resentatives; in February a resolution embodying it was laid on the table by a majority still larger. The anti-slavery tide was manifestly receding, Webster's speech being, not the origin of the backward movement, but only a part of it — indeed a helping, but not a starting force. The disunion declamations of Southern men, too, gradually lost much of their fierceness, and the general temper of the public mind in both sections of the country grew steadily more favorable to a compromise. The anti-slavery men were as unable to prevent it as the hotspurs of the South. But what they could do was, to answer Calhoun's parting cry of despair with the proclamation that the future was surely theirs.
On March 11, Seward spoke. He insisted upon the prompt and unconditional admission of California, emphatically declaring that he would consent to no compromise upon a question of right. He would not hamper the statesmanship of the future by any compromise whatever. No political equilibrium between freedom and slavery, he maintained, was possible, because if apparently restored to-day it would be destroyed again to-morrow. The moral sense of the age, he boldly proclaimed, would never permit the enforcement of a law making it the duty of Northern freemen to catch the fugitive slaves of Southern slave-holders. He denied that the Constitution recognized property in man. The Constitution, he affirmed, devoted the public domain to union, justice, defense, welfare,
