These moral and social ideas might have had greater scope to work out their natural results, had not the political connections between the North and the South implicated the two sections, alike, in the consequences of any error or folly on the part of either. Taxation and representation, and the surrender of fugitive slaves, all provided for in the Constitution, were the points in which the opposite polities came into contact in the ordinary workings of the Federal Government. Perpetual conflicts necessarily arose. But it was chiefly on the question of territorial extension, and in the formation of new States, that the most inveterate of all the contests were engendered. The constitutional provisions applicable to these questions are not without some obscurity, and this afforded a plausible opportunity for all the impracticable subtleties arising out of the doctrine of strict construction. From the time of the admission of Missouri, in 1820, down to the recent controversy about Kansas, the territorial question was unsettled, and never failed to be the cause of terrible agitation. But the march of events soon superseded the question; and even while the contest was fiercest and most bitter, the silent operation of general causes was sweeping away the whole ground of dispute. The growth of population in the Northern States was so unexampled, and so far exceeded that of the Southern States, that there could be no actual rivalry in the settlement of the territories. The latter already had more territory than they could possibly occupy and people. While the Northern population, swollen by European emigration, was taking possession of the new territories and filling them with industry and prosperity, slavery was repelling white emigration, and the South, from sheer want of men, was wholly unable to meet the competition. Yet, with most unreasonable clamors, intended only to arouse the passions of the ignorant, Southern statesmen insisted on establishing the law of slavery where they could not plant the institution itself. They finally demanded that slavery should be recognized everywhere within the national domain; and that the Federal power should be pledged for its protection, even against the votes of the majority of the people. This was nothing less than an attempt to check the growth of the country, by the exclusion of free States, when it was impossible to increase it by the addition of any others.