December, Mr. Webster, seeing that it was useless to resist its
passage, confined himself to a statement of the objections which
he said always had governed, and always would govern him, in
regard to this measure. It is important that those objections
should be distinctly recapitulated here.

With regard to the form of making this foreign country and
nation a part of the United States, he had always held that, if it
were to be done at all, it should be done by diplomatic arrange-
ment, sanctioned by treaty. This would have made the country
a "Territory" of the United States, to be governed by Congress
until it might be fit to form that Territory into a State or States
for admission into the Union. The admission of a foreign state
into the Union, by the legislative action of Congress, he regarded
as unwarranted by the Constitution. With respect to the
admission of Texas, under any form whatever, his objections
were these: First, that to enlarge further the limits of the
Union endangered the permanency of its institutions, which
had always been the great subject of all his political efforts
and the paramount object of his political regard. Second-
ly, that the example of a great, rich, and powerful republic,
not possessed by a spirit of aggrandizement, was one due from
us to the world, in favor of the character of republican govern-
ment, and one that he had always wished this country to exhibit.
Thirdly, that while he adhered, and always meant to adhere, to
the original arrangements and compromises of the Constitution,
he never could consent to the admission of new slave States
into the Union, with the inequalities that were allowed and
accorded by the Constitution to the slaveholding States which
were in existence at the time of its establishment. He held that
the States already in the Union had a clear right to insist that
any new State should come in only upon an equality; and that, if
slavery was an impediment to coming in on an equality, the State
proposing to come in should either remove that inequality or be
excluded. He rested this objection on the fact that such an
increase of inequality and unjust advantage against the free
States, in favor of the slaveholding States, deranged the balance
of the Constitution. Finally, he objected to the constitution
of Texas, that it tied the hands of the Legislature, in respect to
the abolition of slavery; and although it might be in the power

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