same considerations
that now influenced and controlled the judgment of Mr. Seward. As
matter of historic justice, the Republicans who waived the anti-
slavery restriction should at least have offered and recorded their
apology for any animadversions they had made upon the course of
Mr. Webster ten years before. Every prominent Republican senator
who agreed in 1861 to abandon the principle of the Wilmot Proviso
in organizing the Territories of Colorado and Nevada, had, in 1850,
heaped reproach upon Mr. Webster for not insisting upon the same
principle for the same territory. Between the words of Mr. Seward
and Mr. Sumner in the one crisis and their votes in the other,
there is a discrepancy for which it would have been well to leave
on record an adequate explanation. The danger to the Union, in
which they found a good reason for receding from the anti-slavery
restriction on the Territories, had been cruelly denied to Mr.
Webster as a justifying motive. They found in him only a guilty
recreancy to sacred principle for the same act which in themselves
was inspired by devotion to the Union.

It was certainly a day of triumph for Mr. Douglas. He was justified
in his boast that, after all the bitter agitation which followed
the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Republicans adopted
his principle and practically applied its provisions in the first
Territory which they had the power to organize. Mr. Douglas had
been deprived of his chairmanship of the Committee of Territories
by the Southern leaders, and his place had been given to James S.
Green of Missouri. His victory therefore was complete when Mr.
Seward waived the anti-slavery guaranty on behalf of the Republicans,
and when Mr. Green waived the pro-slavery guaranty on behalf of
the Breckinridge Democracy. It was the apotheosis of Popular
Sovereignty, and Mr. Douglas was pardonable even for an excessive
display of self-gratulation over an event so suggestive and so
instructive. Mr. Grow, the chairman of Territories in the House,
frankly stated that he had agreed with Mr. Green, chairman of
Territories in the Senate, that there should be no reference whatever
to the question of slavery in any of the Territorial bills. It
cannot be denied that this action of the Republican party was a
severe reflection upon that prolonged agitation for prohibition of
slavery in the Territories by Congressional enactment. A surrender
of the principle with due explanation o