interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by Congress, nor with their regulations for securing the title to purchasers; that no tax should be imposed on lands, the property of the United States; that non-resident proprietors should not be taxed more than residents; and that the navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, and the carrying-places between them, should be common highways and for ever free. The fifth provided, that there should be formed in the territory not less than three, nor more than five States, with certain boundaries; and that whenever any of the States should contain sixty thousand free inhabitants, such State should be (and might be before) admitted by its delegates into Congress, on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever, and should be at liberty to form a permanent constitution and State government, provided it should be republican, and in conformity with these articles of compact. The sixth provided, that there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes; but that fugitives owing service in other States might be reclaimed. American legislation has never achieved any thing more admirable, as an internal government, than this comprehensive scheme. Its provisions concerning the distribution of property, the principles of civil and religious liberty which it laid at the foundation of the communities since established under its sway, and the efficient and simple organization by which it created the first machinery of civil society, are worthy of all the praise that has ever attended it. It was not a plan devised in the closet, upon theoretical principles of abstract fitness. It was a constitution of government drawn by men who understood, from experience, the practical working of the principles which they undertook to embody. Those principles were, it is true, to be applied to a state of society not then formed; but they were taken from states of society in which they had been tried with success. The equal division of property; general, not universal suffrage, but a suffrage guarded by some degree of interest in society; representative government; the division of the three grand departments of political power; freedom of religious opinion and worship; the _habeas corpus_, trial by jury, and the course of the common law; the right to be bailed for offences not capital, and the prohibition of immoderate fines and cruel or unusual punishments; the great principle of compensation for property or service demanded by the public, and the legislative inviolability of contracts; the encouragement of schools and the means of education,--were all taken from the ancient or recent constitutions of States, from which the greater part of the inhabitants of the new territory would necessarily come. A community founded on these principles was predestined to prosperity and happiness.