The Secretary of State set himself against the Northern Jingoes, and though his motives may have been sectional, his arguments were really unanswerable. He pointed out that to fight England for Oregon at that moment would be to fight her under every conceivable disadvantage. An English army from India could be landed in Oregon in a few weeks. An American army sent to meet it must either round Cape Horn and traverse the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the face of the most powerful navy in the world or march through what was still an unmapped wilderness without the possibility of communications or supports. If, on the other hand, the question were allowed to remain in suspense, time would probably redress the balance in favour of the United States. American expansion would in time touch the borders of Oregon, and then the dispute could be taken up and settled under much more favourable circumstances. It was a perfectly just argument, but it did not convince the "forty-seven-forty-or-fighters," who roundly accused the Secretary--and not altogether unjustly--of caring only for the expansion of his own section. Calhoun was largely instrumental in averting a war with England, but he did not otherwise conduct himself in such a manner as to conciliate opinion in that country. England, possibly with the object of strengthening her hand in bargaining for Oregon, had intervened tentatively in relation to Texas. Lord Aberdeen, then Peel's Foreign Secretary, took up that question from the Anti-Slavery standpoint, and expressed the hope that the prohibition of Slavery by Mexico would not be reversed if Texas became part of the American Union. The intervention, perhaps, deserved a snub--for, after all, England had only recently emancipated the slaves in her own colonies--and a sharp reminder that by the Monroe Doctrine, to which she was herself a consenting party, no European Power had a right to interfere in the domestic affairs of an American State. Calhoun did not snub Lord Aberdeen: he was too delighted with his lordship for giving him the opportunity for which he longed. But he did a thing eminently characteristic of him, which probably no other man on the American continent would have done. He sat down and wrote an elaborate and very able State Paper setting forth the advantages of Slavery as a foundation for civilization and public liberty. It was this extraordinary dispatch that led Macaulay to say in the House of Commons that the American Republic had "put itself at the head of the nigger-driving interest throughout the world as Elizabeth put herself at the head of the Protestant interest." As regards Calhoun the charge was perfectly true; and it is fair to him to add that he undoubtedly believed in Slavery much more sincerely than ever Elizabeth did in Protestantism. But he did not represent truly the predominant feeling of America. Northern Democratic papers, warmly committed to the annexation of Texas,