This result, so auspicious to the country, was unhappily followed by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and a consequent reopening of the agitation upon the subject of slavery, in a form and under influences more portentous of evil than any which had before attended it. I received information of that event whilst I was abroad, a sojourner in a country which was under the dominion of an absolute monarch,--circumstances which never fail to increase the attachment of a true-hearted American, however orthodox he may have been before in his devotion, to home and its inestimable institutions. Although forever withdrawn from public life, I could not be indifferent to a measure promising such startling consequences. Having had full opportunities to become acquainted with the evil which the infusion of slavery agitation into the partisan feelings of the country was capable of producing, I felt, in all their force, the dangers to which our political fabric would be exposed by that act, and mourned over its adoption. Whatever may be thought or said of it in other respects, in regard to its influence in exciting sectional animosities to a far more perilous height than they had ever reached before there is not now room for two opinions. Under the feelings of the moment, I naturally extended to the substitute Congress had provided, the odium which, in my view, belonged to the act of repeal, and could see no adequate relief save in a restoration of the Compromise. But as passion subsided I became convinced of the impracticability of that step, and turned my attention to a more careful consideration of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and I became satisfied that, if honestly executed, it was all that could, under existing circumstances, be done, or, perhaps, desired. Having been a second time invited by my old political friends of Tammany Hall, before the Presidential election of 1856, to submit my views upon the then state of the question, I gave them in a letter which presented the whole subject in a form and was written in a spirit which many thought well calculated to make favorable impressions on well-intentioned and sober-minded men. It contained a simple and truthful description of the position I had before occupied upon the slavery subject, an exposition of the reasons by which I was yet satisfied that it had been well taken, and of the ground of my expectation that Mr. Buchanan would do all in his power to cause the Kansas-Nebraska Act to be carried into full and fair effect.