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 1854-e] Results of the Act. 429 also by " a higher law than the Constitution " ; and had earnestly avowed the conviction that slavery even within the Slave States must eventually give way " to the salutary instructions of economy and to the ripening influences of humanity." " All measures which fortify slavery or extend it," he declared, " tend to the consummation of violence : all that check its extension or abate its strength, tend to its peaceful extirpation." This was a new voice and counsel in affairs ; but since 1850 four more aggressive men of the same way of thinking had come to recruit Seward and Chase in the Senate. Ohio had added Benjamin Wade; New York, Hamilton Fish; Massachusetts had sent Charles Sumner, and Vermont Solomon Foote; and Douglas had been obliged to take account of the rising influence of every one of these in debate and upon the opinion of the country. He ought to have been warned as much by the conservative temper as by the radical speech of such a man as Charles Sumner. Sumner spoke upon occasion words of passion, but never words of revolution. He knew the limits of the Con- stitution and did not wish to transcend them. He had no desire, he said, to touch the system of slavery where it was already established as part of the social order and upon foundations of valid law ; but he did mean to resist its extension to the utmost, and brought talents of no mean sort to the task. He believed it demonstrable that the Constitu- tion gave Congress complete power, over this as over every other matter, in the Territories. Nothing, however, shook the confidence or daunted the audacity of the Democratic leaders. Every compromise was abandoned, even the Compromise of 1820, which had stood and been reckoned on for a generation. The settlers upon new lands must be permitted to admit or exclude slaves as they chose. But when ? Now, while the districts they were setting up homes in were under federal law as Territories ; or after a while, when all the first processes of settlement were past and finished, and the time had come to frame a State constitution? The Kansas- Nebraska statute did not answer that question ; but no practical man, of the stuff* that settlers are made of, could hesitate long what answer must be given. It would be too late when the time for constitution-making came: by that time facts would have effectually answered it. Either the Territory would then be full of slave-holders with their slaves, or it would not be. Whoever should possess the land would make its laws. The federal authorities, it seemed, were to stand aside, neutral, uninterested: thus, then, it must be determined by the fact of pos- session, by whoever should have the power. Douglas and his followers must have been startled to observe how instantaneously the country saw and acted on these very obvious and practical considerations; and must have trembled when they saw a race for possession turn into civil war. There was no longer debate; that was ended, and argument gave