484 MR WEBSTER S OPINIONS. 



ment did not forbid it. It will be a melancholy, though, 

 as many may think, a deserved punishment, to all free 

 states of the Anglo-Saxon blood, if the retention of 

 slavery in this vast south-western country shall enable 

 cheaper and more manageable labour to be applied to 

 manufacturing purposes, where soil and climate forbid 

 the profitable employment of it in the cultivation of the 

 soil. Amid the increasing misery and degradation of 

 our labouring populations, we shall then regret that the 

 power we once possessed was not exercised more vigor 

 ously for the establishment of freedom among a race of 

 men whose condition must exercise a certain measure of 

 influence upon our own. 



But that, in reality, the system of slavery is not con 

 sidered to be excluded from New Mexico by a natural 

 necessity, as was argued by Mr Webster, may be inferred 

 from the final result of the California admission and 

 slavery questions in Congress. By that result, and with 

 Mr Webster s concurrence, an area of New Mexico 

 proper has been handed over to Texas and slavery, equal 

 to 95,000 square miles. 



It is not difficult to reconcile this action of Mr 

 Webster, as Secretary of State, with all his previous 

 declarations, when circumstances were different ; but it 

 must have cost him much to consent to this increase of 

 the slave territory of Texas to the admission of three 

 new slave States formed of its territory, and to the giving 

 of a territorial government to New Mexico without an 

 anti-slavery proviso in the face of the strong language 

 in which he expressed himself on the subject of slavery 

 in the territories so late as 1848. &quot; My opposition to 

 the increase of slavery in this country,&quot; he said, &quot; or to 

 the increase of slave representatives in Congress, is 

 general and universal. It has no reference to the lines 

 of latitude or points of the compass. I shall oppose all 

 such extension, and all such increase, in all things, 



