[Sidenote: The President's rebuke.] In his message to Congress, of December 2nd, 1851, President Fillmore referred to these cases of resistance to the execution of the law; declared the law to be required by the Constitution; denounced the opposition to its execution as directed against the Constitution and the Union itself; repeated his dictum that the Compromise Measures were a final settlement of the subjects embraced in them; and congratulated the country upon the general acquiescence in these Measures manifested throughout the Union. [Sidenote: Mr. Foote's finality resolutions.] Two days later, Mr. Foote introduced into the Senate a resolution declaring these Measures to be a definite settlement of the questions embraced in them, and recommending acquiescence in them by all good citizens. [Sidenote: The failure of the resolutions to pass the Senate, but their success in the House.] The debate upon this proposition, which began December 8th, and lasted, off and on, until February 28th, was, in the main, a discussion between four Southern members--Mr. Foote, Mr. Butler, Mr. Rhett, and Mr. Clemens--during which the history of the movements of the Southern leaders in 1850 and 1851 were brought to light, beginning with the Southern Address, issued {375} from Washington before the passage of the Compromise Measures, for the purpose of producing a united action on the part of the South in behalf of Southern rights, and the call of the Nashville convention by the Mississippi legislature, and ending with the demand of the convention for the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes to the Pacific Ocean, and the declaration by the convention and by conventions in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, of the abstract right of secession as a principle of the political system of the Union. It was evident that these movements had approached dangerously near to an attempt at something like practical secession, and that the Southern leaders were now anxious to underrate their significance. The Northern Senators allowed these Southern brethren to proceed with criminations and recriminations against each other, until they themselves were convinced that they would lose more by the continuance of the debate than they could gain by the passage of the resolution. After a fiery speech by Mr. Clemens, on February 28th, 1852, the attempt to pass the resolution was abandoned in the Senate. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, incited by memorials sent into it by the legislatures of New Jersey and Iowa, actually passed resolutions, on April 5th, 1852, by a large majority, declaring the finality of the Measures. Petitions began again to pour into the Senate for the repeal of the law. Mr. Seward, Mr. Hale, and Mr. Sumner presented such petitions and tried to get a hearing upon them, but the Senate voted to lay them all on the table. [Sidenote: The National conventions of 1852 and the finality of the compromise measures.]