Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/53

 "Fifth. It is an object, worthy the attention of government, to secure the friendship of the Indians, and prevent alliances between them and other nations. . ..

"Sixth, The settlement of the Oregon country, would conduce to a freer intercourse, and a more extensive and remunerative trade with the East Indies. . . . Such an extension and enjoyment of the East India Trade, would provoke the spirit of American enterprise, to open communications from the Mississippi valley, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific ocean, and thus open new channels, through which the products of America and the Eastern world, will pass in mutual exchange, saving in every voyage, a distance of ten thousand miles; new channels, which opening across the bosom of a widespread ocean; and intersecting islands, where health fills the breeze and comforts spread the shores, would conduct the full tide of a golden traffic into the reservoir of our national finance.

"Seventh. Many of our seaports would be considerably benefitted by taking emigrants from their redundant population. It is said, and truly so, that business of all kinds is overdone; that the whole population cannot derive a comfortable support from it; hence the times are called hard; which generally press the hardest upon those, who pursue the useful occupations of laborious industry.

"The learned profession might spare some of their wise and erudite votaries who, in Oregon, could find meeds of immortal honours. Many of industrious habits and honest lives, whose reputations have been blasted by the foul breath of calumny; these, with the unfortunate and oppressed, but virtuous of all orders, could there find an asylum, and succeed to a better condition.

"These hastily written observations must be concluded by the remark, that all nations, who have planted colonies, have been enriched by them."

The first date set for the starting of an expedition to the