This conflict for industrial domination developed logically in an industrial republic into one for political domination. It was unavoidable, under the circumstances, that the strife between our two opposing systems of labor should gather about the federal government and rage fiercest for its possession as a supreme coign of vantage. The power which was devoted to the protection of slavery and the power which was devoted to the protection of the new industrialism here locked horns in a succession of engagements for position and final mastery. It seems to have been early understood by a sort of national instinct, popular intuition, that as this issue between the contesting systems happened to be decided the Union would thereupon be put in the way of becoming eventually either wholly free or wholly slave, as the case might be. Wherefore the two sections massed in time their opposing forces for the long struggle at this quarter of the field of action. It has already been noted that certain advantages had accrued to the South from the original distribution of political power under the national Constitution, and from sundry cessions of territory to the general government after the adoption of that instrument. But while the South secured indeed the lion's share of those early advantages, the North got at least two of considerable moment, viz., the Constitutional provision for the abolition of the African slave trade, in 1808, which imposed, after that year and from that source, a check upon the numerical increase of slaves within the Union, and, secondly, the Ordinance of 1787, which excluded forever the peculiar labor of the South from spreading into or taking root in the Northwest territory, and, therefore, in that direction placed a limit to its territorial expansion. Together they proved eventually of immense utility to free industrialism in its strife with the slave industrial system, the first operating in its favor negatively, and the second positively in the five populous and prosperous commonwealths which were subsequently organized out of this domain, and in which free labor grew and multiplied apace.