It was comparatively easy to question and disprove the unqualified statement of the _Appeal_, that "the original settled policy of the United States was non-extension of slavery." Less convincing was Douglas's attempt to prove that the Missouri Compromise was expressly annulled in 1850, when portions of Texas and of the former Spanish province of Louisiana were added to New Mexico, and also a part of the province of Louisiana was joined to Utah. Douglas was in the main correct as to geographical data; but he could not, and did not, prove that the members of the Thirty-first Congress purposed also to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction in all the other unorganized Territories. This contention was one of those _non-sequiturs_ of which Douglas, in the heat of argument, was too often guilty. Still more regrettable, because it seemed to convict him of sophistry, was the mode by which he sought to evade the charge of the _Appeal_, that the act organizing New Mexico and settling the boundary of Texas had reaffirmed the Missouri Compromise. To establish his point he had to assume that _all_ the land cut off from Texas north of 36 deg. 30', was added to New Mexico, thus leaving nothing to which the slavery restriction, reaffirmed in the act of 1850, could apply. But Chase afterward invalidated this assumption and Douglas was forced so to qualify his original statement as to yield the point. This was a damaging admission and prejudiced his cause before the country. But when he brought his wide knowledge of American colonization to bear upon the concrete problems of governmental policy, his grasp of the situation was masterly. "Let me ask you where you have succeeded in excluding slavery by an act of Congress from one inch of American soil? You may tell me that you did it in the northwest territory by the ordinance of 1787. I will show you by the history of the country that you did not accomplish any such thing. You prohibited slavery there by law, but you did not exclude it in fact.... I know of but one territory of the United States where slavery does exist, and that one is where you have prohibited it by law, and it is in this very Nebraska Territory. In defiance of the eighth section of the act of 1820, in defiance of Congressional dictation, there have been, not many, but a few slaves introduced.... I have no doubt that whether you organize the territory of Nebraska or not this will continue for some time to come.... But when settlers rush in--when labor becomes plenty, and therefore cheap, in that climate, with its productions, it is worse than folly to think of its being a slave-holding country.... I do not like, I never did like, the system of legislation on our part, by which a geographical line, in violation of the laws of nature, and climate, and soil, and of the laws of God, should be run to establish institutions for a people."[467]