All action taken thus far to ensure the perpetuity and safety of the Government against the strangers within its gates seemed to the Federalists incomplete while this seditious press remained unbridled. The crowning measure of the session of 1798, therefore, took the shape of an addition to the early act defining crimes against the United States. It provided fine and imprisonment for conspiring to oppose measures of the Government, for advising insurrection, and for libelling the Government, either House of Congress, or the President. The duration of the act was limited to the end of the present Administration. As originally introduced into the Senate, this "sedition act" declared that giving aid or comfort to a Frenchman or to France was treason to the United States, punishable by death. It was toned down in this and several other particulars by moderate spirits before being enacted into a law. The opposition in Congress, called "Republicans" by themselves and "Jacobins" by their enemies, had resisted these famous "alien and sedition laws" at every step. They pleaded that such police regulations had been left by the Constitution to the States; that national citizenship did not exist separate from State citizenship; that Congress could pass uniform laws of naturalisation, but could not control aliens resident in a State; that adequate punishment for sedition was already provided in the laws of the various States; that the crime of treason was taken care of by the Constitution and Federal laws; that existing treaties required notice to be given before foreigners could be sent away, and then only in case of war; and that a dangerous power was placed in the hands of the President. The constitutional amendments guaranteeing trial by jury and freedom of speech were also quoted in vain. When a member from New York declared that the people ought not to submit to such tyrannical legislation and would deserve the chains which these measures were forging for them if they did not resist, such language was declared treasonable by the other side and productive of the insurrectionary spirit they were trying to stamp out. An analysis of the distribution of the vote on the Alien bill shows that these presses, although located in the Northern and Central States, were supported by the Southern people. Perhaps the sectional tendency of the vote should be considered as indicative of the loss of the Southern States to the Administration and prophetic of the support which individualism was to receive from that section. Not a Senator north of the Mason and Dixon line opposed the measure, and only one from south of the line supported it. Of the Southern members in the House, nine voted for and thirty against sending away dangerous aliens. In the Northern section the vote stood thirty-seven to ten in favour of the punitive action.