never trust their interests to European arbitrators, prejudiced as
they inevitably would be by their monarchical environment.[213] This
feeling was, indeed, shared by the President and his cabinet advisers.

With somewhat staggering frankness, Douglas laid bare his inmost
motive for unflinching opposition to Great Britain. The value of
Oregon was not to be measured by the extent of its seacoast nor by the
quality of its soil. "The great point at issue between us and Great
Britain is for the freedom of the Pacific Ocean, for the trade of
China and Japan, of the East Indies, and for the maritime ascendency
on all these waters." Oregon held a strategic position on the Pacific,
controlling the overland route between the Atlantic and the Orient. If
this country were yielded to Great Britain--"this power which holds
control over all the balance of the globe,"--it would make her
maritime ascendency complete.[214]

Stripped of its rhetorical garb, Douglas's speech of January 27, 1846,
must be acknowledged to have a substratum of good sense and the
elements of a true prophecy. When it is recalled that recent
developments in the Orient have indeed made the mastery of the Pacific
one of the momentous questions of the immediate future, that the
United States did not then possess either California or Alaska, and
that Oregon included the only available harbors on the coast,--the
pleas of Douglas, which rang false in the ears of his own generation,
sound prophetic in ours. Yet all that he said was vitiated by a
fallacy which a glance at a map of the Northwest will expose. The line
of 49° eventually gave to the United States Puget Sound with its
ample harbors.

Perhaps it was the same uncompromising spirit that prompted Douglas's