tion. The reasons he gave for this apparent change
were, that nature had forbidden slavery in the newly-conquered regions, and
that the proviso, under such circumstances, would be a useless taunt and
wanton insult to the South. The famous sentence in which he said that he
"would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to
reenact the will of God," was nothing but specious and brilliant rhetoric.
It was perfectly easy to employ slaves in California, if the people had not
prohibited it, and in New Mexico as well, even if there were no cotton nor
sugar nor rice plantations in either, and but little arable land in the
latter. There was a classic form of slave-labor possible in those
countries. Any school-boy could have reminded Mr. Webster of

"Seius whose eight hundred slaves
Sicken in Ilva's mines."

Mining was one of the oldest uses to which slave-labor had been applied,
and it still flourished in Siberia as the occupation of serfs and
criminals. Mr. Webster, of course, was not ignorant of this very obvious
fact; and that nature, therefore, instead of forbidding slave-labor in the
Mexican conquests, opened to it a new and almost unlimited field in a
region which is to-day one of the greatest mining countries in the world.
Still less could he have failed to know that this form of employment for
slaves was eagerly desired by the South; that the slave-holders fully
recognized their opportunity, announced their intention of taking
advantage of it, and were particularly indignant at the action of
California because it had closed to them this inviting field. Mr. Clingman
of North Carolina, on January 22, when engaged in threatening war in order
to bring the North to terms, had said, in the House of Representatives:
"But for the anti-slavery agitation our Southern slave-holders would have
carried their negroes into the mines of California in such numbers that I
have no doubt but that the majority there would have made it a
slave-holding State."[1] At a later period Mr. Mason of Virginia declared,
in the Senate, that he knew of no law of nature which excluded slavery from
California. "On the contrary," he said, "if California had been organized
with a territorial form of government only, the people of the Southern
States would have gone there freely, and have taken their slaves there in
great numbers. They would have done so because the value of the labor of
that class would have been augmented to