In the progress of this debate it has been again and again argued that perfect tranquillity reigns throughout the country, and that there is no disturbance threatening its peace, endangering its safety, but that which was produced by busy, restless politicians.  It has been maintained that the surface of the public mind is perfectly smooth and undisturbed by a single billow.  I most heartily wish I could concur in this picture of general tranquillity that has been drawn upon both sides of the Senate.  I am no alarmist; nor, I thank God, at the advanced age at which His providence has been pleased to allow me to reach, am I very easily alarmed by any human event; but I totally misread the signs of the times, if there be that state of profound peace and quiet, that absence of all just cause of apprehension of future danger to this confederacy, which appears to be entertained by some other senators.  Mr. President, all the tendencies of the times, I lament to say, are toward disquietude, if not more fatal consequences.  When before, in the midst of profound peace with all the nations of the earth, have we seen a convention, representing a considerable portion of one great part of the Republic, meet to deliberate about measures of future safety in connection with great interests of that quarter of the country?  When before have we seen, not one, but more—­some half a dozen legislative bodies solemnly resolving that if any one of these measures—­the admission of California, the adoption of the Wilmot proviso, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia—­should be adopted by Congress, measures of an extreme character, for the safety of the great interests to which I refer, in a particular section of the country, would be resorted to?  For years, this subject of the abolition of slavery, even within this District of Columbia, small as is the number of slaves here, has been a source of constant irritation and disquiet.  So of the subject of the recovery of fugitive slaves who have escaped from their lawful owners:  not a mere border contest, as has been supposed—­although there, undoubtedly, it has given rise to more irritation than in other portions of the Union—­but everywhere through-out the slave-holding country it has been felt as a great evil, a great wrong which required the intervention of congressional power.  But these two subjects, unpleasant as has been the agitation to which they have given rise, are nothing in comparison to those which have sprung out of the acquisitions recently made from the Republic of Mexico.  These are not only great and leading causes of just apprehension as respects the future, but all the minor circumstances of the day intimate danger ahead, whatever may be its final issue and consequence. * * *

Mr. President, I will not dwell upon other concomitant causes, all having the same tendency, and all well calculated to awaken, to arouse us—­if, as I hope the fact is, we are all of us sincerely desirous of preserving this Union—­to rouse us to dangers which really exist, without underrating them upon the one hand, or magnifying them upon the other. * * *