Such States as may be formed out of that portion of said territory lying south of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, commonly known as the Missouri compromise line, shall be admitted into the Union with or without slavery, as the people of each State asking admission may desire; and in such State or States as shall be formed out of said territory north of the Missouri compromise line slavery or involuntary servitude (except for crime) shall be prohibited.

The Territory of Oregon lies far north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, the Missouri and Texas compromise line.  Its southern boundary is the parallel of 42 degrees, leaving the intermediate distance to be 330 geographical miles.  And it is because the provisions of this bill are not inconsistent with the laws of the Missouri compromise, if extended from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean, that I have not felt at liberty to withhold my sanction.  Had it embraced territories south of that compromise, the question presented for my consideration would have been of a far different character, and my action upon it must have corresponded with my convictions.

Ought we now to disturb the Missouri and Texas compromises?  Ought we at this late day, in attempting to annul what has been so long established and acquiesced in, to excite sectional divisions and jealousies, to alienate the people of different portions of the Union from each other, and to endanger the existence of the Union itself?

From the adoption of the Federal Constitution, during a period of sixty years, our progress as a nation has been without example in the annals of history.  Under the protection of a bountiful Providence, we have advanced with giant strides in the career of wealth and prosperity.  We have enjoyed the blessings of freedom to a greater extent than any other people, ancient or modern, under a Government which has preserved order and secured to every citizen life, liberty, and property.  We have now become an example for imitation to the whole world.  The friends of freedom in every clime point with admiration to our institutions.  Shall we, then, at the moment when the people of Europe are devoting all their energies in the attempt to assimilate their institutions to our own, peril all our blessings by despising the lessons of experience and refusing to tread in the footsteps which our fathers have trodden?  And for what cause would we endanger our glorious Union?  The Missouri compromise contains a prohibition of slavery throughout all that vast region extending twelve and a half degrees along the Pacific, from the parallel of 36 degrees 30 minutes to that of 49 degrees, and east from that ocean to and beyond the summit of the Rocky Mountains.  Why, then, should our institutions be endangered because it is proposed to submit to the people of the remainder of our newly acquired territory lying south of 36 degrees 30 minutes, embracing less than four degrees of latitude, the