California, Utah, New Mexico and Texas all embraced territory on both sides of the Missouri Compromise line. California was the first State south of that line that had ever asked for admission to the Union with a Constitution excluding slavery. The cardinal feature of the Compromise of 1850 was the abandonment of a geographical line to separate free and slave territory, and the distinct recognition of the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery. The compromise in terms recognized the right of the people of the territories to be admitted to the Union with or without slavery as they might desire--that was its very essence as distinguished from the Compromise of 1820. The principle of non-intervention in the territories had been logically involved, in the national platforms of the democratic party since 1840, but it had never until 1850 received the direct sanction of the Congress. The legislation of 1850 must be regarded as one of the most memorable events in our constitutional and political history. It received the aid and sanction of some of the ablest and wisest statesmen the nation has ever known.--There were men in the Senate taking part in the controversy that resulted in the compromise, whose political lives had commenced when the fathers of the Republic were ruling its affairs. Clay, Benton, Webster and Calhoun were there, and the South and the North alike were represented by their ablest men. It had become their high duty to settle by an enduring principle the future policy of the nation as to the organization of territorial government for the national domain, and as to the admission of new States. The antagonisms of the North and South, fostered on the one hand by the spirit of abolition, and on the other by the spirit of slavery extension; and still more fostered by the long continued and unconstitutional attempts of Congress to deal with the question, by splitting the difference between the contending sections, could no longer be reconciled by a boundary line. With every fresh acquisition of national territory, the zeal of the contending power overleaped the congressional boundary, and demanded more for its own sectional policy. In the Congress of 1850 the Northern or Free soil party insisted on the absolute prohibition of slavery in all the new territory acquired from Mexico. They were able as they had been before when Mr. Douglas proposed, and the South voted for it, to vote down the project of extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. The South with such Northern men as were opposed to the Wilmot proviso, were able to defeat that. Neither the Missouri Compromise nor the Wilmot proviso could be carried.--The "irrepressible conflict," long encouraged by selfish political schemers or over-zealous, if not fanatical theorists, had reached a crisis, and the nation looked on in fear.