America were an independent country, or were they placed in their commercial relations, at least with the United States, on the same footing as the British possessions in Europe, these relations would be regulated by the reciprocal interests and wants of the parties immediately concerned. Great Britain has an undoubted right to persist in her colonial policy; but the result has been extremely vexatious, and to the United States injurious. All this is true. But feelings do not confer a right, and the indulgence of excited feelings is neither virtue nor wisdom.

The Western States have no greater apparent immediate interest in the acquisition of Oregon than the States bordering on the Atlantic. These stand in greater need of an outlet for their surplus emigrating population, and to them exclusively for the present will accrue the benefit of ports on the Pacific for the protection of the numerous American ships employed in the fisheries and commerce of that ocean. It is true that in case of war the inhabitants of the Western States will not, if a naval superiority shall be obtained on the Upper Lakes, feel those immediate calamities of

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war to which the country along the sea shore is necessarily exposed; but no section of the United States will be more deeply affected by the impossibility of finding, during the war, a market for the immense surplus of its agricultural products. It must also be remembered that a direct tax has heretofore been found more productive than the aggregate of all the other internal taxes levied by the General Government; that, in case of war, it must necessarily be imposed; and that, as it must in conformity with the Constitution be levied in proportion to the respective population of the several States, it will be much more oppressive on those which have not yet accumulated a large amount of circulating or personal capital. The greater degree of excitement which prevails in the West is due to other and more powerful causes than a regard for self interest.

Bordering through the whole of their northern frontier on the British possessions, the Western people have always been personally exposed to those annoyances and collisions already alluded to; and it may be that the hope of getting rid of these by the conquest of Canada has some influence

upon their conduct. Independent of this, the indomitable energy of this nation has been and is nowhere displayed so forcibly as in the new States and settlements. It was necessarily directed towards the acquisition of land and the cultivation of the soil. In that respect it has performed prodigies. Three millions of cultivators of the soil are now found between the Lakes and the Ohio, where, little more than fifty years before, save only three or four half Indian French settlements, there was not a single white inhabitant. Nothing now seems impossible to those men ; they have not even been sobered by fresh experience. Attempting to do at once, and without an adequate capital, that which should have been delayed five and twenty years, and might have then been successfully accomplished, some of those States have had the mortification to find themselves unable to pay the interest on the debt they had contracted, and obliged to try to compound with their creditors. Nevertheless, undiminished activity and locomotion are still the ruling principles; the Western people leap over time and distance; a-head they must go; it is their mission. May

God speed them, and may they thus quietly take possession of the entire contested territory!

It may not be possible to calculate with any degree of certainty the number of citizens of the United States who, aided by these various measures, will, within any given period, remove to the territory beyond the Stony Mountains. It is certain that this number will annually increase, and keep pace with the rapid increase of the population of the Western States. It cannot be doubted that ultimately, and at no very distant time, they will have possession of all that is worth being occupied in the territory.

Whether more or less prompt, the result is nevertheless indubitable. The snowball sooner or later becomes an avalanche; where the cultivator of the soil has once made a permanent establishment game and hunters disappear; within a few years the fur trade will have died its natural death, and no vestige shall remain, at least south of Fuca's Straits, of that temporary occupancy of those vested British interests which the British Government is now bound to protect. When the whole territory shall have thus fallen in the posses

sion of an agricultural industrious population, the question recurs, by what principle will then the right of sovereignty, all along kept in abeyance, be determined?

The answer is obvious. In conformity with natural law, with that right of occupancy for which Great Britain has always contended, the occupiers of the land, the inhabitants of the country, from whatever quarter they may have come, will be of right, as well as in fact, the sole legitimate sovereigns of Oregon. Whenever sufficiently numerous, they will decide whether it suits them best to be an independent nation or an integral part of our great Republic. There cannot be the slightest apprehension that they will choose to become a dependent colony; for they will be the most powerful nation bordering on the American shores of the Pacific, and will not stand in need of protection against either their Russian or Mexican neighbours. Viewed as an abstract proposition, Mr Jefferson's opinion appears correct, that it will be best for both the Atlantic and the Pacific American nations, whilst entertaining the most friendly relations, to remain independent, rather