It was agreed that in counting population, whether for direct taxation or for representation in the lower house of Congress, five slaves should be reckoned as three individuals. [Sidenote: In other words, it was the best solution attainable under the circumstances.] All this was thoroughly illogical, of course; it left the question whether slaves are population or chattels for theorizers to wrangle over, and for future events to decide. It was easy for James Wilson to show that there was neither rhyme nor reason in it: but he subscribed to it, nevertheless, just as the northern abolitionists, Rufus King and Gouverneur Morris, joined with Washington and Madison, and with the pro-slavery Pinckneys, in subscribing to it, because they all believed that without such a compromise the Constitution would not be adopted; and in this there can be little doubt that they were right. The evil consequences were unquestionably very serious indeed. Henceforth, so long as slavery lasted, the vote of a southerner counted for more than the vote of a northerner; and just where negroes were most numerous the power of their masters became greatest. In South Carolina there soon came to be more blacks than whites, and the application of the rule therefore went far toward doubling the vote of South Carolina in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college. Every five slaveholders down there were equal in political weight to not less than eight farmers or merchants in the north; and thus this troublesome state acquired a power of working mischief out of all proportion to her real size. At a later date the operation of the rule in Mississippi was similar; and in general it was just the most backward and barbarous parts of the Union that were thus favoured at the expense of the most civilized parts. Admitting all this, however, it remains undeniable that the Constitution saved us from anarchy; and there can be little doubt that slavery and every other remnant of barbarism in American society would have thriven far more lustily under a state of chronic anarchy than was possible under the Constitution. Four years of concentrated warfare, animated by an intense and lofty moral purpose, could not hurt the character or mar the fortunes of the people, like a century of aimless and miscellaneous squabbling over a host of petty local interests. The War of Secession was a terrible ordeal to pass through; but when one tries to picture what might have happened in this fair land without the work of the Federal Convention, the imagination stands aghast. [Sidenote: Compromise between New England and South Carolina as to the foreign slave-trade.]