404 conclusion. [1845. 



ment for their numerous vessels, engaged in the trade and fishery 

 of the Pacific, particularly as there is a prospect that they may in 

 time be excluded from the Sandwich Islands ; and also to prevent 

 those territories from falling into the hands of any other power, 

 which might direct against their western frontiers the hordes of 

 Indians roving through the middle and westernmost divisions of the 

 continents. Great Britain, on the other hand, can have no motive 

 for opposing the occupation of Oregon by the United States, except 

 that of checking their advancement, by excluding their vessels from 

 the Pacific, and by maintaining an influence deleterious to their 

 interests and safety, over the savages in their vicinity. 



Great Britain, at present, possesses the advantage, as regards the 

 forcible and temporary occupation both of Oregon and California*, 

 where a few ships of w r ar stationed in the Bay of San Francisco, 

 the Columbia, and Puget's Sound, might doubtless control the Amer- 

 ican settlements, all necessarily situated in the vicinity of the 

 coast, and receiving nearly all their supplies of foreign articles by 

 sea. But that she should, within any period which it is now pos- 

 sible to foresee, furnish a population to the regions in question, 

 there are certainly no grounds for supposing. Her provinces in 

 America have no redundance of inhabitants ; and what induce- 

 ments can be offered in good faith to her subjects in Europe, for 

 undertaking a voyage of six months to the Columbia, or a voyage to 

 Canada and a subsequent journey of four thousand miles through 

 her wild and frozen Indian territories, so long as the West Indies, 

 Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and, lastly — the United 

 States — are open to them ? The difficulties experienced by 

 American citizens, in their passage to Oregon, along the valleys of 

 the Platte and the Lewis, great though they may be at present, sink 

 into insignificance, when compared with those which British sub- 

 jects must encounter, in proceeding to that country, by either of the 

 routes above indicated : and the contrast becomes still stronger, 

 when we compare the character and habits of Americans, trained 

 from their childhood to struggle and provide against the hardships 

 and privations incident to the settlement of a new country, with 

 those of Europeans, accustomed only to a routine of labor the most 

 simple, and the least calculated to nourish energies or to stimulate 

 invention. 



END OF THE HISTORY. 



