my judgment, as impracticable as it is unjustifiable. We shall have to enter upon a fresh career of annexation and conquest to carry it out, if it is to be carried out at all. When Texas shall have been exhausted by the admission of the two or three more slave States, which it has been so strongly contended that we have already stipulated to admit, you will have to go farther and farther South to find fresh material to manufacture slave States out of, for the sake of equilibrium.

Walter Scott, in one of his inimitable essays, under the sobriquet of Malachi Malagrowther, tells us of a castle of the olden time, the steward of which had such a passion for regularity, that when a poacher, or a rogue of any sort, was caught and put in the pillory on one side of the gate, he gave half a crown to an honest laborer to stand in the other pillory opposite to him! This, Sir, was all for uniformity's sake, and to preserve the equilibrium. And we shall have to adopt a similar course, if this idea of equilibrium is to be adopted; we shall be called on systematically to plant slavery upon free soil, if not to put manacles upon free men, for uniformity's sake.

Sir, you did not wait for a free State to come in hand-in-hand with Texas. You regarded no principles of equilibrium or uniformity on that occasion. You brought her in to disturb the equilibrium then existing, and to secure for the South a preponderance in at least one branch of the Government. And with this example in our immediate view, the North, the free States, cannot but feel aggrieved, if the admission of California is to be made in any degree dependent upon considerations of this sort. We do not say that she has an absolute right to be admitted to-day or to-morrow. But we do say, that a rejection or a postponement of her admission, on mere grounds of sectional equilibrium, would be an offence without either provocation or justification.

And now, Sir, entertaining such views, I need hardly add that, in my judgment, California ought to be admitted to the Union without more delay, as a separate, independent measure. I am opposed to any scheme for qualifying or coupling it with other arrangements. I am opposed to all omnibus bills, and all amalgamation projects. It is unjust to California to embarrass, and

perhaps peril, her admission, by mixing her up with matters of a controverted character. It is still more unjust to a large majority of this House, who desire to record their names distinctly for her admission as a State, to deny them the proper, legitimate, parliamentary mode of doing so, by annexing to the same bill provisions against which not a few of them are solemnly pledged. What would Southern gentlemen say, if we were wantonly to insist on inserting a Wilmot proviso in the California bill? Let them forbear to teach us bloody instructions, which may return to plague the inventor. The ingredients of the poisoned chalice may yet be commended to their own lips. Let them remember, that there may be a point of honor at the North as well as at the South. Let them remember, that the same voice of patriotism which cries to the North "give up," says to the South also "keep not back." Let them reflect, how far it is generous towards those Northern members who have consented thus far to waive any struggle for the proviso, to drive them to the odious alternative of rejecting what they desire to adopt, or of adopting what they may feel constrained to reject.

And now, Sir, turning from California, what remains? New Mexico and Utah. And what are we to do with them? Nothing, nothing, I reply, which shall endanger the harmony and domestic peace of these United States.

Undoubtedly, Mr. Chairman, my own honest impulse and earnest disposition would be to organize territorial governments over both of them, and to ingraft upon those governments the principles of the ordinance of 1787. If I were consulting only my own feelings, or what I believe to be the wishes and views of the people of New England, this would be my unhesitating course. Though believing, as I do, that the laws of Mexico, abolishing slavery, are still in force there, I would yet make assurance doubly sure, and take a bond of fate, against the introduction of slavery into any territory where it does not already exist.

But, Sir, I am not for overturning the government of my country, or for running any risk of so disastrous a result, in order to accomplish this object in the precise mode which would be most satisfactory to myself. No, Sir; nor would I press

such a course pertinaciously upon Congress, even although the consequences should be nothing more serious than to plant a sting in the bosoms of the people of the South, or to leave an impression in their minds that they had been wronged and humiliated by the government of their own country.

I hold to the entire equality of all the citizens of this Republic, and of all the States of this Union. And while I wholly deny that the course which I have suggested would in any degree infringe upon this equality, while I can by no means admit that a prohibition of slavery in the territories would encroach a hair's breadth upon the just rights of the Southern States or the Southern people, I would yet willingly and gladly forbear from any unnecessary act, which could even give color to such an idea. So far as my own sense of duty will allow me to go, or to forbear from going, it shall never be my fault, if any human being in this wide-spread Republic shall even imagine that he has been injured or assailed either in his person, his property, or his feelings.

What, then, am I ready to do? Sir, I have already expressed my intention to stand by the President's plan on this subject; and nothing has since occurred to change that intention. I have heard this plan stigmatized as a weak and contemptible plan; but I believe it to be a wise and patriotic plan, and one which, whether it succeeds or fails, will have entitled the President to the unmingled respect and gratitude of the American people.

My honorable friend from New York (Mr. Duer) has anticipated me in most of the views which I had intended to take of this plan, and I should only weaken their impression by presenting them over again. But I cannot forbear dwelling for a moment upon a single consideration connected with it.

The President, in his annual message, after stating his belief that "the people of New Mexico would, at no very distant day, present themselves for admission into the Union," says as follows:

By awaiting their action, all causes of uneasiness may be avoided, and confidence and kind feeling preserved. With a view of maintaining the harmony and tranquillity so dear to all, we should abstain from the introduction of those exciting topics of a

sectional character which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the public mind; and I repeat the solemn warning of the first and most illustrious of my predecessors against furnishing any ground for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations.'

Again, in his message of January 21, communicating his views in more detail upon the subject before us, he says:

"No material inconvenience will result from the want, for a short period, of a government established by Congress over that part of the territory which lies eastward of the new State of California; and the reasons for my opinion, that New Mexico will at no very distant period ask for admission into the Union, are founded on unofficial information, which I suppose is common to all who have cared to make inquiries on that subject.

"Seeing, then, that the question which now excites such painful sensations in the country, will in the end certainly be settled by the silent effect of causes independent of the action of Congress, I again submit to your wisdom the policy recommended in my annual message, of awaiting the salutary operation of those causes, believing that we shall thus avoid the creation of geographical parties, and secure the harmony of feeling so necessary to the beneficial action of our political system."

This, Sir, is the great beauty, the crowning grace of the President's proposition. His is, in my judgment, the only plan which gives a triumph to neither side of this controversy, and to neither section of the Union, and which, thus, leaves no just pretence for the formation of geographical parties.

The passage of what has been called the Wilmot proviso would, we all understand, under present circumstances, unite the South as one man, and if it did not actually rend the Union asunder, would create an alienation and aversion in that quarter of the country, which would render the Union hardly worth preserving.

On the other hand, Sir, I cannot suppress my apprehensions, that the organization of territorial governments by Congress without any anti-slavery clause, would only transfer the agitation and indignation to the other end of the Republic, and would tend freshly to inflame a spirit which we all desire, and which Southern men, especially, cannot fail to desire, to see forever extinguished.

Mr. Chairman, there must be something of reciprocity in any arrangement by which this question is to be settled. But I can see none, none whatever, in the plan of admitting California, organizing the two territories without condition, and settling the

boundaries of Texas, as proposed in the same bill. What concession does the South make in such an arrangement? The admission of California? I cannot admit that there is any concession in that. If there be any objections to the admission of California, they are national and not sectional in their character, arising out of irregularities in her preparatory proceedings, and not out of the substantial provisions of her Constitution. And yet, in consideration of this admission, the North is called on not merely to waive any anti-slavery action in regard to two territories, but to sanction, as I understand it, the positive introduction of slavery where the South itself has already prohibited it. By the resolutions of annexation, all of Texas above 36° 30' is to be free soil; but, by this plan, we are to purchase all this, and unite it to New Mexico, and then abrogate the prohibition!

Sir, the true ground for conciliation is the middle ground, on which both sides can meet without the abandonment of any principle, or the sacrifice of any point of honor. Such, in my judgment, is the ground upon which the President has planted himself; and I cannot hesitate to express my belief, that if party feelings had never entered into this question; if these pernicious and poisonous elements could have been eliminated from the controversy in which we are engaged, the great mass of the American people, from the South and from the North, from the West and from the East, would have been found rallying round the Executive upon this precise ground, and settling all their differences in harmony and concord.

Tell me not that New Mexico and Utah may be left a little while longer without a government by such a course. Better that they should go without a government forever, than that our own Government should be broken up! Better that they should be sundered from us eternally, than that they should be instrumental in sundering us from each other! But no such alternative is involved in this policy. The people who occupy those territories are capable of self-government, and no sooner shall we have finally announced to them this policy, than they will follow the example of California, and relieve us of all further responsibility.