Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/226

186 country a wilderness, to maintain amicable relations with the Indians, and to depend mainly on the fur-trade for the great profits of their enterprise. The policy of the American immigrants was to build homes, cities, roads, steamboats, mills, develop the country, crowd out the natives, and depend on mining, farming, stock-raising, lumbering, for their profits; not profits of a monopoly located in a distant money centre, but profits of the individual worker on his own land. The difference was world-wide. It represented two different conceptions of government and of life itself.

But though the American people had the manifest destiny of expanding to the Pacific, the Government was strangely supine. We say "strangely," but it was not so strange after all. Congress was dominated by the South in the interest of slavery, and by the East in the interest of the tariff. Calhoun usually led the South, and he weighed everything in the scales of slavery. Webster governed Eastern sentiment largely, and he spoke for New England manufacturers. It is true that Clay was at all times a power in the councils of the nation, and Clay's constant word was nationalisation and expansion. But even Clay was so committed to the tariff that he did not always appreciate the possibilities of the "West-most West." The Presidents of the period from 1819 to 1846 were from the South or the Atlantic seaboard and not usually inclined to regard the far West with special interest.

The American people were away ahead of the American government in the struggle for possession of Oregon. A few of the utterances of leading statesmen of that period as significant of their con-