of position on the part of the South, as sudden as it is unaccountable, being nothing less than the surrender of a fortress which until then they had defended with the pertinacity of a blind and almost infuriated fatuity.  Upon the discussions during the pendency of the resolutions, and upon the vote, by which they were carried, I make no comment, save only to record my exultation in the fact there exhibited, that great emergencies are true touchstones, and that henceforward, until this question is settled, whoever holds a seat in Congress will find upon, and all around him, a pressure strong enough to TEST him—­a focal blaze that will find its way through the carefully adjusted cloak of fair pretension, and the sevenfold brass of two-faced political intrigue, and no-faced non-committalism, piercing to the dividing asunder of joints and marrow.  Be it known to every northern man who aspires to a seat in Congress, that hereafter it is the destiny of congressional action on this subject, to be a MIGHTY REVELATOR—­making secret thoughts public property, and proclaiming on the house-tops what is whispered in the ear—­smiting off masks, and bursting open sepulchres beautiful outwardly, and heaving up to the sun their dead men’s bones.  To such we say,—­Remember the Missouri Question, and the fate of those who then sold the North, and their own birthright!

Passing by the resolutions generally without remark—­the attention of the reader is specially solicited to Mr. Clay’s substitute for Mr. Calhoun’s fifth resolution.

“Resolved, That when the District of Columbia was ceded by the states of Virginia and Maryland to the United States, domestic slavery existed in both of these states, including the ceded territory, and that, as it still continues in both of them, it could not be abolished within the District without a violation of that good faith, which was implied in the cession and in the acceptance of the territory; nor, unless compensation were made to the proprietors of slaves, without a manifest infringement of an amendment to the constitution of the United States; nor without exciting a degree of just alarm and apprehension in the states recognizing slavery, far transcending in mischievous tendency, any possible benefit which could be accomplished by the abolition.”

By voting for this resolution, the south, by a simultaneous movement, shifted its mode of defense, not so much by taking a position entirely new, as by attempting to refortify an old one—­never much trusted in, and abandoned mainly long ago, as being unable to hold out against assault however unskilfully directed.  In the debate on this resolution, though the southern members of Congress did not professedly retreat from the ground hitherto maintained by them—­that Congress has no power by the constitution to abolish slavery in the District—­yet in the main they silently drew off from it.

The passage of this resolution—­with the vote of every southern senator, forms a new era in the discussion of this question.