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396 Documents. goods from the mouth of the Columbia as cheap as from Boston or New- York, We have, then, in our favor a distance of nearly fifteen thousand miles of sea navigation. The beneficial effects of this advantage would soon be felt as far as the banks of the Mississippi and Ohio. But suppose we do not, the future inhabitants of Oregon will reap these advantages. And who will they be? Our friends, relations, and countrymen, who may emigrate to those delightful regions. Every State that is occupied by our people will add to the general prosperity. They will be neighbors and friends and countrymen. Those who emigrate will be as much at home on the shores of the Pacific as on the banks of the Mississippi. Who is there here that has not come from some other State? He who has left Massa- chusetts, Virginia, or Georgia, to settle in Illinois, feels himself as much in his own native country as if he had never removed. The same national feeling still exists. He has not expatriated ; he has not sworn allegiance to any other Government ; he is still in the United States, under the same laws, entitled to the same protection, and proud of the same stars and stripes that waved over the place of his birth. It would be the same with him on the shores of the Pacific. The advantages which have been enu- merated would be enjoyed by us if we chose to go there, and would still be enjoyed by us here in the persons of those who do go. Their happiness would be our happiness ; their prosperity would be our prosperity ; and their wealth would add to the general wealth and power of the nation. Mr. Semple said that he regretted exceedingly that the western bound- ary had not been settled in the late treaty of limits with England. He considered the right of the United States to the whole of Oregon, as far north as the Russian boundary, as clear as the noon-day sun. He thought that the right of the State of Maine to all that she claimed equally as clear. But a foreign nation laid claim to a part of that territory without any shadow of right whatever. Yet, we have seen the special agent of that nation refusing even to discuss the question of right ; and yet proposing, for the sake of peace, to divide the country in dispute, and we have seen that proposition agreed to by the Executive and Senate of the United States. Mr. S. said he was as much in favor of peace as he thought any citizen of the United States ought to be. But, for himself, he would have preferred war before he would have yielded one inch of the territory claimed by the State of Maine. It is possible, before a long time, there will be a proposition, for the sake of peace, to divide the Oregon with the British. Will the West ever allow it? God forbid! Mr. S. said that if ever we were obliged to have war, he wanted to have as many good causes of war, and as many parts of the country interested in it as possible. If we had gone to war about the limits of Maine, we of the West would have been equally interested, and would have been found fighting together. But we have divided the question ; we have settled the Maine controversy, and left ours unsettled. Will Maine and Massachusetts now have the same interest in a war for the Oregon, as if their own boundary were at stake? Mr. Semple here went into an explanation of what he considered to be the foundation of the right of the United States to the whole of the Oregon, as far as the Russian boundary, and the frivolous pretences of the British in laying claim to any part of it. He concluded by hoping that the West would never give up one acre of that country, though war, and repeated wars, might be the consequence of such refusal.