Sir, adjustments in the shape of compromise may be made without producing any such consequences as have been apprehended. There may be a mutual forbearance. You forbear on your side to insist upon the application of the restriction denominated the Wilmot proviso. Is there any violation of principle there? The most that can be said, even assuming the power to pass the Wilmot proviso, which is denied, is that there is a forbearance to exercise, not a violation of, the power to pass the proviso. So, upon the other hand, if there was a power in the Constitution of the United States authorizing the establishment of slavery in any of the Territories--a power, however, which is controverted by a large portion of this Senate--if there was a power under the Constitution to establish slavery, the forbearance to exercise that power is no violation of the Constitution, any more than the Constitution is violated by a forbearance to exercise numerous powers, that might be specified, that are granted in the Constitution, and that remain dormant until they come to be exercised by the proper legislative authorities. It is said that the bill presents the state of coercion--that members are coerced, in order to get what they want, to vote for that which they disapprove. Why, sir, what coercion is there? * * * Can it be said upon the part of our Northern friends, because they have not got the Wilmot proviso incorporated in the territorial part of the bill, that they are coerced--wanting California, as they do, so much--to vote for the bill, if they do vote for it? Sir, they might have imitated the noble example of my friend (Senator Cooper, of Pennsylvania), from that State upon whose devotion to this Union I place one of my greatest reliances for its preservation. What was the course of my friend upon this subject of the Wilmot proviso? He voted for it; and he could go back to his constituents and say, as all of you could go back and say to your constituents, if you chose to do so--"We wanted the Wilmot proviso in the bill; we tried to get it in; but the majority of the Senate was against it." The question then came up whether we should lose California, which has got an interdiction in her constitution, which, in point of value and duration, is worth a thousand Wilmot provisos; we were induced, as my honorable friend would say, to take the bill and the whole of it together, although we were disappointed in our votes with respect to the Wilmot proviso--to take it, whatever omissions may have been made, on account of the superior amount of good it contains. * * *