And now let me add, that this
disproportion can never be diminished; it must remain for ever. How are
you going to diminish it? Why, here is Texas, with a hundred and
forty-nine thousand people, with one State. Suppose that population
should flow into Texas, where will it go? Not to any dense point, but
to be spread over all that region, in places remote from the Gulf, in
places remote from what is now the capital of Texas; and therefore, as
soon as there are in other portions of Texas people 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.
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