Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/199

EVENT OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO 187 claims of the United States to the Columbia River Country, and that his influence in the Monroe administration was very great.

During recent years casual writers of history have accorded some emphasis to a mistaken doctrine that Oregon was nearly lost to the United States through the indifference of the government and the people. Mr. H. Addington Bruce, a gifted writer upon a wonderfully wide range of subjects, in his "The Romance of American Expansion," 1909, advanced this conclusion. In this year, 1918, Bishop James Bashford of the M. E. Church in his "The Oregon Mission" (p. 81) concurs with Mr. Bruce. In that connection it is not amiss to direct attention to the friendly attitude to Oregon acquisition of John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, whose career needs no rehearsing, 'during all of the years 1814-1846. In the same letter to Mr. Rush he wrote: "If the United States leave her (Great Britain) in undisturbed enjoyment of all her holds upon Europe, Asia and Africa, with all her actual possessions in this hemisphere, we may fairly expect that she will not think it consistent either with a wise or friendly policy to watch with eyes of jealousy and alarm every possibility of extension to our natural dominion in North America, which she can have no solid interest to prevent, until all possibility of her preventing it shall have vanished."