•8 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters. 
The admission of four new states to the Union will further tend to over¬ 
throw the old sectionalism. Dakota, with an area larger than any other 
political division except Texas, with a rapidly growing population, and 
with sufficient fertility to support three million people, has properly been 
divided into two states. Washington and Montana having passed the re¬ 
quirements respecting population, have come in as growing and influential 
states. 
The effect of these new additions to the Union, so far as the historic sec¬ 
tions are concerned, may be estimated as follows: In the electoral college— 
the southern system of states will have 156 votes; the northern system will 
have 270 votes. 
In the Senate sixteen southern states will be represented by thirty-two 
seats; twenty-six states of the northern system will have fifty-two seats. 
In the House of Representatives, the South will be entitled to some 120 
congressmen; the North will be entitled to over 220 congressmen. 
The most insurmountable political ascendancy is, of course, more prob¬ 
able in the United States Senate that elsewhere. Sectionalism throughout 
our entire political history has nowhere been better preserved. While the. 
country has been broken up irrespective of Mason and Dixon’s line in the 
House of Representatives, and while great states of the North have shifted 
their political allegiance with a reassuring spontaneity at Presidential elec¬ 
tions, the Senate has always continued in a large sense a mirror of deep 
rooted geographical differences. With a brief and uncertain interval of 
doubt it has now been uninterrupted possession of the preponderant party 
of one section for nearly thirty years, and unless new and unforeseen events 
or issues arise, it bids fair to continue that political ascendancy for many 
years longer. 
V. 
The growth of the West has established a counter-balance to southern 
sectionalism, and the overthrow of slavery has tended to remove the es¬ 
sential difference between northern and southern civilization. Though 
the bitterness of the struggle for equilibrium has survived the war, there 
has been a growing recognition of the transformed condition of the prob¬ 
lem. Bellicose politics have gone out, shirted in ridicule; ridicule which is 
the right medicine for all earnestness that outlives its purpose. And the 
imaginary danger from a solid South is apt to yield to some considerations: 
1. It is perceived that the south is solid to-day rather for domestic than 
for national reasons; it is not a sectional caucus solidified for the purpose 
of gaining some contention against the other sections as it figured in ante¬ 
bellum days. It is rather a domestic problem which makes the South solid. 
The white man has grappled with the black bear; and he has no choice 
about letting go. The South is solid to save herself and not to domineer- 
over the nation. 
