However the Committee was not unanimous. On the next day some conditional Union men on the Committee presented a minority report. Then numerous amendments were offered, and for eight days longer the debate went on, more earnest and vigorous than ever, but each day it was evident that the more positive secession sentiment was slowly vanishing, so that when on the sixteenth day of the Convention, the vote was taken on the resolution quoted above, while nine members of the Convention were absent, all present but one voted for it. George Y. Bast, a farmer from Rhineland, Montgomery County, has the unenviable distinction of being the minority of one that voted for the secession of Missouri. The other resolutions of the Committee, with varying majorities, were also adopted. On the 22d of March the Convention adjourned to meet on the third Monday in December following; but it also appointed a committee of seven, one from each congressional district, to whom the power was delegated to call the Convention together before the third Monday in December, if, in their judgment, the public exigencies demanded it. The reasons urged by the Convention against the secession of Missouri as we gather them from its reported proceedings, briefly stated, were these: First: the geographical position of Missouri. She was so far north that her climate was better adapted to the white man than to the black. Moreover, she was shut in on three sides by free States, into which, if she seceded from the Union, her slaves would flee and from which they could not be brought back. Second: she had other, and far greater interests than her slaves. They numbered only one hundred and twelve thousand, while she had within her borders more than one million, one hundred thousand white men. During the then preceding decade her slaves had increased twenty-five per cent; while her white population had increased one hundred per cent. The taxable value of her slaves was only forty-five million dollars, while that of her other property was three hundred and fifteen million dollars. Most of her slaves were engaged in raising tobacco and hemp, while her white population, which, through immigration, was rapidly increasing, was developing her mining, manufacturing, and commercial interests. The members of her sovereign Convention, from whose brains the cobwebs had at last been swept, and whose vision had become clear, saw that the immigration of free white men to Missouri would nearly, if not wholly, cease, if the State by secession should be placed under the political domination of the Confederacy, whose corner-stone had been declared by its brilliant Vice-President to be African slavery.