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diers and American citizens being in great hazard, Mr Web ster could not do otherwise than vote for all the supplies de manded to carry the war on, till peace could be honorably concluded. The same principle by which he had been actua ted in 1812 again controlled his course in 1845; and he carried his patriotism, or moderation, to such a pitch, that he permitted his son Edward, a very promising young man, to enter the army as a volunteer, and sacrifice his life before the walls of Mexico. Mr. Webster never failed to submit with grace, and, if possible, to use with advantage, what he could not prevent.

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While the war with Mexico was in progress, the president raised another question, which, almost at once, threatened to excite hostilities between us and England. Mr. Polk, whose supporters in the canvass had claimed the whole of Oregon, and made 54 degrees 40 minutes a watchword of the party, and a by-word with the people, in his inaugural address, and afterwards in his first and second annual messages to congress, had stated that our right to the whole of Oregon was clear and unquestionable." This opinion, of course, was given in his official character as president of the United States; and accordingly, in the first of the above messages, he recommended that the United States should give notice to Great Britain of their intention "to terminate the convention between the two countries," concluded in 1827, for the joint occupation of the territory. A joint resolution was, therefore, introduced into the senate by Mr. Allen, of Ohio, and referred to the committee on foreign relations, who reported it back with amendments; and while the second time before the senate, it received several additional amendments and alterations. Fearing that an unqualified notice of separation would needlessly alarm the pub lic, and embarrass the settlement of the question, Mr. Critten den, of Kentucky, moved a new amendment, the purport of which was, that, in order to afford ample time for the amicable

adjustment of the question, said notice ought not to be given till after the termination of the current session of congress. On this amendment, Mr. Webster addressed the senate, and this speech, delivered on the 24th of February, 1846, was one of the very few which he was ever known to read in congress. He took the position, in opposition to the extreme language of the president, that if the Oregon dispute was ever settled, it would be settled on the forty-ninth degree of latitude. This idea was immediately scouted by the leading friends of the administration, in both houses; but the result justified the prediction, and illustrated the sagacity of Mr. Webster. The fortyninth parallel was accepted by that very president, who had asserted our right to the whole of Oregon, in such emphatic terms, " as clear and unquestionable;" and after all was over, and over to the satisfaction of the country, Mr. Webster could not fail to draw some amusement from the fact, that the very persons and the party who, in 1842 and afterwards, had threatened him with a political crucifixion for having alienated a worthless strip of disputed territory," which he and they had always looked upon not only as disputed, but as doubtful, should now surrender to the same government a section of country, to which our title was asserted by them as incontestable, which, in width, would cover the space lying between Lake Erie and North Carolina, and in length would extend nearly or quite all the way from Massachusetts to the Mississippi!

However inconsistent for Mr. Polk to settle the Oregon controversy in this way, in the face of his extreme and uncompromising assertions, the same settlement would have been proper enough for Mr. Webster, who had never taken the untenable position. The truth is, indeed, this is the very settlement which he was prepared to offer to Lord Ashburton, and which, had the noble diplomatist been instructed by his government upon this subject, would undoubtedly have constituted a portion of the treaty of Washington. In the absence of such instructions

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nothing could be accomplished, and nothing was accomplished, at that time, by Mr. Webster, in the arrangement of this question; but the merit of the settlement, nevertheless, when the settlement was in fact made, belonged, after all, not to Mr. Polk, nor to his cabinet, but to Mr. Webster, who, doubtless, would never have taken the pains to bring out the evidence of his services, in this particular, to the peace of nations and the best good of the human family. The evidence, however, came forth in an accidental manner. The London Examiner, in an article touching the relations of Great Britain and the United States, furnished the proof that it was Mr. Webster, and not the current administration, that was chiefly instrumental in bringing this vexed controversy to a peaceful and happy termination : "In reply to a question put to him in reference to the present war establishments of this country, and the propriety of applying the principle of arbitration in the settlement of disputes arising among nations, Mr. McGregor, one of the candidates for the representation of Glasgow, took occasion to narrate the following very important and remarkable anecdote, in connection with our recent, but now happily terminated differences with the United States on the Oregon question. At the time our embassador at Washington, the Hon. Mr. Paken ham, refused to negotiate on the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude as the basis of a treaty, and when, by that refusal, the danger of a rupture between Great Britain and America became really imminent, Mr. Daniel Webster, formerly secretary of state to the American government, wrote a letter to Mr. McGregor, in which he strongly deprecated Mr. Pakenham's conduct, which, if persisted in, and adopted at home, would, to a certainty, embroil the two countries, and suggested an equitable compromise, taking the forty-ninth parallel as the basis of an adjustment. Mr. McGregor agreeing entirely with Mr. Webster in the propriety of a mutual giving and taking to avoid a rupture, and the more especially as the whole territory

in dispute was not worth £20,000 to either power, while the preparations alone for a war would cost a great deal more before the parties could come into actual conflict, communicated the contents of Mr. Webster's letter to Lord John Russell, who at the time was living in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, and, in reply, received a letter from Lord John, in which he stated his entire accordance with the proposal recommended by Mr. Webster, and approved of by Mr. McGregor, and requested the latter, as he (Lord John) was not in a position to do it himself, to intimate his opinion to Lord Aberdeen. Mr. McGregor, through Lord Canning, under-secretary for the foreign department, did so, and the result was, that the first packet that left England carried out to America the proposal, in accordance with the communication already referred to, on which the treaty of Oregon was happily concluded."

While the war with Mexico was in progress, and while it was becoming more and more expensive, as well as more and more doubtful in regard to its termination, the administration proposed to amend the tariff of 1842, which had been proposed by congress, and accepted by the people, as a basis for the business of the country. Once more, indeed, every class of business, and every interest of every citizen of the republic, was to be unsettled for the sake of an experiment, for a long time the subject of party speculation, but never before tried in practice. Not only was the tariff, as a tariff, to be tampered with, but the principle of raising revenue, the principle on which all tariffs are based, was to undergo a sudden alteration. All former bills of tariff, since the beginning of the government, had been what political economists call specific, which lay certain duties on certain articles, according to their character and their relations, individually, to the business of the country. The new bill was to lay duties on all imports, with no view to the protection of any business or interest of the country. whether agricultural, commercial, or manufacturing, but with a

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sole regard to the market value of the article in ported. All former bills had aimed at both revenue and protection; and they had taken such shapes as would raise the most money for the treasury, while they extended the greatest amount of encouragement to labor, thus making common cause between the government of the people and the people of the government. The new bill proposed simply to raise money for the government, without any respect to the interests of the people. This sudden and radical change of policy, it proposed to make at a time when the people were already taxed to the amount of about half a million of dollars per day to carry on a war not of their own undertaking, but forced upon them by the influence, some would say the intrigues, of government. The new bill was, therefore, looked upon, by every unprejudiced mind, as an untried and doubtful experiment, particularly unacceptable at a time when the government and the people needed a certain reliance for the exigencies of the moment, and when the business of all classes could, with no safety, suffer a shock so sudden and so fundamental. This was the light in which Mr. Webster held it; and accordingly, in a speech of great length, delivered on the 26th and 27th of July, 1846, he met it with a steadfast and sturdy opposition. As his main positions, he ar· gued that the new bill was unjust and impolitic in itself; that it was exceedingly unfriendly to commerce; and that it would prove deleterious to the labor, and to all the laboring and producing classes, of the country. His speech was learned, eloquent, and able; but, as an opposition to the new measure, which was supported entirely on party grounds, it was unsuccessful. The bill, which introduced into our financial system the ad valorem principle of indirect taxation, passed by a strong majority, and was at once received as the established policy of the democratic party.

On the first day of August, 1846, Mr. Webster again addressed the senate on the bill "to provide for the better organ

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