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.