Mr.Webster acted from the same considerations that now influenced and controlled the judgment of Mr.Seward.

As matter of historic justice, the Republicans who waived the anti- slavery restriction should at least have offered and recorded their apology for any animadversions they had made upon the course of Mr.Webster ten years before.

Every prominent Republican senator who agreed in 1861 to abandon the principle of the Wilmot Proviso in organizing the Territories of Colorado and Nevada, had, in 1850, heaped reproach upon Mr.Webster for not insisting upon the same principle for the same territory.

Between the words of Mr.Seward and Mr.Sumner in the one crisis and their votes in the other, there is a discrepancy for which it would have been well to leave on record an adequate explanation.

The danger to the Union, in which they found a good reason for receding from the anti-slavery restriction on the Territories, had been cruelly denied to Mr.
Webster as a justifying motive.