The project went on.  I was then out of Congress.  The annexation resolutions passed on the 1st of March, 1845; the legislature of Texas complied with the conditions and accepted the guaranties; for the language of the resolution is, that Texas is to come in “upon the conditions and under the guaranties herein prescribed.”  I was returned to the Senate in March, 1845, and was here in December following, when the acceptance by Texas of the conditions proposed by Congress was communicated to us by the President, and an act for the consummation of the union was laid before the two houses.  The connection was then not completed.  A final law, doing the deed of annexation ultimately, had not been passed; and when it was put upon its final passage here, I expressed my opposition to it, and recorded my vote in the negative; and there that vote stands, with the observations that I made upon that occasion.[14] Nor is this the only occasion on which I have expressed myself to the same effect.  It has happened that, between 1837 and this time, on various occasions, I have expressed my entire opposition to the admission of slave States, or the acquisition of new slave territories, to be added to the United States.  I know, Sir, no change in my own sentiments, or my own purposes, in that respect.  I will now ask my friend from Rhode Island to read another extract from a speech of mine made at a Whig Convention in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the month of September, 1847.

     Mr. Greene here read the following extract:—­

“We hear much just now of a panacea for the dangers and evils of slavery and slave annexation, which they call the ‘Wilmot Proviso.’  That certainly is a just sentiment, but it is not a sentiment to found any new party upon.  It is not a sentiment on which Massachusetts Whigs differ.  There is not a man in this hall who holds to it more firmly than I do, nor one who adheres to it more than another.

“I feel some little interest in this matter, Sir.  Did not I commit myself in 1837 to the whole doctrine, fully, entirely?  And I must be permitted to say that I cannot quite consent that more recent discoverers should claim the merit and take out a patent.

     “I deny the priority of their invention.  Allow me to say, Sir, it
     is not their thunder....

     “We are to use the first and the last and every occasion which
     offers to oppose the extension of slave power.

“But I speak of it here, as in Congress, as a political question, a question for statesmen to act upon.  We must so regard it.  I certainly do not mean to say that it is less important in a moral point of view, that it is not more important in many other points of view; but as a legislator, or in any official capacity, I must look at it, consider it, and decide it as a matter of political action.”

On other occasions, in debates here, I have expressed