because it provoked debate and there was not time enough at the fag-end of a session to push it past debate to its passage. It was necessary that the matter of the proviso should be settled. The Missouri compromise line ran only to the western boundary of the Louisiana purchase; the war brought accessions of territory as extensive, almost, as Louisiana itself; the question of the extension of slavery once more awaited debate and settlement. Here were vast provinces greater than the entire area of the original Union. Was slavery to be carried into them, and were slave States to be erected along the mountains and by the Pacific which should preserve the political balance of North and South in the Senate? The "Wilmot proviso" must be adopted or rejected; its question could not be put out of sight.

While the war lasted and the troublesome questions it bred were yet in abeyance, the Democrats made good the programme of domestic administration they had set themselves. By the elections of 1844 both houses of Congress had become Democratic, and party measures could be carried. In July, 1846, therefore, a new tariff Act was passed which brought protective duties down almost to a strict revenue basis, and considerably enlarged the free list. In August an Act was passed which once more established the Independent Treasury,1 substantially as Mr. Van Buren had planned it. The expenses of the war were met, so far as the revenues fell short, by large issues of interest-bearing treasury notes. The Democratic leaders were steadfast in their determination neither to use the banks nor to increase the tariff in order to assist the Treasury.

But their power came to an end with the first Congress

CHARGE OF THE "PALMETTOS" AT CHURUBUSCO

of Mr. Polk's administration. The congressional elections of the autumn of 1846 transformed the majority in the House from Democratic to Whig again. The Senate, more slow to change, remained Democratic. With the houses no longer agreed, party plans fell into confusion. Congress was once more disturbed by questions which lay deeper than politics and cut both parties athwart with the lines of faction. The question of slavery had returned again to plague it. The Democratic Senate wished to pass an appropriation bill "for the settlement of the boundary question" in which nothing should be said about the extension of slavery; the Whigs of the House insisted upon Mr. Wilmot's proviso. Oregon was drawn into the controversy. The Senate would agree to no bill organizing Oregon as a Territory which excluded slavery; the House would adopt no measure which did not exclude it. The treaty of peace and cession found the houses still unagreed. Not until August, 1848, could they agree even upon the organization of Oregon. Then the Senate yielded and the Territory was organized under a law which

extended to her area the prohibitions of the Ordinance of 1787. But in the matter of California and New Mexico the dead-lock was unbroken. All measures failed, and the new territories were left with no law but such as they had got from Mexico.

Democratic politicians, indeed, put forward a political doctrine in the matter which, if accepted, would make it unnecessary for Congress to act at all upon the chief question at issue. The introduction or non-introduction of slavery into those territories, they said, was not a

thing to be determined beforehand or by federal authority: it must be determined by circumstances and by the free choice of the people who were to make their homes there. It ought to be their privilege to choose their own institutions and economy of life, and Congress ought not to attempt to dictate what their choice should be. They called this a principle of democracy, that every community should determine its own life; but it came too late to their lips to look like anything more than a counsel of timidity and inaction, a makeshift party doctrine of "squatter sovereignty"; and opinion was neither stayed nor satisfied by the compromise it offered.

That year of dead-lock between the houses was the year also of a presidential election; and no one who looked observantly upon the incidents of that year doubted what significant changes were setting in. The airs of opinion blew now out of this quarter and again out of that, but their shifting currents foretold, to those who could read the weather, the setting in of the trades, which should blow continuously and with increasing volume out of one quarter a long season through. Both Whigs and Democrats observed the signs of the times, and fell silent upon the main issue that was in every man's mind, awaiting steadier weather. The Democrats, turning from Mr. Polk, nominated Mr. Lewis Cass, of Michigan, for President, a man conspicuous among them for conservative temper and liberal ways of thought, and spoke in their declaration of principles only of old doctrines, deliberately excluding an avowal of the doctrine of non-interference with the extension of slavery. The Whigs, more cautious still, fell back again upon their tactics of 1840: nominated for President