e enough within our
common construction of the Constitution and our practice in respect to
the admission of States, my honorable friend from Texas[4] will have a
new State, and I have no doubt he has chalked it out already.

As to New Mexico, its population is not likely to increase. It is a
settled country; the people living along in the bottom of the valley on
the sides of a little stream, a garter of land only on one side and the
other, filled by coarse landholders and miserable _peons_. It can
sustain, not only under this cultivation, but under any cultivation that
our American race would ever submit to, no more people than are there
now. There will, then, be two Senators for sixty thousand inhabitants in
New Mexico to the end of our lives and to the end of the lives of our
children.

And how is it with California? We propose to take California, from the
forty-second degree of north latitude down to the thirty-second. We
propose to take ten degrees along the coast of the Pacific. Scattered
along the coast for that great distance are settlements and villages and
ports; and in the rear all is wilderness and barrenness, and Indian
country. But if, just about San Francisco, and perhaps Monterey,
emigrants enough should settle to make up one State, then the people
five hundred miles off would have another State. And so this
disproportion of the Senate to the people will go on, and must go on,
and we cannot prevent it.

I say, Sir, that, according to my conscientious conviction, we are now
fixing on the Constitution of the United States, and its frame of
government, a monstrosity, a disfiguration, an enormity! Sir, I hardly
dare trust myself. I don't know but I may be under some delusion. It may
be the weakness of my eyes that forms this monstrous apparition. But, if
I may trust myself, if I can persuade myself that I am in my right mind,
then it does appear to me that we in this Senate have been and are
acting, and are likely to be acting hereafter, and immediately, a part
which will form the most remarkable epoch in the history of our country.
I hold it to be enormous, flagrant, an outrage upon all the principles
of popular republican government, and on the elementary provisions of
the Constitution under which we live, and which we have sworn to
support.

But then, Sir, what relieves the case from this enormity? What is our
reliance? Why, it is that we stipulate that these new States shall only
be brought in at a s