I do not then hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this district, thereby attempting to fix a National degradation upon half of the states of this confederacy _I am for disunion_, and if my physical courage be equal to the maintenance of my convictions of duty, I will devote all I am, and all I have on earth to its consummation.[68] This speech was repeatedly interrupted by storms of applause. And Stephens, too, was greeted with loud acclamations when he announced his concurrence in every word of his colleague, and declared the Union dissolved from the moment an attack upon a section became an accomplished fact. Colcock of South Carolina then announced that he would bring in a formal motion for the dissolution of the Union, as soon as the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia should have been resolved upon, or the Wilmot Proviso passed.[69] The compromise agreement was effected by the fine patriotism, the sagacity, and the personal sacrifice of two great figures of that generation: Clay and Webster. In promoting this measure, they exhausted their political resources, and forfeited their political fortunes. Neither of them could have been reëlected to the senate. Nothing was settled by the compromise of 1850; both sides accepting it in a tentative way. "The present Crisis may pass," wrote Mr. Stephens in 1850,[70] "the present adjustment may be made, but the great question of permanence of slavery in the Southern states will be far from being settled thereby. And, in my opinion, the crisis of that question is not far ahead." This review, altogether too brief, is made herein to show the extreme tension of the sectional feeling which existed in the country on account of the extension of slavery; and the national significance of the struggle that was soon to develop over the question in Kansas. It also foreshadows the action the Southern States would surely take, if the Kansas decision declared against them. By the admission of California into the Union as a Free State, the South lost the "balance of power"; but the general situation at the time was far from being hopeless. Further territorial expansion was necessary--imperatively so--but the prospect was still full of promising possibilities. There was Cuba, that Buchanan had offered a hundred millions for in 1848; out of which two, or, if necessary, three States could be made. And, looming up in the more remote horizon, were Nicaragua and the remainder of Mexico. And, last but not least, "Squatter Sovereignty," or, in more modern parlance: "Let the People Rule."