Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/188

 in the same body with Webster. His course showed that he was both an apt and a discriminating learner.

It was naturally at a late period that the United States Government turned its attention to internal improvements as a part of its necessary and legitimate province. The improvement as well as the defence of the ports on the Atlantic coast, doubtless limited the views of many at the adoption of the Constitution. The duty of laying out military and postal roads necessarily involved the construction of roads for the transportation of inter-State commercial products. When at last the Mississippi River, as well as the line of northern lakes, became as much as inland roads, highways for commerce, it was time that the partial system—in a double sense of that term—become both a general and an equable system. Houston came into Congress just at the time when such a system was to be considered and inaugurated. While Tennessee had her special claims as a sharer in this general provision, it was for other States that the legislation first called for was to be made; and Houston's mind from the first embraced at once the whole country in which, as a soldier during the second war, he served, from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, to the swamps of Florida.

The latest question to arise, that of resistance to the planting of monarchical governments through European influence, on the North American Continent, was nevertheless an old issue; though under Monroe it took the form of a declared policy. When the Colonies declared themselves independent, the resistance to European supremacy began; but it was an afterthought which framed the Federal Republic, distinct from the aristocratic governments of Spain in Mexico and Florida, of France in Louisiana, and of England in Canada. When, however, the States formed out of the ceded French and Spanish territory, acquired in 1803 and 1819, came into the Union, it was essential that, under the Federal Constitution, they should be Republican. When, again, Mexico, in 1821, after a struggle of years, became independent of Spain, and when the next year, 1822, it adopted a Republican Constitution, the action of European monarchies adverse to the Republic, which would, if recognized as legitimate, have justified alike European intervention to overthrow the United States Government, brought about a crisis which compelled for self-preservation the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine. In July, 1822, led by France under the restored Bourbon rule, representatives of several continental powers, met at Verona, Italy, determined to unite in aiding Spain to recover her power in Mexico. Inasmuch as England's sway in Canada, once a French possession, was threatened, Mr. Canning, then Secretary of Foreign Affairs, privately invited the President of the United States