Much disorder brings with it much order. Informed of all the evils to which this state of affairs gave rise, Governor Riley, in 1849, called the people to meet in convention for the forming of a State government. The delegates accordingly assembled in September at Monterey. They framed a constitution, on the plan of the free States, prohibiting slavery; for as labor was to be the corner-stone of the State, the men of 1849 would not degrade free labor by competition with slave-labor. In November the constitution was ratified by the people; and in December the officers elected under it met at San José to fully organize the State government. [Illustration: CHICKEN-VENDER.] The petition of California to be a free State was strongly resisted by the Southern men in Congress, who had hoped it would come in as a slave State. Once again it brought up the whole subject of slavery extension. Eventually the struggle gave rise to another compromise by which California came in as a free State (1850), the slave-trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, and the Fugitive Slave Law passed, mainly by the efforts of Henry Clay. The execution of the last-named law roused the indignation of the North as nothing had ever yet done. Resistance to slavery extension was now become the dominant question there in politics, in literature, and in the pulpit. The doctrine that the people of a territory alone should have the right to decide whether they would have slavery or not had been urged with much force by Senator Douglas in the case of California; and thus popular sovereignty, as it was called, now first brought together the moderate partisans of slavery, those indifferent to its extension, and those who believed such a settlement as Mr. Douglas proposed would lift the question out of party agitation, and so put a stop to the threats of secession, which was the bugbear of all who loved the Union. ARIZONA. A dispute having arisen with Mexico about the boundary the war had established, President Pierce settled it by buying the territory in question (1853) for ten millions of dollars. General James Gadsden negotiated its transfer, and for him it was called the Gadsden Purchase. The United States thus acquired the strip of country lying between the Gila River and the present southern boundary of Arizona. Prior to its purchase it had formed part of the Mexican State of Sonora. Mr. Gadsden exerted himself to secure with it the port of Guaymas on the Gulf of California, but was not sustained by Congress in his effort to do so.