dent's discretion in purchasing
Mexican territory was met by an amendment moved by a Northern Democrat
named Wilmot, himself an ardent supporter of the war, providing that
from all territory that might be so acquired from Mexico Slavery should
be for ever excluded. The proviso was carried in the House of
Representatives by a majority almost exactly representative of the
comparative strength of the two sections. How serious the issue thus
raised was felt to be is shown by the fact that the Executive preferred
dispensing with the money voted to allowing it to be pushed further. In
the Senate both supply and condition were lost. But the "Wilmot Proviso"
had given the signal for a sectional struggle of which no man could
foresee the end.

Matters were further complicated by a startlingly unexpected discovery.
On the very day on which peace was proclaimed, one of the American
settlers who had already begun to make their way into California, in
digging for water on his patch of reclaimed land, turned up instead a
nugget of gold. It was soon known to the ends of the earth that the
Republic had all unknowingly annexed one of the richest goldfields yet
discovered. There followed all the familiar phenomena which Australia
had already witnessed, which South Africa was later to witness, and
which Klondyke has witnessed in our time. A stream of immigrants, not
only from every part of the United States but from every part of the
civilized world, began to pour into California drunk with the hope of
immediate and enormous gains. Instead of the anticipated gradual
development of the new territory, which might have permitted
considerable delay and much cautious deliberation in the settlement of
its destiny, one part of that territory at least found itself within a
year the home of a population already numerous enough to be entitled to
admission to the Union as a State, a population composed in great part
of the most restless and lawless of mankind, and urgently in need of
some sort of properly constituted government.

A Convention met to frame a plan of territorial administration, and
found itself at once confronted with the problem of the admission or
exclusion of Slavery. Though many of the delegates were from the Slave
States, it was decided unanimously to exclude it. There was nothing
sentimentally Negrophil about the attitude of the Californians; indeed,
they proclaimed an exceedingly sensible policy in the simple formula:
"No Nig