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238 the boundary line of Maine. There was reason for uneasiness in the well known leaning of Mr. Webster toward certain commercial advantages to be got by treaty from Great Britain, and his low estimate of the value of the Oregon Territory to the United States. We now know that for this and for other reasons the prevalent apprehensions of the time in regard to the Oregon Territory were not groundless. The evidence is now at hand that the President and his secretary did contemplate a treaty with England which would involve a surrender of territory on the North Pacific Coast such as no administration hitherto had been willing for a moment to consider. The compensation, however, for the territory surrendered was not, as was then surmised, to be found wholly, if at all, on the Atlantic Coast.

It will be remembered that the Oregon Question was not the only question that agitated the country at this time. There was the Texas question, well nigh as old as that of Oregon, lately become pressing through events in Texas itself, and through the growing importunity of the Southern States. Then, too, there was the California question, not a question of as widespread and popular interest as either of the others, but one which for a decade or more had been of growing interest to a narrow but intelligent circle. There was a popular demand for the assertion and maintenance of our rights in Oregon; there had come to be a popular demand for the annexation to the union, or the reannexation, as some chose to put it, of Texas; while as far back as the second administration of President Jackson there had been a desire on the part of farseeing statesmen to secure from Mexico the cession to the United States of so much of California as to include the bay of San Francisco. England was interested in Texas, was even thought by many in the United States to be contemplating making it a colony; England had