ever, enable the United States to avoid war with Mexico. We have said that Polk and his followers did not want war. They merely wanted something that could not be obtained without war. So the Mexican War promptly came on. We need not review its course. The United States was easily victorious. But in the results of that war were several pieces of the bitterest irony ever conceived by a remorseless Nemesis, which must have rankled until death in the souls of those who engineered the unhallowed enterprise. One was that in securing so large a part of Mexico we also acquired another boundary dispute. The maps used in making the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were inaccurate and there soon afterward arose a dispute as to the ownership of the Masilla Valley, lying south of the Gila River. The United States coveted this region, supposing it to be rich in precious minerals and to be invaluable as the path of a railroad from the Atlantic coast to southern California, and so, through a treaty negotiated by James Gadsden of South Carolina, in December, 1853, it purchased it from Mexico for the sum of $10,000,000—an enormous sum for a small bit of territory, in proportion to what was paid for other acquisitions. Perhaps we may regard it as the unconscious paying of "conscience money" to Mexico for the wrong we had done her a few years before.

Again, it had been expected, as we have already

said, that Texas would be divided into five states, with ten senators at Washington, and that New Mexico and the southern part of California would be erected into states, each with two senators, thus increasing by fourteen the slave strength in the Senate. But Texas remained, and remains to this day, a single state, with only two senators. New Mexico remained, and remains to this day, a territory without a single vote in Congress. And the whole of California quickly came into the Union as a free state! Never was engineer more disastrously hoist with his own petard than were the pro-slavery expansionists. At every point the conspiracy for the extension of slave statehood, though conducted at the cost of a war and of national honor, egregiously failed. Nor was that all. Calhoun, speaking on the Mexican War, in the Senate on February 24, 1847, with the prescience of a seer, truly said, "It has closed the first volume of our political history under the Constitution, and opened the second." It had, more than all other proceedings before it, led to the rise of sectionalism in national policies, an ominous thing that was to be got rid of only at the price of another and incomparably more costly war.

We have already described the general area acquired by the United States as the fruits of its criminal aggression upon Mexico. The outcome of its scarcely less criminal concession in the northwest was that it had to be content with pos

session of the present states of Oregon and Washington and parts of Wyoming and Montana, instead of holding also a large part of what is now British Columbia. Thus the present continental domain of the United States was completed and its boundaries were fixed, as they have since remained for just half a century and as they bid fair to remain for immeasurable time to come. The MexicanOregon chapter in our history cannot be regarded with pride or pleasure. It is true that great good has followed as its sequel. But when an overruling Providence brings good out of evil, the evil remains none the less evil still. Let it be unhesitatingly granted that it is well, for us and for the world, that we possess both Texas and California. Let it be granted that it was our "manifest destiny" to acquire them. The fact remains that they might have been acquired peaceably and honorably instead of violently and dishonorably.

THE story of Alaska suggests a curious application of the principle that "the first shall be last." Russia was the first European power to which what we may call the American riot act was read. Russian aggressions, or the direct menace of them, caused the first formal enunciation of the fundamental principle of the Monroe Doctrine, made, as we have already seen, by John Quincy Adams to the Russian minister months before Monroe issued his famous message. The Monroe Doctrine itself was directed against Russia more than any other power, since the "Holy Alliance" was a thing chiefly of Russian devising, and it was the Russian government that was most eager to undertake the work of suppressing, or undoing, the revolution in South and Central America and of restoring those countries to Spanish or other European and monarchical control; a step which, had it been accomplished, would almost certainly have led Russia and her reactionary allies to attempt the conquest of the

United States and its subjection to European despotism. Russia also, it will be recalled, arbitrarily invaded California and established settlements on its coast, from which she had to be expelled by the United States under threat of force. Yet this same Russia, strangely enough, lingered upon this continent long after the departure of France and Spain, and finally left it at her own volition, and was succeeded by the United States only through a bit of chance, and partly as an unexpected result of our abandonment of northern Oregon.

We may safely accord to Russia full original title to Alaska, by virtue of discovery, conquest, and occupation. It was a Russian agent, Vitus Bering, who, under the Russian flag, in 1741 set out from Kamchatka on a voyage of discovery, and likewise of indescribable peril, hardship, and tragedy. It was a Russian, Michael Novidiskov, who, in 1745, first of all white men landed on Attoo Island, the extreme end of the Aleutian chain now belonging to our territory of Alaska. It was the Russian fur-hunters who, for a century thereafter, tortured and slaughtered the helpless natives of Alaska with a savagery unsurpassed elsewhere in the history of conquest. By the end of the eighteenth century no fewer than sixty Russian companies were settled and were operating in northwestern America, almost exclusively engaged in the fur trade. All these