power to prohibit citizens of the United States from supplying foreign countries with slaves, and to forbid foreigners fitting out slave ships in our ports; and finally that they would exercise all the authority they had to promote the views presented by the memorialists. Our limits will not permit us to give even an abstract of the arguments, thinly scattered through six days of congressional declamation, upon this memorable report. The speakers readily divided themselves into the three parties which have ever since been maintained, whenever a similar question has arisen in either house--the earnest and uncompromising opponents of slavery; its equally zealous defenders; and a third party, which from that day to this has uniformly stood between the two, with temporising, soothing, and compromising measures, promising peace, but sowing the seeds of future war, quieting the temper but not satisfying the understanding, sweet to the mouth but bitter to the belly. Jackson and Smith, after deprecating the question altogether as unconstitutional and uncalled for, finally took bolder ground than any they had yet assumed, insisting on the justice and necessity of their favorite institution; on the happy condition of the Southern slave, as compared with the laborers of Europe, and the lower classes of the North; that slavery, sanctioned by the example of every illustrious nation of ancient and modern times, looked for its original to the will of God himself; that this unnecessary measure bade fair to plunge the Union into confusion; that the South was prepared to defend, and would defend their property against every aggression; that if the compromises of the Constitution were not to be respected, the Union, which had been cemented by them must at once and forever be dissolved. The opposite side was supported mainly by Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania; but the only speech of interest on their side, was that of Scott, from the last named State, who labored, with no little ingenuity, to prove that Congress were in no wise bound to inactivity by the clause in question; that, as the arbiters of commerce, the framers of naturalization laws, and the punishers of piracy, they could in many ways not only control, but if they saw fit, at once abolish the traffic, in spite of this ambiguous and disgraceful restriction. There was not, and there could not be, anything original in the views of the third party, except perhaps that their most earnest advocate, Baldwin, came from Georgia.