a brilliant and striking display, calculated to please and captivate the fancy, but to array before the senate a formidable front of facts, to hem in the whole house with a wall of adamantine argument, which could be neither scaled nor sapped; and he was completely successful. He commenced by a brief exordium of the most caustic irony, which fell like molten lead upon the heads of his opponents. He expressed his admiration at the more than Aristidean justice which prompted certain gentlemen, in a question of territorial title between the United States and a foreign nation, to espouse the cause of the foreign, presuming that Spain in any future negotiations, would be magnanimous enough not to avail herself of these voluntary concessions in her favor in the senate of the United States. He said he would leave the honorable gentleman from Delaware to bewail the fallen fortunes of the king of Spain, without stopping to inquire whether their loss was occasioned by treachery or not, or whether it could be traced to any agency of the American government. He confessed that he had little sympathy for princes, but that it was reserved for _the people_, the great mass of mankind, and did not hesitate to declare that the people of Spain had it most unreservedly and most sincerely. He went into a minute and circumstantial history of the territory in dispute, and proved by a chain of reasoning the most clear and satisfactory, that its title was in the United States. In doing this he adopted that mode which the nature of the subject suggested, by a critical examination of all the title papers, transfers, and all other documents in any way relating or appertaining to it. He examined the patent granted by Louis the XIV to Crozat in 1712, which patent covered the province in question, and declared that it was at that time designated by the name of the Province of Louisiana, and was bounded on the west by old and new Mexico, and on the east by Carolina. This document he regarded as settling the question beyond all doubt, that the country under consideration was embraced within the limits of Louisiana. He proved that it originally belonged to France, who claimed it by virtue of certain discoveries made by La Solle and others during the seventeenth century; that she ceded it to Spain in 1762, who retroceded it to France in 1800, by the treaty of St. Ildefonso, and that it belonged to the United States by purchase from her as a portion of Louisiana in 1803. After the most thorough investigation, considering all the ambiguous expressions unintentionally incorporated with the treaties relating to the territory, and applying to them the most impartial and rigid rules of construction, he presented the title of the United States to it as most indefeasible, and as standing on a basis which all the sophistry, and ingenuity, and ill-directed sympathy of the opposition could not shake. He then proceeded to inquire if the