tains of the East, the flower of youth, the strength of manhood, and in some instances the feebleness of age have gone forth, moved mainly by the spirit of adventure and the desire of wealth. Vessel after vessel, and we may almost say fleet after fleet, has sailed out of our harbors, freighted to the full with men whom tears of parental affection and solicitude, the endearments of domestic life, the considerations urged by plighted love, the silent pleading of helpless children, and the thousand ties that bind to home and friends, could not withhold from the dangers of the deep, and the greater dangers of a life of unaccustomed exposure and toil, in an untried climate. Others, too eager to stand on the golden shore to be willing to wait the departure of the weary months occupied by a voyage around "the stormy Cape," have braved the hardships of the wilderness, some to fall by the way, and many to experience unheard of sufferings ere their eyes should behold the land of promise. Every week is now bringing at least its hundreds into the harbor at San Francisco, and every week numbers, after a journey of months in the wilderness, are entering the valley of the Sacramento. So great and so rapid has been the emigration thither, that already California claims a place among the members of our great confederacy. She presents herself at Washington at the present session of our national Congress, not as at the last, with a request for a government, but with a government of her own adoption, and a request to be admitted into the Union as a sovereign state!

At the commencement of this article we have referred to her civil constitution, together with the somewhat entertaining volume of Mr. Johnson-a gentleman formerly connected, as he informs us in his dedicatory sentence, with "The Eclectic,"-with no intention of entering upon a critical examination and review of either, but rather, as affording occasion for an inquiry into the political and religious bearings of that wonderful movement, of which the former is an important consequence, and the latter a partial description.

What is to be the issue of this rush for gold? Is the discovery of California's treasures an event that calls for joy or sorrow? As revealing how deeply rooted is the love of money in the hearts of the American people, as revealing its supremacy, in many instances, over the domestic affections, and as affording occasion for the increase of the passion, it is to be lamented; but taking a more comprehensive view of its results, we think God's good hand is so distinctly visible in it that it affords fresh occasion for ascriptions of praise to an omnipresent and all-wise Providence.

The future historian of our Union will doubtless have occasion to attribute to this event much of its prosperity, and possibly its continued existence.

The enemies of republicanism abroad, the sovereigns and politicians of the old world, have ever been busy in predicting the early downfall of our government, and the consequent crushing of the world-wide aspirations after liberty, which our hitherto successful experiment has inspired. It has lived long enough, however, to send out an influence which already has caused the shaking of kingdoms and the falling of thrones; and we are bound to believe that it is destined to live, until the principles for which our fathers contended shall have won a universal triumph. Nevertheless, it is not to be denied, that there is in our system one element whose presence is fraught with danger. We refer to the institution of slavery. This, more than anything else, has threatened the permanence of our Union. On the great question of personal freedom as the inalienable right of all, strange as is the fact, the inhabitants of this free land have been, and are, divided. On one side of a given line they are defenders of human bondage; and on the other there is a well nigh perfect unanimity in the denial of its right to exist. On one side its duration is expected to run parallel with that of the Union; and on the other it is believed to be destined to fall before the power of increasing light, and the influence of multiplied evangelical triumphs. On one side the fostering aid of governmental power has been invoked in its behalf; and on the other it is claimed that under the guidance of the constitution, and within its limitations, governmental action and influence should be wholly against it. On one side there is sought an extension of its dark dominion; and on the other the declaration is that not another inch of God's free earth shall be permitted to feel its blight. At the instance of the slave interest, the nation was recently plunged into an unjust and inglorious war, inglorious though successful, that territories might be won from a sister republic and doomed to bear the burden of human bondage. From such a doom, said the freemen of the North, they shall be preserved. No slave shall tread their soil without by that very act ceasing, if he shall so determine, to call any man master. But, replied the sons of the South, these territories were won by our blood as well as yours, and we have as good a right to emigrate thither with our slaves as you with your horses. Slavery is purely a creature of the law, was the reply, while the subjection of the mere animal to the human will is an ordinance of heaven; and we will consent to the establishment of no government over the territories in question which does not provide against the introduction of slaves and slave law. And we, said those on the opposite side, will consent to none which does. Moreover, proviso or no proviso, with law or against it, we will go there, and our slaves shall go with us, and none shall hinder. Your slaves shall not go, was again the answer: the black flag of that barbarous institution

shall never wave on the Pacific coast. It shall wave there, was the reply that came back from the South, it shall wave there, though we bear it thither amid surrounding bayonets, and in the face of marshalled hosts!

How was such a dispute to be adjusted without either a violent sundering of the Union, the voluntary relinquishment of claimed rights, on the one hand, or the giving up of cherished principles on the other? Just at this crisis the hand of God uncovered the gold-mines; and thenceforth it was settled that California at least must be free. In her golden dust there was a motive power which was sure to bring northern enterprise to her shores, and speedily to fill her valleys and cover her hills with men who would be true to the principles of their fathers, and would honor their early homes by refusing to have fellowship with oppression. But why might not the sons of the South be attracted thither, in as great or greater numbers than those of the North? Sure enough, why? Not because they were less the lovers of wealth, but because when there is a demand for enterprise, skill and labor, they are never found volunteering first and in greatest numbers. It required the energy which only the soil of freedom nourishes, to furnish the means and the men that during the last few months have gone from the prairies and forests of the West, and the harbors of the East. The men who composed the recent State Convention in California only expressed their own spontaneous sentiment and that of the thousands of new comers, when they incorporated into their Constitution the provision by which slavery is excluded. California is free! Free, independently of the determination of the North that she should be so; and in spite of the determination of the South that she should not. The question of her freedom is settled, not by the parties between whom it has been in dispute, but by a third party, suddenly called into being by the discovery of her golden placers-a power whose jurisdiction in the case is undeniable. It is settled without the threatened disruption of the Union, without a voluntary relinquishment of claimed rights on the part of the South, and without the giving up of cherished principles on the part of the North. The most earnest advocate of slavery and slave extension, can not refuse with a good grace now to consent that her soil shall be free for the slaves of the South are not kept out by Congressional legislation, but by the free choice of their own citizens. As well might the right to prohibit slavery within her own boundaries be denied to the territory of Minnesota, when she shall propose to become a state, as to California. And yet, we have been forewarned of a plan by which it is still hoped that a portion of her soil may be devoted to the interests of the "peculiar institution." "Her territory is too extensive for a single State," is the suggestion which comes from the South; let it be divided, and let the

northern portion be now set off as a state, and received into the Union, and the southern be reserved for another state to be admitted at some future period." Too extensive, is it? Why was not the territory of Texas too extensive? With her admission to the Union as a precedent, we do not believe that this stratagem, devised by southern ingenuity, has any chance of success. Moreover, if it should succeed, we do not believe anything would be gained to slavery. Bounded on the north by a free state, every way fitted to be her model, and receiving thence her first forming and guiding influences, the chances are ten to one that by her own choice the second Californian state would be as free as the first. We think therefore, that the conclusion is warranted, that whatever of danger to our institutions seemed to be involved in the settlement of the slavery question, as it is related to our new territories, has been averted.

We do not forget that so far as New Mexico is concerned, the same difficulty still remains to be settled; but it is confessed on all hands that, be the action of Congress what it may, slavery can not live there, because there, slave labor can never be made productive. There will doubtless be a warm contest for and against the right to carry slaves there. The representatives of the south, with accustomed chivalric demonstrations will contend for its recognition, while those of the north will, and for the sake of the possible bearing of the decision on future congressional action, ought to contend against it. Failing to accomplish their purpose by other means, the representatives of the South, as their custom is, will undoubtedly resort to scheming, and endeavor to open a door for slavery by admitting the claim of Texas to the territory in question; while we hope and believe that the representatives of the North will resist that claim to the uttermost, and secure, as they can by their united strength, its defeat. But since in no case can slavery be made to flourish there, there is little occasion to apprehend that serious consequences will grow out of the dispute.

In deciding against the extension of human bondage, the providence of God has, it seems to us, inflicted a fatal blow upon the institution within its present limits. It has long been understood that to confine slavery, is in the end to destroy it; and hence the anxiety of the slaveholder to give it latitude. The profits of slaveholding in the older slave states, would not now sustain the system, were it not for their practice-a practice so odious that the thought of it fills every right-hearted man with loathing-of breeding human beings like cattle for market in the south and southwest a traffic hardly second in atrocity to the African slave traffic, universally branded as piracy. Thanks to the discovery of the gold mines, the limits of slavery are now practically fixed; and all the slave states must ultimately become old with no market farther south or farther west for the slaves, or their off

spring, whose labor on an exhausted soil has ceased to be profitable. Thus the doom of slavery is written. Thus the element, which, more than any other, has threatened us with national shipwreck seems destined to be wholly eradicated from our system. Surely, then, it is not in vain that an overruling Providence has so long withheld the treasures of the extreme West from human grasp, and just at this crisis has revealed them in all their extent and attractiveness.

Nor is it in vain for the interests of freedom throughout the world; for whatever threatens freedom here, threatens freedom everywhere, and whatever delivers it from danger here, delivers it from a universal danger. Our government is a sun in the firmament of political freedom which is destined to be the center of an extended and glorious system. Whatever threatens to make that sun go out in darkness, threatens the myriads that are to live in its light, with the gloom of a night whose succeeding morning no man can foretell. Whatever tends to make it hold on its way securely, tends to confer on those myriads the advantages of a bright and ceaseless day. In blessing us politically therefore, the finding of a land of gold in like manner blesses the world.

But the finding of such a land has religious as well as political bearings. He who in future years shall tell the process by which this vast country has been kept for Christ, will give no obscure place to the gold discoveries and gold excitement of the present period.

It has often been said that what the West is, the whole country will be; and it may be said with an emphasis, now that the West is beginning to be understood as embracing all the territory between the Alleghanies and the Pacific Ocean. Much has been done for the laying of true religious foundations, in the older West; but the discovery of the gold region has secured the planting of the gospel on the Pacific slope earlier, and hence in more hopeful circumstances than elsewhere.

In our new settlements generally, growth is gradual. Though each census makes it appear rapid, it is still gradual. Commonly years pass after the depths of the forest first resound with the echo of the woodman's axe, ere there is strength of numbers and means adequate to establish to the full, and maintain, the institutions of religion, Before God is worshiped in a Protestant sanctuary, it is more than likely that infidelity has begun to strike deep its roots, and perhaps, by the aid of foreign means, false religion has reared her temple and begun to direct the current of religious thought. Thus error gains a vantage ground on which to stand in her conflict with truth, ere the conflict begins. Thus the gospel is compelled to wield its weapons against an enemy to whom a long period has been granted for self-entrenchment. Not so is it at San Francisco, and the other towns which have so