age-old method of compromise as the safety valve of the nation.

He had not read history in vain. He knew that all statesmanship is the
record of compromise--that compromise is another name for reason. The
Declaration of Independence was a compromise between the radicalism of
Thomas Jefferson and the conservatism of the colonies. In the original
draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had written a paragraph arraigning
slavery which had been omitted:

"He (the King of Great Britain) has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him; capturing and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ King
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should
be bought and sold, he prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye,
he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the
people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes
committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges
them to commit against the lives of another."

This indictment of Slavery and the Slave trade was stricken from the
Declaration of Independence in deference to the opposition of both
Northern and Southern slave owners who held that the struggling young
colonies must have labor at all hazards.