(3) "On and after the fourth day of July 18--, slavery or involuntary servitude, except for crime, shall cease within the limits of this State." On the twenty-seventh day of January, Mr. Battelle offered the following:[66] (1) "No slave shall be brought into the state for permanent residence after the adoption of this constitution. (2) "All children born of slave parents in this state on and after the fourth day of July 1865 shall be free; and the Legislature may provide by general law for the apprenticeship of such children during their minority and for their subsequent colonization." It is obvious that the first set of propositions provided for the total abolition of slavery, the date undetermined; whereas the second, while providing for the freedom of the children, born of slave parents on and after a specified date, condemned to perpetual slavery all other persons who prior to that date were slaves. In line with the proposals of Mr. Battelle was the pertinent and clear-sighted editorial of _The Wheeling Intelligencer_ under date of December ninth, 1861. It said: "We have endeavored to show how entirely adverse to the best interests of Western Virginia it would be for the present convention to adjourn without first engrafting a free State provision on our constitution in shape of a three, five or ten years emancipation clause. We should esteem it far better that the Convention had never assembled than that it should omit to take action of this character.... Congress would hesitate long before it will consent to the subdivision of a slave State simply that two slave States may be made out of it. The evil which has so nearly destroyed not only Western Virginia, but the whole country, will find that its tug-of-war is yet to come, when it has run the gauntlet of our Convention and our Legislature. We believe that when it reaches Congress, it will reach its hitherto and that it will never pass. It will avail very little for this convention to remain in debate on this subject for a month at a heavy expense and consummate a work which will only last end in a defeat and entail upon its framers the cold distrust of the only friends they have in the world. The loyal masses of the free States who are fighting the great battle of Constitutional freedom, who are endeavoring to stay the absorbing and consuming demands of slavery upon this continent, will never consent that in the very midst of them it shall burst out, in a new place, with the extraordinary demands that its present representation of a state in their Senate shall be doubled.... We say then to the members of our convention that before you waste your time and money on a constitution you look to its probable fate."[67]