It will be seen that this recommendation contained the same objectionable feature as did that of the committee of Thirteen of the House, that is, the proposition to rely upon the Missouri legislature to enter into an obligation to Congress, which should bind all future legislatures and also the constituent power of the Commonwealth. It was, therefore, attacked upon the same ground, but the supporters urged so strongly that Congress should put a reasonable faith in the honor of Missouri to keep the pledge made by her first legislature, that the resolution was finally adopted by the House, by a very small majority, on the same day that it was reported. It was immediately sent to the {103} Senate for concurrence, and, after a brief debate, was voted by that body on the 28th, by a large majority. The great struggle was at last over, and it was sincerely hoped that the "era of good feeling," so suddenly interrupted by it, had been restored. Apparently it was so, but while the decision finally reached saved the country from one great danger, it sowed the seeds of another. A brief review of the effects of that decision upon the constitutional law, political science, and social conditions of the Republic will make this apparent. [Sidenote: The general effects of the decisions reached in the Missouri question.] In the first place, the decision involved the constitutional and political principle that, in the federal system of government generally, and in the system of the United States in particular, the powers of government are, and must be, distributed by the sovereignty behind, and supreme over, both the general Government and the Commonwealths, and not by either of the two governments, unless expressly empowered to do so, in specific cases, by the sovereignty through the Constitution. This is undoubtedly a sound principle, both of political science and constitutional law, but it taught the Southerners that protection of their property in slaves would depend upon strict construction of the Constitution. It caused their leaders to desert the broad national ground in the interpretation of the Constitution which they had occupied since 1812, and to seek more and more to limit and restrict the powers of Congress, in which the majority of the members of one House, at least, must always come from the North, and in the other House of which no more than an exact balance could be maintained. It introduced, therefore, the principle which led necessarily to a division of the all-comprehending Republican party into two branches, the one branch holding {104} to the latitudinarian and national views of the party from 1812 to 1819, and the other to the earlier creed of 1798 to 1812. The former finally coalesced with the remnants of the Federal party and formed the National Republican or Whig party, while the latter called itself the Democratic party.