In the main the delegates were young. More than a third of them were under forty, and more than two-thirds under fifty; none of them were enfeebled by age. But a single glance at them convinced any intelligent beholder that, taken as a whole, they were in capacity mediocre; and most of them by their occupations had not been fitted to grapple with questions that pertained to the fundamental law of the State. The people who chose them had evidently not kept clearly in view the delicate and difficult work that they would be called upon to perform. To a large extent passion and prejudice born of the hour had controlled the voters in their choice of delegates. In their anxiety to elect men who were uncompromisingly in favor of immediate emancipation, they had not been sufficiently careful in demanding that they should also be men qualified to do their part intelligently in reconstructing the organic law of the commonwealth. Moreover, the Convention did not fairly represent the whole body of loyal men in the State. Ruling out all downright rebels as justly debarred from voting, the conservative anti-slavery element secured at the best but a very small representation in this deliberative assembly. The stringent oath of allegiance, framed by the old Convention and rigidly required of every voter, kept many from making any attempt to deposit their ballots; not because they were not, even under such a severe test, legal voters, but because they shrank from the catechizing to which they would be subjected at the polls by men who looked with suspicion upon any one with conservative views. Now when the Convention made up mainly of men holding ultra notions came together and organized for work, choosing, at its second session, for president, Arnold Krekel of St. Charles, a native of Prussia, an able lawyer, but an extremist of the most pronounced type, all St. Louis was agog. This first important act of the Convention unmistakably revealed its radical drift, and showed how potent in it were the ultra political notions of our German fellow-citizens. It proceeded at once to the paramount business for which it had been created and called together, the emancipation of the slaves of Missouri. On the fifth day after its organization it passed, with only four votes in the negative, the following ordinance: “Be it ordained by the People of the State of Missouri, in Convention assembled: “That hereafter, in this State, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and all persons held to service or labor as slaves are hereby declared free.”