The Convention adjourned about the middle of September, and the members betook themselves to their respective homes--most of them to defend in their State conventions the great work which they had completed. It would be a tedious, and is happily an unnecessary task, to trace the Constitution through the many ordeals it had to pass, ere a final ratification was obtained. The arguments used both by the friends and opponents of the compromises, were the same as those already sketched. Suffice it to say that while the toleration of the slave trade and the apportionment of representatives, met with serious opposition in all the Northern States; yet so far as there are any reports of the debates, there does not appear to have been a word said either for or against the clause relating to the restoration of fugitives, except in Virginia and the two Carolinas, where it was enumerated among the victories gained for the _South_, and spoken of in terms of high approval. Generally, however, it was passed over without the slightest comment. Such, then, were, upon this subject, the materials of controversy bequeathed to posterity by the framers of the Constitution--harmless enough, it would seem, and not easily tortured out of their quiescent state; but in the gradual change of times and parties, and magnified, too, by sectional interests and passions, found amply sufficient for the political wranglers of three generations, and gifted with a vitality and obstinacy that survive unchanged the conflicts of sixty years--neither broken by the blows nor mollified by the compromising caresses of whole hosts of eloquent statesmen.