opinion that the Southern people were not virtuous enough to emancipate their slaves, voluntarily and that nothing short of adversity would compel them. This was an estimate of his people which he resented with observable warmth of manner, but in temperate language, showing a provincial spirit quite new to me. Still, I was at fault, in not then comprehending that the beneficiaries of privilege, whether North or South, East or West, never let go except upon compulsion. After fifty-two years of experience, we smile when recollecting our youthful ignorance, but we have advanced and are still advancing, in the only possible way for human beings, by groping. For further information concerning the educational antecedents of Mr. Craig's Oregon career, see Mr. Himes' Press History, before mentioned.
One of the most conspicuous figures in Oregon during the time between 1850 and 1860, was T. J. Dryer, editor of The Oregonian newspaper. He was a fluent, effervescent and popular speaker and writer; in politics a Whig with a lineage reaching back to the Revolutionary War, and with never a doubt that anything the Whig party proposed was right and needed no vindication, and that everything the Democrats favored was wrong and deserved nothing but denunciation. Hence, as the Democratic party was the preferred instrument for advancing the slave-holding interest, Mr. Dryer, from the habit of opposition as well as from principle, naturally fell into the ranks of the free-state men of Oregon, who proclaimed themselves as such. One writer whose article upon that subject was published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, makes Mr. Dryer the chief influence and factor of resistance to the adoption of the institution in this State, but from what I saw of The Oregonian in those days, and a recollection of my impressions formed at the time, I am quite sure that Mr. Dryer's services in that connection are much overrated by his biographical friend. The Oregonian was a distinctively Whig journal with incidental anti-slavery proclivities, and remained so for two years after the birth of the Republican party, its editor, Mr. Dryer, appearing for the
