anything whatever in the history of sectional feeling can be traced back from an effect to a cause which has produced it. But this was not the whole of the evil produced by the anti-slavery agitation. It prevented all consideration by the higher class of Northern statesmen of any method of action by which the people of the free States could aid their Southern brethren in removing slavery; and it presented to Northern politicians of the inferior order a local field for cultivating popularity, as the excitement went on increasing in violence and swept into its vortex the voters whose local support was found to be useful. That there was a line of action on which any Northern statesman could have entered, consistently with all the obligations flowing from the letter and the spirit of the Federal Constitution, is perfectly plain. While it was impracticable for the people of the North to act directly upon slavery in any State through the Federal Government, it was not impracticable for that Government to follow, with cautious steps, in auxiliary measures to aid what it could not initiate. There were States which were becoming ripe for changes in the condition of their colored population. Of course such changes could be proposed, considered and acted upon only in each of those States, as a measure that concerned its own domestic condition. But there were many ways in which the Federal Government, without transcending its constitutional powers, could incidentally assist any State in what the State had of itself determined to do. The line which separated what the Federal power could legitimately and properly do from what was prohibited to it by every political and moral consideration, was not difficult to be discovered. For example, if the State of Virginia had in 1832-33 adopted any system for colonizing her negroes, what was there to prevent the Federal Government from granting a portion of the public lands for such a purpose? If the subject of prospective emancipation had been approached in this manner, without the disturbance produced by the anti-slavery societies of the North, who can doubt that experiments of the utmost consequence could have been tried, and tried successfully, in a country possessing an almost boundless public domain? But the sudden irruption of those societies into the field, their disregard of all prudential and all constitutional restraints, their fierce denunciations of the slaveholder, their demand for instant and unqualified manumission, at once converted a question which should have remained a matter for joint and friendly coöperation of the two sections, into a struggle for political supremacy of one section over the other in the councils of the Federal Government. All measures and tendencies in the South, which might have opened the way for subsidiary aid on the part of the Federal power, were at once arrested; and it became a study with Southern statesmen how they were to raise new barriers for the