Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/197

 the state of Washington and our territory of Alaska. Here is our old invet- erate and historical enemy with all its forts, and harbors and battleships, and trans-continental railroads, ready to harbor the Japansese and combine against

' American interests, and Oregon commerce, and do us more damage from these advantages cowardly given away by the Polk administration, than any army of a hundred thousand men could do attacking us from any point east of the Rocky mountains. H our government had courageously held on to all of Oregon, as the people told them to do in the presidential election of 1844, and as senators Benton and Linn vainly besought them to do, we would have had all of old Oregon today, and the Pacific ocean with all its vast commercial advantages would be practically an American lake. And for just retribution of this great wrong, some day the American people will raise up and place another Andrew Jackson in the presidential chair, and then look out, if the British flag is not pulled down from New Foundland to Vancouver island, and the Canadians told to go it alone, or come in under the stars and stripes.

And now after reviewing the history of the country for over sixty years, and considering the desperate and horrible course of the slave states in plung- ing the nation into all the horrors of the civil war, and putting the life and existence of the nation at stake, there can be but little doubt that had it not been for the American settlements in the Willamette valley, and the organization of the provisional government, which had declared against slavery, the pro- slavery president and his supporters would have given up the whole of Oregon to England to prevent the addition of another free state to the union.