of slavery there.  Naturally there arose a controversy which sounded to the aged Jefferson like “a fire-bell in the night” and revealed for the first time to all America a deep rift in the Union.  The Representatives of the South eventually carried their main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as the “Dough-faces,” who all lost their seats at the next election.  Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, while by tacit agreement permitted south of it.

This was the Missouri Compromise.  The North regarded it at first as a humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for the Northern territories.  The adoption of it marks a point from which it became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal American statesmen and the tacit object, of every party manager to keep the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in politics.  The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.

5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln’s Youth.

Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several distinct movements in national life began or culminated.  They link themselves with several famous names.

The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great men of their time.  Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man.  He was always passed over for the Presidency.  That was not so much because of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character, as because in days of artificial party issues, when vital questions are dealt with by mere compromise, high office seems to belong of