Under these conditions, the annexation, sooner or later, was inevitable. No man and no party could oppose it except at serious cost. It is not true that schemes of annexation are always popular. Several administrations have lost heavily by proposing them. Grant failed with Santo Domingo; Seward with St. Thomas; and it required all his skill and influence to accomplish the ratification of the Alaska purchase. There is no general desire among Americans for acquiring outlying territory, however intrinsically valuable it may be; their land-hunger is confined within the limits of that of a Western farmer once quoted by Mr. Lincoln, who used to say, "I am not greedy about land; I only want what jines mine." Whenever a region contiguous to the United States becomes filled with Americans, it is absolutely certain to come under the American flag. Texas was as sure to be incorporated into the Union as are two drops of water touching each other to become one; and this consummation would not have been prevented for any length of time if Clay or Van Buren had been elected in 1844. The honorable scruples of the Whigs, the sensitive consciences of the "Liberty" men, could never have prevailed permanently against a tendency so natural and so irresistible. Everything that year seemed to work against the Whigs. At a most unfortunate time for them, there was an outbreak of that "native" fanaticism which reappears from time to time in our politics with the periodicity of malarial fevers, and always to the profit of the party against which its efforts are aimed. It led to great disturbances in several cities, and to riot and bloodshed in Philadelphia. The Clay party were, of course, free from any complicity with these outrages, but the foreigners, in their alarm, huddled together almost as one man on the side where the majority of them always voted, and this occasioned a heavy loss to the Whigs in several States. The first appearance of Lincoln in the canvass was in a judicious attempt to check this unreasonable panic. At a meeting held in Springfield, June 12, he introduced and supported resolutions, declaring that "the guarantee of the rights of conscience as found in our Constitution is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic than the Protestant, and that all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights either of Catholic or Protestant, directly or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall have our most effective opposition." Several times afterwards in his life Lincoln was forced to confront this same proscriptive spirit among the men with whom he was more or less affiliated politically, and he never failed to denounce it as it deserved, whatever might be the risk of loss involved.