From the day that the administration of Mr.Polk began its career of foreign acquisition, the question of slavery in the Territories had been a subject of controversy between political parties.

When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the Territories of the United States north of the line of 36 deg.

30' were left without slavery inhibition or restriction, the agitation began which ended in the overthrow of the Democratic party and the election of Mr.Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States.

It will therefore always remain as one of the singular contradictions in the political history of the country, that, after seven years of almost exclusive agitation on this one question, the Republicans, the first time they had the power as a distinctive political organization to enforce the cardinal article of their political creed, quietly and unanimously abandoned it.
And the abandoned it without a word of explanation.

Mr.Sumner and Mr.Wade and Mr.Chandler, the most radical men in the Senate on the Republican side, sat still and allowed the bill to be passed precisely as reported by James S.Green of Missouri, who had been the ablest defender of the Breckinridge Democracy in that body.
In the House, Mr.Thaddeus Stevens, Mr.Owen Lovejoy, the Washburns, and all the other radical Republicans vouchsafed no word explanatory of this extraordinary change of position.
COLORADO, DAKOTA, AND NEVADA.
If it be said in defense of this course that all the Territories lay north of 36 deg.