two hundred acres of land upon a representative in the territorial
legislature and of fifty acres upon an elector for a representative.
Here was an illustration of that revertive tendency in the sections
which has maintained the national equilibrium. Accumulated wealth in
the North was beginning to overcome the levelling creed of the Puritan,
while the economic loss resulting from slave labour in the South was
reducing the colonial Cavalier class in the planter States. The
exceedingly profitable cotton culture had not yet developed in the
Gulf States to create the ante-bellum aristocracy of the lower South,
nor had the stream of European immigration set in to the Northern
States to restore the levelling tendency there.

The two ordinances were alike in precluding the separation of any part
of the territory from the United States, requiring the inhabitants to
pay a portion of the national debt, and forbidding new States, to
interfere with the sale of or to tax the national public lands within
their limits.

Two provisions in Jefferson's first draft of the Ordinance of 1784
were struck out by the Congress before adoption. One, which forbade
granting of titles of nobility, was eliminated because, as Jefferson
wrote to Madison, "it was thought an improper place to encounter them."
The contest against the introduction of aristocracy was unlikely to
be precipitated in the backwoods bordering the Ohio River. Yet the
provision would have been in keeping with the spirit of the times.
Congress had recently rejected a proposition made to Washington by the
Polish Order of Knights of Divine Providence that their order should
be officially extended to the United States. The other eliminated
provision, forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory
after the year 1800 except as a punishment for crime, is important not