the trading depots of Southern nabobs. The representation of slaves, the chief productive element of Southern wealth, was selected as the test question, and the powers of both parties were developed to the utter-most in debating it. In the end, the North gained the commercial privileges upon which it had insisted, the South three-fifths of the anomalous representation which they demanded, together with the exemption of exports from taxation. The overwhelming power and wealth which the North have since acquired, and which must certainly be in some measure attributed to this early policy, sufficiently proves that they made an excellent “bargain” as one of their members termed it; the _morality_ of the arrangement we do not propose to discuss, but certainly while that compromise, be it good or bad, remains in the Constitution, the interested work of both parties, it would require the nicest casuistry to determine which of them is entitled to indulge in any special self-glorification in the premises. The second question above stated, acquired great additional importance from the mode in which the first had been determined; though minor and more local interests prevailed to alter the arrangement of the contending forces. The whole of the middle and Eastern States were of course, both from principle and policy, opposed to the perpetuation of the slave trade. They had everything to lose and nothing to gain by it. If this population must needs be represented on the floor of Congress, certainly their next object was to reduce it to the smallest numbers possible. But in addition to these very obvious interests, Virginia and Maryland had other and private reasons for wishing to abolish a trade which, as their lands were already overloaded by this unhappy race, could be of no possible service to them, while to some extent it must deprive them of the ever-extending southern market, into which their surplus, “annually arising and renewing,” might be profitably disgorged. Virginia philanthropy was therefore earnest to put an end to so nefarious a traffic, and its ruinously debilitating and demoralizing effects were vividly depicted by her talented delegates. South Carolina and Georgia, whose original swamps were yet unredeemed from their primeval worthlessness and desolation, and all whose hopes of future greatness, both political and agricultural, depended on the increase of this very available population, were sadly dismayed at the dismal prospect thus suddenly and unfeelingly opened before them by the desertion of their late allies. In vain they sought to discover, and no wonder the problem puzzled them, why it should be a damning crime to buy prisoners of war on the banks of the Niger, but a very laudable and eminently patriotic course to buy black children and mulattoes bred for the purpose on the banks of the Potomac.