to be put forward in 1852, but he had firmly declined. There was no longer any vulgar ambition disturbing him. The old man felt that his endeavors must find their reward in themselves. “I am here,” he said, “expecting soon to go hence, and owing no responsibility but to my own conscience and to God.” Neither had he approached the problem to be solved with his old dictatorial spirit. Time and again he had assured the Senate that he was not wedded to any plan of his own, and that he would be most grateful for the suggestion of measures more promising than those proposed by him as to the pacification of the country. He had sacrificed the Wilmot Proviso, the adoption of which would have accorded best with his natural impulses. He had made concession after concession to the defenders of slavery, much against his sympathies. And now, seeing his scheme of adjustment after all in great danger of defeat, he once more poured out all his patriotic fervor in a last appeal: —
“I believe from the bottom of my soul,” he said, “that this measure is the reunion of the Union. And now let us discard all resentments, all passions, all petty jealousies, all personal desires, all love of place, all hungering after the gilded crumbs which fall from the table of power. Let us forget popular fears, from whatever quarter they may spring. Let us go to the fountain of unadulterated patriotism, and, performing a solemn lustration, return divested of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our conscience, and our glorious Union.”
