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Slavery Question in Oregon. 243 Really the people were worn out by the incessant impor- tunities of the self-seeking politicians, and obtained an ease- ment by giving 5593 majority in favor of a State government. In the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, there was successful opposition to the Democrats in four counties, but not enough to speak of. The ratio stood about five to one. General Lane was again successful over his op- ponent, George W. Lawson, an independent Democrat of free-state proclivities, who was defeated by the usual majority. Mr. Lawson was a fluent and entertaining speaker and prob- ably polled the full strength of the opposition. He discussed a great number of topics, while the real issue was not brought to the front. In after years he affiliated with the Republi- cans, but in the main disappeared from politics in the practice of his profession, the law. There was one remarkable feature of the slavery agitation in Oregon preceding the vote upon the Constitution, and that was the lack of agitation. As one of the surviving Democrats remarked recently, There was not much agitation." Cer- tainly there was not, such as Wendell Phillips and Sam Lewis produced east of the Rocky Mountains. All parties assembled at their meetings; opposing ingredients are necessary to con- stitute an agitation. No such opportunity occurred here for reasons already stated. The number of Whigs who were willing to be known as Republicans was very small, and the papers in opposition to the Democracy, The Oregonimi and The Argus, had a very limited circulation, twelve or fifteen hundred each, taken mostly by the same persons, and therefore did not reach one-eighth of the people. And furthermore, of necessity their function w^as not so much agitation as segrega- tion. With them, as with The Statesman, the w^arfare in great part, w^as personal and partisan, a condition which may seem deplorable, but such was human nature in the nineteenth century and may be as much so in the twentieth. The Chinese are not entirely wrong when they thunder w^ith gongs to inspirit and increase their own numbers and distract their foes, and Americans acknowledge it when they