wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal. Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of New York, succeeded him. Fillmore had an appearance of grave and benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple. The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was bought from the South by large concessions in other directions. This was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay. The chief concessions made to the South were two. In the first place Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery. This concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham, because the physical character of those regions made successful slave plantations impossible there. But it was, of course, a surrender of the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground. There had been reason for the territorial concessions to slavery in the past generation because it was established in the territories concerned; but there was no such reason now. The second concession was that of a new Federal law to ensure the return of fugitive slaves from the free States. The demand for this was partly factitious, for the States in the far South, which were not exposed to loss of slaves, were the most insistent on it, and it would appear that the Southern leaders felt it politic to force the acceptance of the measure in a form which would humiliate their opponents. There is no escape from the contention, which Lincoln especially admitted without reserve, that the enactment of an effective Act of this sort was, if demanded, due under the provisions of the Constitution; but the measure actually passed was manifestly defiant of all principles of justice. It was so framed as almost to destroy the chance which a lawfully free negro might have of proving his freedom, if arrested by the professional slave-hunters as a runaway. It was the sort of Act which a President should have vetoed as a fraud upon the Constitution. Thus over and above the objection, now plain, to any compromise, the actual compromise proposed was marked by flagrant wrong. But it was put through by the weight of Webster and Clay.