_Fifth_: After the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slaves escaping from Arkansas and Missouri, for example to Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, could be reclaimed, but escaping to Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, they could not be. And the Congress of 1820 so understood it. The particular in which the Missouri proviso was altered in copying from the ordinance of 1787, is proof enough of this. But did the framers of the Government intend to distinguish in this manner between new and original slave States? Certainly not; and the reason is, they did not mean to have any new slave States. Otherwise they certainly did mean to make this distinction, for nothing can be clearer than that Louisiana and Missouri cannot go to Ohio to recover fugitive slaves within the meaning of this "compact of the fathers;" while Georgia can. Manifestly we have departed from the system devised by the fathers in allowing Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida to be admitted with slavery, which explains, and nothing else can, this anomalous condition of things. There can be no escape from these conclusions, but to deny that the ordinance has ever had any validity under the Constitution; which would be scarcely less than to deny that the Constitution itself had ever been a valid instrument. Having the like unequivocal sanction of national authority, and expressing alike in the words of Mr. Toombs, "the collective will of the whole," they must stand or fall together. Originally the territory was not divided by the line of 36 deg. 30', or by any other line giving part to freedom and part to slavery. It was all secured, and by consent of the South, to freedom. There is nothing, therefore, in the original compromise, to justify the remark of the Editor of the Boston _Courier_ in a recent number of that paper, that "below the line of 36 deg. 30', the South have the right of prescription." Freedom has an older prescriptive right to all the Territories. The line established by the compromise, between slavery permitted and slavery prohibited, was the boundary line between the then existing States and the Territory of the United States; or the line between exclusive national jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the States. It is an erroneous assumption, therefore, that the free States, by the introduction of slavery south of 36 deg. 30', as well as north of it, would receive more than a fair share or moiety of rights and privileges, as between States or parties entitled to equal privileges. The idea that the extension of slavery under the Federal Government can be claimed by anybody south or north as a right, is wholly inadmissible. The _Courier_ will hold the following declarations from Mr. WEBSTER to be good authority, if others do not: