Philip Hardin gives him the details of the coming struggle of North
and South. It is a battle for the coast from Arizona to Oregon. Lost
to England, Russia, and France, lost to the Mormons by stupidity or
neglect, this West is lost to the South by the defeat of slavery.
Industrious farmers come, in fairly equal numbers, from the Northern
and Southern agricultural States. The people of the Atlantic free
States come with their commerce, capital, and institutions. The
fiat of Webster, Clay, and Seward has placed the guardian angel
of freedom at the gates and passes of California. The Southerner
cannot transfer his human slave capital to the far West. The very
winds sing freedom's song on the wooded heights of the Sierras.

Philip Hardin sighs, as he drains his glass, "Valois, our people
have doomed the South to a secondary standing in the Union. This
fatal blunder in the West ruins us. Benton and Fremont's precipitancy
thwarted our statesmen. This gold, the votes of these new States,
the future commerce, the immense resources of the West, all are cast
in the balance against us. We must work for a Western republic.
We must wait till we can fight for Southern rights. We will conquer
these ocean States. We will have this land yet."

The legal Mephisto and his pupil are true to the Southern cause.
Neither of them can measure the coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie
Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba
Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American
children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never
blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob
Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the
beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They