constitution that should vest in the national government an immediate power to prohibit the importation of slaves. He made, therefore, a real concession, when he consented to the prohibition at the end of twenty years, and he made it in order that the union of the thirteen States might be preserved under a Constitution adequate to its wants. For this, as well as for other services, he is entitled to a place of honor among the great men who framed the charter of our national liberties; and when we recollect that by his action he armed the national government with a power to free the American name from the disgrace of tolerating the slavetrade, before it was effectually put down by any other people in Christendom, we need not hesitate to rank him high among those who made great sacrifices for the general welfare of the country and the general good of mankind.1 1 In the first draft of the Constitution reported by the Committee of Detail, it was provided that the importation of such persons as the States might think proper to admit should not be prohibited. When the committee to arrange, if possible, certain compromises between the Northern and Southern States was raised, this provision, with other matters, was referred, and it was finally agreed that the importation should not be prohibited before the year 1808. After the adoption of the Constitution, Congress, by the acts of March 22d, 1794, and May 10, 1800, prohibited the citizens and residents of the United States from carrying slaves to any foreign territory for the purpose of traffic. By the act of March 2, 1807, the importation of slaves into the United States after January 1, 1808, was prohibited under severe penalties. In 1818 and 1819 these penalties were further increased, and in 1820, the offence was made piracy. Although the discussion of the subject commenced in England at about the same time (1788), it was nearly twenty years before a bill could be carried through Parliament for the abolition of the traffic. Through the whole of that period, and down to the very last, counsel were repeatedly heard at the bar, in behalf of interested parties, to oppose the reform. The trade was finally abolished by act of Parliament in March, 1807; it was made a felony in 1810, and declared to be piracy in 1824. While, therefore, the representatives of a few of the Southern States of this Union refused to consent to an immediate prohibition, they did consent to engraft upon the Constitution what was in effect a declaration that the trade should be prohibited at a fixed period of time; and the trade was thus abolished by the United States, under a government of limited powers, with respect to their own territories, as soon as it was abolished by the " omnipotent" Parliament of Great Britain. Moreover, by consenting to give to the Union the power to regulate commerce, the Southern States enabled Congress to abolish the slave-trade with foreign countries thirteen years before the same trade was made unlawful to British vessels. CHAPTER XIV. WILSON. JAMES WILSON, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the early Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, was one of the first jurists in America during the latter part of the last century. He was born in Scotland about the year 1742. After studying at Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Edinburgh, he emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1766. He became, soon after his arrival, a tutor in the Philadelphia College, in which place he acquired great distinction as a classical scholar. He subsequently studied the law, and was admitted to the bar; and, after practising at different places, took up his residence at Philadelphia, where he continued to reside during the rest of his life.1 For six years out of the twelve that elapsed from 1775 to the summoning of the Convention of 1787, he was a member of Congress. Concerned in all the great measures of independence, the establishment of the Confederation, the peace, and the reve 1 Encyclopædia Americana, Art. "Wilson, James." nue system of 1783, he had acquired a fund of political experience, which became of great value to the country and to himself. Although a foreigner by birth, he was thoroughly American in all his sentiments and feelings, and, at the time he entered the Convention, there were few public men in the country who perceived more clearly the causes of the inherent weakness of the existing government. During the war, he had always considered the States, with respect to that war, as forming one community;1 and he did not admit the idea, that, when the Colonies became independent of Great Britain, they became independent of each other. From the Declaration of Independence he deduced the doctrine that the States by which that measure was adopted were independent in their confederated character, and not as individual communities. This rather subtile distinction may seem now to have been of no great practical moment, since the Confederation had actually united the States as such, rather than the inhabitants of the States. But it was one of the positions assumed by those who desired to combat the idea that the States, when assembled in Convention, were restrained, by their position as equal and independent sovereignties, from adopting a plan of government founded on a representation of the people. To this objection Mr. Wilson repeatedly addressed himself, and his efforts had great influence in causing the adoption of the principle by which 1 Madison, Elliot, V. 78. 2 Ibid. 213. the people of the States became directly represented in the government in the ratio of their numbers. He showed that this principle had been improperly violated in the Confederation, in consequence of the urgent necessity of forming a union, and the impossibility at that time of forming any other than a union of the States. As a new partition of the States was now impracticable, it became necessary for them to surrender a portion of their sovereignties, and to permit their inhabitants to enter into direct relations with a new federal union. He pointed out the twofold relation in which the people must henceforth stand; - in the one, they would be citizens of the general government; in the other, they would be citizens of their particular State. As both governments were derived from the people, and both were designed for them, both ought to be regulated on the same principles. In no other way could the larger States consent to a new union; and if the smaller States could not admit the justice of a proportionate representation, it was in vain to expect to form a constitution that would embrace and satisfy the whole country. This great idea of a representative government was in fact the aim of all Mr. Wilson's exertions; and when the Constitution was formed, he enforced this idea in the Convention of Pennsylvania with singular power. His speech in that body is one of the most comprehensive and luminous commentaries on the Constitution that have come down to us from that period. It drew from Washington a high en |