The repeal of the Missouri compromise did for the more or less fluid state of anti-slavery sentiment at the North what Goethe says a blow will do for a vessel of water on the verge of freezing--the water is thereby converted instantly into solid ice. So did the agitation produced by the abrogation of that act convert the gradually congealing sentiment of the free States on the subject of slavery into settled opposition to its farther extension to the national territories and into a fixed purpose to confine it within its then existing limits. But to put immovable bounds to the territorial expansion of the slave industrial system was virtually, under the circumstance, to provide for its decline and ultimate extinction, for the beginning of a period of actual and inhibited non-extension of slavery as a rival system of labor in the Union would mark the termination of its period of growth and the commencement of its industrial decay. The peril of the slave system was certainly extreme, and the dread of the slave power was not less so. The national situation was full of gloom and menace to the industrial rivals. For the passions of the slave power were taking on an ominously violent and reckless energy of expression, which, unless all signs fail, would take on presently a no less violent and reckless energy of action. The crisis was intensified, first, by the repeal on the part of certain free States of their slave-sojournment laws; second, by the extraordinary activity of the underground railroad; third, by increasing opposition in the North to the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, all of which, acting together, seriously impaired the value and security of slave property in the Union; fourth, by that fierce, obstinate, but futile, struggle of the South to obtain possession of Kansas, and the exposure thereby of its marked inferiority as a colonizer in competition with modern industrialism; fifth, by the growing influence of the abolition movement, and, sixth, by those nameless terrors of slave insurrections, which were evoked by the apparition of John Brown at Harper's Ferry. This acute situation was finally rendered intolerable to the slave power upon the election of Abraham Lincoln on a sectional platform, pledged to a policy of uncompromising resistance to the farther extension of slavery to the territories. Worsted within the Union, it was natural that the South should refuse to yield at this point of the conflict, and that it should make an attempt, as a dernier resort, to secede from it with its peculiar institution for the purpose of continuing the battle for its existence outside of a political system in which it had been overborne and hemmed in upon itself by modern industrialism and so doomed by that inexorable force to slow but absolutely certain extinction.