The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law. It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself. It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very dangerous. The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why, they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for the benefit of the North? This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted legislation. The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory. Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849 and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state. Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it would elect to become a slave state.