much as, if not more than, it secured to the South. Regarded in the light of a settlement of a dangerous and exciting controversy, on which the whole Union could repose, the Missouri Compromise disposed of the future character of all the territory then belonging to the United States, not including the Northwestern Territory, the character of which was fixed by the ordinance of 1787. For a quarter of a century afterward, the two sections of North and South rested in peace upon the settlement of 1820, so far as discussion of the subject of slavery in the halls of Congress could be induced by the application of new States to be admitted into the Union. But in 1845, when Texas, a foreign, an independent, and a slave State, was annexed to the Union, the subject of an increase in the number of slave States came again into discussion, in which angry sectional feeling was carried to a dangerous point. Texas was finally admitted into the Union as a slaveholding State, with a right to divide herself into four new States, with or without slavery; but one of the express conditions of the annexation was a recognition of the Missouri Compromise line, so that north of that line no new State could be framed out of any portion of Texas unless slavery should be excluded from it. The wisdom and policy of the Missouri Compromise were thus again recognized, and it remained undisturbed for a period of thirty-four years from the time of its enactment, as a covenant of peace between the North and the South. The war between the United States and Mexico, which was terminated by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, resulted in the acquisition by the United States of a vast region of country which was not embraced by the Missouri Compromise. At the time of this acquisition, Mr. Buchanan earnestly advocated the extension of the line of 36° 30´ through the whole of this new territory to the Pacific Ocean, as the best mode of adjustment.