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EXAMPLES OF MAJOR UNIONS OF STATES 211
Union without interfering with the institution of slavery. We
failed, and the blow at slavery was struck.5
The survival of the Union, however, required the abolition of
slavery. One was incompatible with the other, supporting our
Pan-African stand that complete freedom is imperative for
African unity. W ithin the United States, the continuance of the
Union paved the way for America's vital industrial advance:

T h e rich section, w hich had been kept back in the general
developm ent by a single institution, and had been a clog on the
advance of the w hole, had been dragged up to the level of the
rest of the country. Free labour w as soon to show itself far
superior to slave labour in the South. . . . T h e pow er of the
nation, never before asserted openly, had m ade a place for itself;
and yet the continuing pow er of the states saved the national
pow er from a developm ent into centralized tyranny. A n d the
new pow er of the nation, b y guaranteeing the restriction of
governm ent to a single nation in central N orth Am erica, gave
security against any introduction o f international relations,
international w ars and continued w ar taxation into the territory
occupied b y the U nited States.1

Thus the American nation emerged stronger out of the civil
war to continue its road to its present eminence as the foremost
free enterprise state in the world.
In the Soviet Union, the story was different. There the right
of secession was the crucial testing point of the Treaty of Union.
Lenin made this clear in the assertion th a t:

Just as m ankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by
passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the
oppressed class, so m ankind can only achicve the inevitable
m erging of nations b y passing through the transition period of
com plete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e. their
freedom to secede.2
O n this, the third All-Russian Congress of Soviets amplified
Lenin5s standpoint in its declaration of 24 January 1918 that:
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947. Article on The History of the United
States of Ajnerica, Vol. 22, p. 810.
2 Lenin: Selected Works} Vol. V, pp. 270-1.
H*