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 them many hundred fold."[2] These were the views of practical men and experienced slave-owners who represented the opinions of their constituents, and who believed that domestic slavery could be employed to advantage anywhere.  Moreover, the Southern leaders openly avowed their opposition to securing any region to free labor exclusively, no matter what the ordinances of nature might be.  In 1848, it must be remembered in this connection, Mr. Webster not only urged the limitation of slave area, and sustained the power of Congress to regulate this matter in the territories, but he did not resist the final embodiment of the principle of the Wilmot Proviso in the bill