It is probable, however, that the majority of the people in the state believed that enough had been done, and desired to see the little remaining slavery quietly extinguished by the operation of such laws as were effecting the extinction. Be this as it may, it is certain that although many bills were proposed to effect total and immediate abolition, some of which had good prospects of success, yet each one was gradually pared of its most radical provisions, and in the end was always found to lack the support requisite to make it a law. In 1797 the House had a resolution offered and a bill prepared for abolition. This measure dragged along through the next two sessions, but in 1800 so much encouragement came from the city and counties that the work was carried on in earnest. The course of this bill illustrates the progress of others. At first the proposed enfranchisement was to be immediate and for all; then it was modified to affect only negroes over twenty-eight. In this form it passed the House by a handsome majority, but in the Senate it was postponed to the next session. When finally its time came the committee having it in charge reported that as slavery was not in accordance with the constitution of 1790, a law to do away with slavery was not needed. The measure was still mentioned as unfinished business about the time that the High Court decided that slavery was in accordance with the constitution after all.[259] The abolitionists did not lose heart. They tried again in 1803, and again the following year. In 1811 a little was done in the House, and in 1821 the matter was discussed in the Senate. In this latter year a bill was prepared and debated, but nothing passed except the motion to postpone indefinitely. Indeed the movement had now spent its force, and was thereafter confined to futile petitions that showed more earnestness of purpose than expectation of success.[260] This is easily explicable when it is understood how rapidly slavery had declined. The number of slaves in Pennsylvania had never been large. By the first Federal census they were put at less than four thousand; but within a decade they had diminished by more than half, and ten years later there were only a few hundred scattered throughout the state.[261] The majority of these slaves during the later years were living in the western counties that bordered on Maryland and Virginia, where slavery had begun latest and lingered longest.[262] In Philadelphia and the older counties it had almost entirely disappeared. So rapid was the decline that as early as 1805 the Pennsylvania Abolition Society reported that in the future it would devote itself less to seeking the liberation of negroes than to striving to improve those already free. This could only mean that they were finding very few to liberate.[263]