The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years after the adoption of the constitution. This agitation was only against the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to Congress of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date the beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become respectable with the great mass of northern people until the application of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest eye, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which came out in 1852, stirred the north to its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,--all these had, with oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting, nurturing, and on into extending slavery over her territory. Thus when abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern States now living in content and comfort. I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all that slavery ran the career just described. But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?