Year by year the hatred of slavery had intensified at the North. February 1, 1847, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced in Congress his famous proviso, by which slavery was to be excluded from all territory thereafter acquired or annexed by the United States. And now, in 1849, the conflict on the slavery question was more virulent than ever. California, having framed a constitution prohibiting slavery, applied for admission to the Union. New Mexico asked for a territorial government and for the exclusion of slavery. The South claimed that the Missouri Compromise, extending to the Pacific coast, guaranteed the right to introduce slavery into California and New Mexico, and threatened secession from the Union. Again Henry Clay settled the matter,--for a time only, as it proved,--by his famous Compromise of 1850, by which California was admitted as a free State, the Territories taken from Mexico left to decide the slavery question as they chose, the slave-trade abolished in the District of Columbia, more effectual enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law demanded, with some other minor provisions. The Fugitive Slave Law, which provided for the return of the fugitives without trial by jury, and expected Christian people to aid the slave-dealers in capturing their slaves, was especially obnoxious to the North. Some of the States had passed "Personal Liberty Bills," punishing as kidnappers persons who sought to take away alleged slaves. Mr. Webster saw with dismay all this bitterness, and knew that the Union which he loved was in danger. He hoped to avert civil war, perhaps to still the tumult forever, and so gave his great heart and brain to the Clay compromise. On March 7, 1850, he delivered in Congress his famous speech on the Compromise bill. The Senate chamber was crowded with an intensely excited audience. Mr. Webster discussed the whole history of slavery, opposed the Wilmot Proviso, because he thought every part of the country settled as to slavery, either by law or nature,--he could not look into the future and see Kansas,--and then condemned the course of the North in its resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, which he held to be constitutional. The words in reference to restoring fugitive slaves created a storm of indignation at the North, which had looked upon Webster as a great anti-slavery leader, and who had said in the oration at Plymouth, "I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who, by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified, or let it be set aside from the Christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards, and let civilized man henceforth have no