This contest, indeed, so long waged, was, many years since, decided overwhelmingly against the South. In 1850, the Northern majority in the House of Representatives, the popular branch of the government, had increased from a majority, in 1790, of five votes, to fifty-four. Years before, the legislation of Congress assumed that sectional bias, which was undeviatingly adhered to for the purpose, and with ample success, of the material depression of the South. Under the baleful influences of hostile legislation, of tariffs aimed directly at her commercial prosperity, of bounties for fostering multifarious Northern interests, her position in the Union was helpless and deplorable in the extreme. Yet, like a rock-bound Prometheus, with the insidious elements of destruction gnawing at her vitals, the South suffered herself to be chained by an influence of sentiment, of association, and reminiscence to the Union, fully conscious of the growing rapacity of her despoiler and of her own hopeless decline. Her infatuation was indeed marvelous, in trusting to the dawning of justice and generosity in a fierce, vindictive, and remorseless sectional majority. The alarming portents of ultimately complete material prostration, to be consummated by these perversions of the purposes of the Union, were terribly significant, in view of the venom which actuated the enemies of the South. The sectional balance was hopelessly gone; Southern material prosperity destroyed by sectional legislation; not a check, originally provided by the Constitution for the protection of the weaker section, but had been virtually obliterated; Northern perfidy illustrated in the violation of every compact which, in operation, proved favorable to the South, while the latter was held to a rigid fidelity in all agreements favorable to her enemies; the nullification, by the legislatures of half the Northern States, of Federal laws for the protection of Southern property, are a few of those grievances which presented to the South the hard and inexorable alternative of resistance, or abject submission to endless insult and outrage. A Southern Senator,[15] announcing the secession of his State, and his own consequent withdrawal from the Senate, stated the question in a form, which even then had the authority of history.