Mr. Adams now made one more effort to preserve the Southerners against the consequences of their own folly. He undertook to arrest the debate by calling for the application of the forty-fifth rule of the House, which required that no petition should be debated or decided on the day of its presentation. But the Speaker now decided that this rule could not apply to a petition until it had been received. The gates of Janus were flung wide open, and the House went into an agitation upon the subject, to which all that had gone before was only a prelude. The struggle lasted for more than four months, during which period petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District, signed by over thirty thousand persons, were poured into the House. The slavery question was at last brought before the people of the United States in a way most highly satisfactory to the most radical Abolitionist, and no matter what the immediate compromise upon the subject might be, it was evident to all farseeing minds then that a death-blow had been struck at slavery. [Sidenote: The Pinckney resolutions.] There is not space in this work to recount the scenes enacted on the floor of the House during these four exciting months, or even to give a résumé of the debate. {261} The conflict was ended for the moment by the adoption, on May 25th (1836), of a series of resolutions reported by a committee appointed for the purpose, of which Mr. Pinckney, of South Carolina, was the chairman. These resolutions provided: "That Congress possesses no constitutional authority to interfere in any way with the institution of slavery in any of the States of this Confederacy; that Congress ought not to interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia; and whereas it is extremely important and desirable that the agitation of this subject should be finally arrested, for the purpose of restoring tranquillity to the public mind, ... that all petitions, memorials, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery, or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon." [Sidenote: The new rule of the House of Representatives in regard to the Abolition petitions.] The solution thus reached by the House of the question of the power of the House to control its procedure, over against the right of a number of individuals to excite interminable discussions and paralyze the business of the House by flooding it with petitions upon one and the same subject, was the laying of all such petitions on the table _as a rule of the House_.