There were statesmen like Senator Benton who laughed to scorn the idea that any considerable part of the people could ever seriously contemplate an assault upon the integrity of the Federal Union, but that the Union was truly and very gravely in danger subsequent events conclusively demonstrated. It was to save the Union from disruption at the hands of Northern or Southern fanatics--all of whom were threatening that disaster--that Clay framed, Webster supported, Congress adopted, and the President approved the compromise measures of 1850. Those measures covered substantially all the points in controversy. The bills were five in number. The first provided for the separation of New Mexico from Texas, with compensation to Texas, and for the admission of that territory to the Union as a state when it should become populous enough, with or without slavery as its own people should at such time determine. The second set off Utah from California and provided in a precisely similar manner for its ultimate admission to the Union as a state. Neither of these two measures ever resulted in anything practical. Even unto this day New Mexico has remained too sparsely populated for statehood and Utah was not admitted to the Union until long after the Constitution of the United States had been so amended as to prohibit slavery in any part of the Republic. The third of Clay's compromise bills provided for the admission of California to the Union as a state under the Constitution which it had adopted, which made no provision for the existence of slavery within its borders. The fourth of the bills was a new and more strenuous fugitive slave law than any that had ever before existed. It was intended to carry out the provision of the Constitution of the United States on that subject and it was supposed to be offset to Northern sentiment by the fifth of the compromise measures which forbade the slave trade within the strictly national domain of the District of Columbia. It had long been a grievance to Northern minds that this peculiarly national territory, governed as it was exclusively by a Congress representative of all the states in the Senate and of all their people in the House, and wholly without any expression of the will of its inhabitants, was made a slave mart, into which the slave-trader from Maryland or Virginia could take his chattels for sale on the auction block to other slave-traders who were there to buy speculatively that they might sell again to the owners of cotton and rice fields at the South. In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade; between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human beings for purposes of speculative profit.