the act of annexation. But the accident of the Mexican war wrecked
completely the deep scheme of the Texan plotters, and neutralized the
political advantage which had accrued to the slave power in the admission
of Texas into the Union by the acquisition of California and New Mexico at
the close of that war. It was a checkmate by destiny. Chance had at a
critical moment aligned itself definitely on the side of modern
industrialism in the American republic and given a decisive turn to the
long contest with its slave rival.

With the admission of California as a free State the political balance
between our two opposing systems of labor was irreparably destroyed. For,
while the South possessed Texas, and an expectation of acquiring new slave
States therefrom, this expectation amounted practically to a bare
possibility. For it was found, owing to the inferior colonizing resources
of the slave system, far easier to annex this immense domain than to
people it, or to organize out of it States for emergent needs. On the
other hand, the superior colonizing ability of free labor, taken in
conjunction with all that vast, unoccupied territory belonging to it and
inviting settlement, promised, in the ordinary course of events, to
increase and confirm this preponderance of political power, and so to seal
the fate of slavery. Nor do I forget in this connection that the bill,
which organized into territories Utah and New Mexico, was, in deference to
Southern demand, purged of the Wilmot _proviso_. But this concession on
the part of Northern politicians had no real value to the South, for, as
Webster pointed out at the time, slave labor was effectually interdicted
from competing with free labor for the possession of this land by a power
higher than the Wilmot _proviso_, viz., by a law of nature. The failure,
however, to re-enact this decree of nature in 1850 prepared the way for
the demolition of the slave wall four years later, and thus operated to
hasten the grand catastrophe.

The repeal of the Missouri compromise did for the more or less fluid state
of anti-slavery sentiment at the North what Goethe says a blow will do for
a vessel of water on the verge of freezing--the water is thereby converted
instantly into solid ice. So did the agitation produced by the abrogation
of that act convert the gradually congealing sentiment of the free States
on the subject of slavery into settled opposition to its farther extension
to the national te