Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/187

Rh struggle for more Slave States was to them a struggle for life. This was the true significance of the Missouri question.

The debate was the prototype of all the slavery debates which followed in the forty years to the breaking out of the civil war. One side offered the constitutional argument that any restriction as to slavery in the admission of a new state would nullify one of the most essential attributes of state sovereignty and break the “Federal compact;” the moral argument that negro slavery was the most beneficial condition for the colored race in this country, and for the white race too, so long as the two races must live together; and the economic argument that negro slavery was necessary to the material prosperity of the Southern States, as white men could not work in the cotton and rice fields. The other side offered the constitutional argument that slavery was not directly recognized by the Constitution itself; that the power of the general government to exclude slavery from the territories had always been recognized, and that, in admitting a new state, conditions of admission could be imposed upon it; the moral argument that slavery was a great wrong in itself, and that in its effects it demoralized the whites together with the blacks; and the economic argument that, wherever it went, it degraded labor, paralyzed enterprise and progress, and greatly injured the general interest.

No debate on slavery had ever so stirred the