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438 Growth of anti-slavery forces. [i858-9 And yet the President and his advisers were by no means daunted. It was after the elections that Buchanan sent his annual message to Congress ; and in it he insisted that the United States ought to secure possession of Cuba, assume a protectorate over several of the nearer States of the dissolving Mexican republic, and establish definite rights of control over the Isthmus. He was still, as the Republicans read his motives, bent upon the acquisition of slave territory. The entrance of the Republican party upon the stage of politics had singularly quickened the pace of affairs. Its clear-cut, aggressive purposes seemed to give defmiteness also to the Democratic programme. A sharp rigour per- vaded the air. It startled conservative men to feel the movement as of revolution in the stir of opinion. Such debates as now marked the whole course of politics, such contests uncompromisingly provoked and ordered, gave plain threat of what all men dreaded, of disunion, nothing less. The South explicitly threatened disunion, and yet dis- liked it as intensely and almost as unanimously as it resented the exclu- sion of slavery from the Territories. The North dreaded disunion infinitely ; and yet dreaded the unchecked and general ascendancy of the slave-interest even more. Both sides pushed forward ; but both with a great fear at their hearts. A sinister fate seemed riding at the front of affairs. The power which obviously grew was the power of the North ; the power which waned and was obviously threatened with extinction was that of the South. In May, 1858, the free State of Minnesota entered the Union, under an enabling Act passed by the last Congress of Presi- dent Piercers administration ; and in February, 1859, the free State of Oregon was admitted by the Congress which had refused to admit Kansas under a pro-slavery constitution. Until 1848, when the slavery question came finally to the top in politics, the sections had balanced one another in the Senate : there were as many slave-holding States as free, thirty senators from States which legalised, thirty from States which forbade, slavery. But now the balance was destroyed, as Calhoun had foreseen it would be : there were still not more than thirty senators from slave- holding States, while there were thirty-six from free States. In the House the numbers stood at ninety to one hundred and forty-seven. For in the House population was represented ; and the South, which had stood equal with the North in numbers at the making of the Constitution, had long since fallen far behind. Not only had the population of the North grown very much faster, but to the North had been added the great makeweight of the North-west, from the whole of which slavery was, in fact if not in law, excluded, and, if the Republicans triumphed, excluded for ever. The ways of compromise were abandoned, discredited : the one section or the other must now secure everything or lose everything. As if the crisis were not already sharp enough, conspiracy was added to the open battle of politics. On the night of Sunday, October 17,