actical operation has but poorly
sustained the expectations of its advocates, as will be seen when we
come to consider the events that occurred a few years later in Kansas
and elsewhere. Retrospectively viewed under the mellowing light of time,
and with the calm consideration we can usually give to the irremediable
past, the compromise legislation of 1850 bears the impress of that
sectional spirit so widely at variance with the general purposes of the
Union, and so destructive of the harmony and mutual benefit which the
Constitution was intended to secure.

The refusal to divide the territory acquired from Mexico by an extension
of the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific was a consequence
of the purpose to admit California as a State of the Union before it had
acquired the requisite population, and while it was mainly under the
control of a military organization sent from New York during the war
with Mexico and disbanded in California upon the restoration of peace.
The inconsistency of the argument against the extension of the line was
exhibited in the division of the Territory of Texas by that parallel,
and payment to the State of money to secure her consent to the partition
of her domain. In the case of Texas, the North had everything to gain
and nothing to lose by the application of the practice of geographical
compromise on an arbitrary line. In the case of California, the
conditions were reversed; the South might have been the gainer and the
North the loser by a recognition of the same rule.

The compensation which it was alleged that the South received was a more
effective law for the rendition of fugitives from service or labor. But
it is to be remarked that this law provided for the execution by the
General Government of obligations which had been imposed by the Federal
compact upon the several States of the Union. The benefit to be derived
from a fulfillment of that law would be small in comparison with the
evil to result from the plausible pretext that the States had thus been
relieved from a duty which they had assumed in the adoption of the
compact of union. Whatever tended to lead the people of any of the
States to feel that they could be relieved from their constitutional
obligations by transferring them to the General Government, or that they
might thus or otherwise evade or resist them, could not fail to be like
the tares which the enemy sowed amid the wheat. The union of States,
formed to se