It was impossible, in fact, that these things should be done. It was easy for Congress to resolve that "any reasonable, proper and constitutional remedies and additional and more specific guarantees" should be given, but quite another thing to secure the execution of such a program. One house of Congress vetoed the action of the other on every such resolution and both refused to put the guarantees into legal form. Northern sentiment saw and resented in every such proposition a suggestion of still further concession to that slave power which Northern sentiment had come to abhor with all the loathing that is possible to the human mind, and Northern sentiment would have no part or lot in concession to a system which under compulsion of the Constitution it might tolerate but to the perpetuation of which it would on no account lend a hand. On the other side the extremists of the South asked for no further guarantees and trusted none that might be offered. They contended that the guarantees of the Constitution itself had been nullified by the laws of the Northern States; that every compromise had been broken; that, as they insisted, Northern sentiment had openly and distinctly approved of servile insurrection, with all the horror that it must imply, as a means of abolishing slavery; and that there was no further hope of reconciliation by virtue of paper guarantees which the Federal Government had no adequate power to enforce. The issue had, in fact, been made up and all attempts at compromise were futile folly. The war to which the country's history and politics for half a century past had been leading had at last come and the only real question that remained to be settled was that of who should begin the actual fighting. That detail was of no real importance. The South bore its part in all this by-play and coquetry of endeavors at reconciliation. It sent distinguished men as delegates to plead for peace at Washington, either, as some of them urged, upon some basis of compromise or, as others insisted, upon a governmental recognition of secession as a right and a fact, the recognition of which would indeed have furnished a peaceful remedy for ills otherwise irremediable, an easy and peaceful way out of a controversy that otherwise threatened a savage, brutal and peculiarly devastating war. But that remedy was obviously and absurdly impossible of adoption in the circumstances then existing. Neither side was in the least degree disposed to accept or even seriously to consider the peace proposals of the other. Neither being willing to yield a single item of its contention, there was no ground or chance of compromise. It was clearly understood upon both sides that war was presently to come. On both sides there was an active sharpening of swords and a diligent rubbing up of guns that might prove serviceable in war.