Now, as to California and New Mexico, I hold slavery to be excluded from those territories by a law even superior to that which admits and sanctions it in Texas.  I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth.  That law settles for ever, with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico.  Understand me, Sir; I mean slavery as we regard it; the slavery of the colored race as it exists in the Southern States.  I shall not discuss the point, but leave it to the learned gentlemen who have undertaken to discuss it; but I suppose there is no slavery of that description in California now.  I understand that peonism, a sort of penal servitude, exists there, or rather a sort of voluntary sale of a man and his offspring for debt; an arrangement of a peculiar nature known to the law of Mexico.  But what I mean to say is, that it is as impossible that African slavery, as we see it among us, should find its way, or be introduced, into California and New Mexico, as any other natural impossibility.  California and New Mexico are Asiatic in their formation and scenery.  They are composed of vast ridges of mountains, of great height, with broken ridges and deep valleys.  The sides of these mountains are entirely barren; their tops capped by perennial snow.  There may be in California, now made free by its constitution, and no doubt there are, some tracts of valuable land.  But it is not so in New Mexico.  Pray, what is the evidence which every gentleman must have obtained on this subject, from information sought by himself or communicated by others?  I have inquired and read all I could find, in order to acquire information on this important subject.  What is there in New Mexico that could, by any possibility, induce anybody to go there with slaves?  There are some narrow strips of tillable land on the borders of the rivers; but the rivers themselves dry up before midsummer is gone.  All that the people can do in that region is to raise some little articles, some little wheat for their tortillas, and that by irrigation.  And who expects to see a hundred black men cultivating tobacco, corn, cotton, rice, or any thing else, on lands in New Mexico, made fertile only by irrigation?

I look upon it, therefore, as a fixed fact, to use the current expression of the day, that both California and New Mexico are destined to be free, so far as they are settled at all, which I believe, in regard to New Mexico, will be but partially for a great length of time; free by the arrangement of things ordained by the Power above us.  I have therefore to say, in this respect also, that this country is fixed for freedom, to as many persons as shall ever live in it, by a less repealable law than that which attaches to the right of holding slaves in Texas; and I will say further, that, if a resolution or a bill were now before us, to provide a territorial government