As May-day approaches, Valois, at San Francisco in 1853, sees a procession of growing children. There, thousands of happy young faces of school-children, appear bearing roses in innocent hands. 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 have no regrets, like the knights of slavery, to see their places in life filled by free-born young pilgrims of life. All hail the native sons and daughters of the Golden West! But the Southern politicians forge to the front. The majority is still with them. They carry local measures. Their hands are only tied by the admission of California, as a free State. Too late! On the far borders of Missouri, the contest of Freedom and Slavery begins. It excites all America. Bleeding Kansas! Hardin explains that the circle of prominent Southerners, leading ranchers, Federal officials, and officers of the army and navy, are relied on for the future. The South has all the courts. It controls the legislature. It seeks to cast California's voice against the Union in the event of civil war. As a last resort they will swing it off in a separate sovereignty--a Lone Star of the West. "We must control here as we did in Texas, Valois. When the storm arises, we will be annexed to the Southern Confederacy."