Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster, and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what Webster called “the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and Abolition lectures.” Under these circumstances the “Compromise” was adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred and fifty-six thousand. But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up as never before—here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of their supporters; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame. The Republican Party was formed, the _Black_ Republican Party, as the slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third of the total vote of the country. After that came, in due course, the attempt of the Supreme Court to put an end to the Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Congress could not restrict slavery in the Territories, which meant that the Republican Party had no right to exist. To “cheerfully acquiesce” in the decision of the Supreme Court, was the duty of “all good citizens,” according to President Buchanan; yet the only result of the action of the Supreme Court was to cause the agitation to burst out afresh. In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ran for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision, and the Republican Party all over the country went on in its revolutionary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court had ever existed. A year or two later an agitator made matters still worse by his attempt to set free the slaves by force. “It is my firm and deliberate conviction,” said Senator Douglas, “that the Harper’s Ferry crime was the natural, logical and inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican Party.” And he was perfectly right.