thus secured for that institution the whole of the south-western territory except California, was less careful about the more northern regions-Nebraska and Kanzas—where the physical features of the country and the climate rendered it impossible that slavery could thrive. Even there, however, it refused to allow any governmental organisation, except on condition that negro bondage should be permissive. This action was the simple abnegation by Congress-the Senate coercing the Lower House by refusing to do anything else of its duty to provide for the legal settlement of the growing troubles of a territory still held under military control of the President. By that neglect of duty Kanzas was made the arena of civil war. And when, at the end of that war, the free-State men stood victorious, and, in strict conformity with the contract with Congress, passed a Constitution excluding slavery, the Senate refused to admit them into the Union on an anti-slavery basis. They were only able to enter on the day that a large number of the Senators seceded from Congress, and went to their several States to assist in organising a rebellion against the National Union.

During the years covered by this history, the Senate contained the greatest statesmen and the best patriots in America. The most eloquent protests against the throwing of that body across the inevitable path of liberty were uttered there. But these voices, and the steadily rising tide of national feeling against slavery, as manifested in the popular branch of the Legislature, produced hardly any appreciable effect on the Senate, simply because its vote represented a perpetuation of the vice of the first Confederation. The free State, however populous and enlightened, had its vote balanced by the slave State, however thinly settled or ignorant. match of New York. Louisiana, and the annexation of Texas, the balance of power had been thrown on the side of the South, though that section had a free population less than one-fifth in proportion to that of the North.

Delaware was thus the

Nay, by the purchase of

The fact that along with this moral degradation of the country it had grown in commercial prosperity-a prosperity to which slave-labour had contributed enough to paralyse the consciences of large numbers of Northern people-had led the

politicians to continually assert that it was by a certain divine inspiration that the framers of the Constitution had hit upon that exact adjustment of checks and balances whereby freedom and bondage had been enabled so long and so successfully to dwell together in the same Government, and both to grow so rich. This had so long been said that a generation grew up which held to the divine perfections of the American Constitution as a creed. No accusation against a public man or a reformer was so fatal as that he was aiming or willing to touch the Constitution in order to secure his end.

I have already made the humiliating confession that the statesmen of America have not yet challenged the Senate or the Presidency as institutions, because they hope to fill those offices. But I am able to give a more creditable motive for silence concerning the Senate, at least, as having actuated some statesmen in the days when the Upper House was blocking the wheels of the nation. In those days I remember to have asked an eminent Representative in Washington, who bitterly complained that an antiquarian and non-representative body should be able to arrest the will of the

country, 'Why, then, do you not strike at the Senate itself, and aim to abolish it?' The Representative smiled at my absurdity, and said, 'It would be the simple ruin of our cause if we admitted that it could not be carried without

altering the Constitution. It is a heavy enough

burthen to bear that our cause is moral and humane; but to be suspected of placing humanity above the literally infallible Constitution of our Fathers would be death !'

The cause of which this Representative was a champion triumphed at last, only under that power in the Constitution which provides for its own suspension; and that triumph was only rendered secure by the addition of another line to the absolute perfection of that instrument.

There is a tradition that Jefferson coming home from France, called Washington to account at the breakfast-table for having agreed to a second, and, as Jefferson thought, unnecessary legislative Chamber. Why,' asked Washington, 'did you just now pour that coffee into your saucer, before drinking?' 'To cool it,' answered Jefferson, ‘my throat is not made of brass.' 'Even so,' rejoined Washington, 'we pour our legislation into the

senatorial saucer to cool it.' How well the Senate has served the purposes of a cooler may be gathered from the narrative just given of its services during the great emergency in which the energy of every good institution was required. For years it prevented the organisation of the vast territories of the West, because it could not appropriate them to the behests of slavery, by that prevention consigning them to incessant struggles between Indians and irresponsible white settlers, and finally plunging them into terrible civil wars. Kanzas was enabled to gain her place as a free State only by a path stained at every step with the blood of the bravest men, and illuminated by the lurid flames in which the churches, homes, and school-houses of the friends of freedom were consumed. Nay, it was plainly due to the prolonged refusal of the Senate to bend to the determination of two-thirds of the American people to arrest the further expansion of slavery, that the possibility of settling the issue between the North and South by any peaceful formulas was at last made apparent, and the fearful Civil War, in which slavery perished, became a dire necessity. So much for the Cooler!