"There is another strong objection to the proposed agreement. Among the oldest traditions of the Federal Government is an aversion to political alliances with European powers. In his memorable farewell address, President Washington says: The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.' President Jefferson, in his inaugural address in 1801, warned the country against 'entangling alliances.' This expression, now become proverbial, was unquestionably used by Mr. Jefferson in reference to the alliance with France of 1778-an alliance, at the time, of incalculable benefit to the United States; but which, in less than twenty years, came near involving us in the wars of the French revolution, and laid the foundation of heavy claims upon Congress, not extinguished to the present day. It is a significant coincidence, that the particular provision of the alliance which occasioned these evils was that, under which France called upon us to aid her in defending her West Indian possessions against England. Nothing less than the unbounded influence of Washington rescued the Union from the perils of that crisis, and preserved our neutrality.

"But the President has a graver objection to entering into the proposed convention. He has no wish to disguise the feeling that the compact, although equal in its terms, would be very unequal in substance. France and England, by entering into it, would disable themselves from obtaining possession of an island remote from their seats of government, belonging to another European power, whose natural right to possess it must always be as good as their own-a distant island in another hemisphere, and one which by no ordinary or peaceful course of things could ever belong to either of them. If the present balance of power in Europe should be broken up, if Spain should become unable to maintain the island in her possession, and France and England should be engaged in a death struggle with each other, Cuba might then be the prize of the victor. Till these events all take place, the President does not see how Cuba can belong to any European power but Spain.

"The United States, on the other hand, would, by the proposed convention, disable themselves from making an acquisition which might take place without any disturbance of existing foreign relations, and in the natural order of things. The island of Cuba lies at our doors. It commands the approach to the Gulf of Mexico, which washes the shores of five of our States. It bars the entrance of that

great river which drains half the North American continent, and with its tributaries forms the largest system of internal water-communication in the world. It keeps watch at the door-way of our intercourse

with California by the Isthmus route. If an island like Cuba, belonging to the Spanish Crown, guarded the entrance of the Thames and the Seine, and the United States should propose a convention like this to France and England, those powers would assuredly feel that the disability assumed by ourselves was far less serious than that which we asked them to assume.

"The opinions of American statesmen, at different times, and under varying circumstances, have differed as to the desirableness of the acquisition of Cuba by the United States. Territorially and commercially it would, in our hands, be an extremely valuable possession. Under certain contingencies it might be almost essential to our safety. Still, for domestic reasons, on which, in a communication of this kind, it might not be proper to dwell, the President thinks that the incorporation of the island into the Union at the present time, although effected with the consent of Spain, would be a hazardous measure; and he would consider its acquisition by force, except in a just war with Spain, (should an event so greatly to be deprecated take place,) as a disgrace to the civilization of the age.

"The President has given ample proof of the sincerity with which he holds these views. He has thrown the whole force of his constitutional power against all illegal attacks upon the island. It would have been perfectly easy for him, without any seeming neglect of duty, to allow projects of a formidable character to gather strength by connivance. No amount of obloquy at home, no embarrassments caused by the indiscretions of the colonial government of Cuba, have moved him from the path of duty in this respect. The captaingeneral of that island, an officer apparently of upright and conciliatory character, but probably more used to military command than the management of civil affairs, has, on a punctilio in reference to the purser of a private steamship, (who seems to have been entirely innocent of the matters laid to his charge,) refused to allow passengers and the mails of the United States to be landed from a vessel having him on board. This certainly is a very extraordinary mode of animadverting upon a supposed abuse of the liberty of the press by the subject of a foreign Government in his native country. The captain-general is not permitted by his Government, 3,000 miles off, to hold any diplomatic intercourse with the United States. He is subject in no degree to the direction of the Spanish minister at Washington; and the President has to choose between a resort to force, to compel the abandonment of this gratuitous interruption of commercial intercourse, (which would result in war,) and a delay of weeks and months, necessary for a negotiation with Madrid, with all the chances of the most deplorable occurrences in the interval-and all for a trifle, that ought to have admitted a settlement by an exchange of notes between Washington and the Havana. The President has,

however, patiently submitted to these evils, and has continued faithfully to give to Cuba the advantages of those principles of the public law under the shelter of which she has departed, in this case, from the comity of nations. But the incidents to which I allude, and which are still in train, are among many others which point decisively to the expediency of some change in the relations of Cuba; and the President thinks that the influence of France and England with Spain would be well employed in inducing her so to modify the administration of the Government of Cuba as to afford the means of some prompt remedy for evils of the kind alluded to, which have done much to increase the spirit of unlawful enterprise against the island. "That a convention such as is proposed would be a transitory arrangement, sure to be swept away by the irresistible tide of affairs in a new country, is, to the apprehension of the President, too obvious to require a labored argument. The project rests on principles applicable, if at all, to Europe, where international relations are, in their basis, of great antiquity, slowly modified, for the most part, in the progress of time and events; and not applicable to America, which, but lately a waste, is filling up with intense rapidity, and adjusting on natural principles those territorial relations which, on the first discovery of the continent, were in a good degree fortuitous.

"The comparative history of Europe and America, even for a single century, shows this. In 1752 France, England, and Spain were not materially different in their political position in Europe from what they are now. They were ancient, mature, consolidated states, established in their relations with each other and the rest of the world-the leading powers of western and southern Europe. Totally different was the state of things in America. The United States had no existence as a people; a line of English colonies, not numbering much over a million of inhabitants, stretched along the coast. France extended from the Bay of Saint Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi; beyond which, westward, the continent was a wilderness, occupied by wandering savages, and subject to a conflicting and nominal claim on the part of France and Spain. Everything in Europe was comparatively fixed; everything in America provisional, incipient, and temporary, except the law of progress, which is as organic and vital in the youth of states as of individual men. A struggle between the provincial authorities of France and England for the possession of a petty stockade at the confluence of the Monongahela and Alleghany, kindled the seven years' war; at the close of which, the great European powers, not materially affected in their relations at home, had undergone astonishing changes on this continent. France had disappeared from the map of America, whose inmost recesses had been penetrated by her zealous missionaries and her resolute and gallant adventurers; H. Doc. 551—vol 6—30

England had added the Canadas to her transatlantic dominions; Spain had become the mistress of Louisiana, so that, in the language of the archbishop of Mexico, in 1770, she claimed Siberia as the northern boundary of New Spain.

"Twelve years only from the treaty of Paris elapsed, and another great change took place, fruitful of still greater changes to come. The American Revolution broke out. It involved France, England, and Spain in a tremendous struggle, and at its close the United States of America had taken their place in the family of nations. In Europe the ancient states were restored substantially to their former equilibrium but a new element, of incalculable importance in reference to territorial arrangements, is henceforth to be recognized in America.

"Just twenty years from the close of the war of the American Revolution, France, by a treaty with Spain-of which the provisions have never been disclosed-possessed herself of Louisiana, but did so only to cede it to the United States; and in the same year Lewis and Clark started on their expedition to plant the flag of the United States on the shores of the Pacific. In 1819 Florida was sold by Spain to the United States, whose territorial possessions in this way had been increased threefold in half a century. This last acquisition was so much a matter of course that it had been distinctly foreseen by the Count Aranda, then prime minister of Spain, as long ago as 1783. "But even these momentous events are but the forerunners of new territorial revolutions still more stupendous. A dynastic struggle between the Emperor Napoleon and Spain, commencing in 1808, convulsed the peninsula. The vast possessions of the Spanish Crown on this continent-vice-royalties and captain-generalships, filling the space between California and Cape Horn-one after another, asserted their independence. No friendly power in Europe, at that time, was able, or, if able, was willing, to succor Spain, or aid her to prop the crumbling buttresses of her colonial empire. So far from it, when France, in 1823, threw an army of one hundred thousand men into Spain to control her domestic policies, England thought it necessary to counteract the movement by recognizing the independence of the Spanish provinces in America. In the remarkable language of the distinguished minister of the day, in order to redress the balance of power in Europe, he called into existence a New World in the Westsomewhat overrating, perhaps, the extent of the derangement in the Old World, and not doing full justice to the position of the United States in America, or their influence on the fortunes of their sister republics on this continent.

"Thus, in sixty years from the close of the seven years' war, Spain, like France, had lost the last remains of her once imperial possessions on this continent. The United States, meantime, were, by the arts of

peace and the healthful progress of things, rapidly enlarging their dimensions and consolidating their power.

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The great march of events still went on. Some of the new republics, from the effect of a mixture of races, or the want of training in liberal institutions, showed themselves incapable of self-government. The province of Texas revolted from Mexico by the same right by which Mexico revolted from Spain. At the memorable battle of San Jacinto, in 1836, she passed the great ordeal of nascent states, and her independence was recoginzed by this Government, by France, by England, and other European powers. Mainly peopled from the United States, she sought naturally to be incorporated into the Union. The offer was repeatedly rejected by Presidents Jackson and Van Buren, to avoid a collision with Mexico. At last the annexation took place. As a domestic question, it is no fit subject for comment in a communication to a foreign minister; as a question of public law, there never was an extension of territory more naturally or justifiably made.

"It produced a disturbed relation with the Government of Mexico; war ensued, and in its results other extensive territories were for a large pecuniary compensation on the part of the United States, added to the Union. Without adverting to the divisions of opinion which arose in reference to this war, as must always happen in free countries in reference to great meaures, no person surveying these events with the eye of a comprehensive statesmanship can fail to trace in the main result the undoubted operation of the law of our political existence. The consequences are before the world. Vast provinces, which had languished for three centuries under the leaden sway of a stationary system, are coming under the influences of an active civilization. Freedom of speech and the press, the trial by jury, religious equality, and representative government, have been carried by the Constitution of the United States into extensive regions in which they were unknown before. By the settlement of California, the great circuit of intelligence round the globe is completed. The discovery of the gold of that region-leading, as it did, to the same discovery in Australiahas touched the nerves of industry throughout the world. Every addition to the territory of the American Union has given homes to European destitution and gardens to European want. From every part of the United Kingdom, from France, from Switzerland and Germany, and from the extremest north of Europe, a march of immigration has been taken up, such as the world has never seen before. Into the United States-grown to their present extent in the manner described—but little less than half a million of the population of the Old World is annually pouring, to be immediately incorporated into an industrious and prosperous community, in the bosom of which they find political and religious liberty, social position, employment, and