to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” To Jefferson, aged and waiting, this Missouri controversy and its adjustment, was the alarum in which he heard the death-knell of the Union, and in a letter to John Holmes, dated Monticello, April 22, 1820, he so expresses himself: “I thank you, dear sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not far distant. But this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the death-knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not the final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practical way. The cession of that kind of property (for so it is misnamed) is a bagatelle, which would not cost me a second thought, if in that way a general emancipation and _expatriation_ could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one Free State to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence, too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men comprising a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them, and given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say that the non-freemen of Connecticut could be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate to another State?