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not unknown in our history. He frankly grants the impossibility of arresting the westward progress of the population, but he objects to the bill because he has no wish to accelerate something he considers inevitable. His main reason is one evidently not peculiar to him, since Floyd had already animadverted to it in his own speech : 25
"In the nature of things the people of the east and west sides of the Rocky Mountains must have a perma- nent separation of interests. . . . (The states of the Atlantic seaboard) are held together by bonds of com- merce and self defense. The commerce of the Pacific slope people will be carried on with the Orient. They can have no inducement to trade with us. ... The connection would be an inconvenience and a burden to both."
It must be apparent already on what a vagueness of geographical knowledge both the friends and enemies of the measure were proceeding. Tucker is a good exam- ple ; his Oregon is 4000 miles away. The distance varies from three to four thousand miles though one speaker raises it to five thousand. It is apparent that Tucker regards westward expansion on the analogy of the swarming of a beehive : Density leads to emigration and the result is an independent swarm. As an alternative he saw but one thing, colonization. He, in company with a large number of others, disliked a colony as uncon- genial to republican institutions. So far as they were concerned there were but these two sides to the situa- tion, unencouraged but unobstructed emigration followed by political independence, or a long, expensive, anti-re- publican colonial system. They had no desire to see in- troduced "those distant praetorships whose effects were so pernicious in the Roman Empire," As to the protec- tion of the whaling industry all that would be necessary would be a military post; ships could refit or rebuild on
25 Op. cit., p. 423.
