The next great battle was in 1844, when slavery grasped Texas, and plunged the country into a war to extend her territory. The end of that was a nominal defeat of liberty, but the real defeat of slavery. For the South has only gained thereby an additional slave population of 60,000 in Texas; a vast, region whose western border is already in the hands of free men; a fugitive slave law, whose imperfect enforcement has greatly served to alienate the Northern mind, and reduce the escape of slaves to a science; and a barren promise of several new States in Texas, New Mexico, and Utah, if she can get them. The North secured the State of California, which has shut off the Pacific from slavery, and planted a mighty free State like a circular battery, covering all the newly acquired Mexican Territory. The regions west of Texas will finally be peopled from free California. They are now sparsely populated, because unfit for settlement. But if gold or silver mines or profitable agricultural districts should be discovered in this vast wilderness, there would be a hegira that way which would “re-enact the will of God” beyond hope of repeal. Then came the battle of 1854, when the South abolished the Missouri Compromise, to steal Kansas, and lost this territory and wounded slavery to death in Missouri, thus planting two great States over against Western Texas and the Indian Possessions, which must be settled therefrom. Then, in desperation, the slave power sentenced all the territories of the United States to slavery; and the North has declared, unanimously, by a popular vote of 3,250,000 against 200,000, that she will not permit this subversion of the Constitution. Thus stand the forces on the field. Slavery has fifteen states; three of which are turning one ear to freedom. Freedom has eighteen states, with double their white population, and holds the two strategical points, California and Kansas, which cover every territory, and make it almost impossible that new slave states should be permanently sustained therein. And now the North has united to confine the peculiar institution within its present limits. _In the Union, the battle is fought and won._ Slavery, nominally the victor, has been really defeated in every contest since the Revolution. She has violated every compromise, and thus morally put it out of her power to demand concession from liberty. The slave power to-day stands beaten, surrounded, and dependent for its very existence on the will of the Free States.