than before a national goal of expansion which appealed to all imaginative minds.
Henceforth in South and North, as well as West, the men whose eyes were fixed on the future whose interests were higher than cotton or the tariff, whose imagination had been kindled by the vision of a great nation stretching from ocean to ocean, more and more gathering to its broad embrace the commerce of the European world with that ancient and mysterious East, were the tireless champions of Oregon. To Oregon of all our territories in the North was there a stream of emigration from the Southern States. Oregon alone of all the territories whose acquisition has been subjected to previous popular discussion, has appealed to all sections without discrimination. Oregon was not desired to provide new territory for slavery or to preserve the equilibrium between the North and the South; nor was its acquisition opposed from similar considerations. No clash of sections, no mutterings foreboding civil war, grew out of the agitation for Oregon, as was the case with Texas; nor was the completion of our title to that part which we secured followed by crises like that precipitated by the acquisition of California simultaneously with the discovery of gold. Oregon, alone, I may repeat, was national in its appeal, looking to a future national greatness and to future international connections, alike desirable to all who had confidence in American institutions and in the capacity of man to remove physical obstacles; and Quixotic to an equal degree in the eyes of those to whom the physical obstacles seemed insuperable and of those who distrusted democratic government on the grand scale.
The second administration of James Monroe, once characterized as the Era of Good Feeling, is now universally remembered as the period of the official annunciation of the intention of the United States to play a larger part in
