He understood the gentleman from New York as denying that there existed in the United States, as such, a capacity to acquire territory; that, by the constitution, they were restricted to the limits which existed at the time of its adoption. If this position be correct, it undeniably follows that those limits must have been accurately defined and generally known at the time when the Government took effect. Either they have been particularly described in the constitutional compact, or are referred to as settled beyond dispute, and universally acknowledged. But this was not the fact, in either case. The constitution not only did not describe any particular boundary, beyond which the United States could not extend, but our boundary was unsettled on our north-eastern, southern, and north-western frontier, at the time of its adoption. But perhaps we shall be told, that, although our limits were in dispute with our English and Spanish neighbors, still there were certain boundaries specified in the Treaty of Paris, of 1783, which were the actual boundaries of the United States. It was, however, a well attested fact--one of which we possessed official information from the Executive--that the limits assigned us by that treaty were incapable of being established. A line running west, from the Lake of the Woods, not touching the Mississippi at all--it followed that the United States were without limits beyond the source of the Mississippi. It will not be denied, that, among the powers which the Government possesses under the constitution, there exists that of settling disputes concerning our limits with the neighboring nations. This power was not only necessary in relation to the disputed boundaries on the side of Canada and Florida, but was indispensable to a government over a country of indefinite extent. The existence of this power will not be denied: it has been exercised in ascertaining our north-eastern and southern frontier, and it involves in it the power of extending the limits of the Confederacy. Let us suppose that the Commissioners, under the Treaty of London, had determined the river St. John or St. Lawrence to be the _true_ St. Croix--would not that part of the province of New Brunswick or Quebec which lies on this side of those rivers at this time have been a part of the United States? Suppose the northern boundary of Florida had been fixed, under the Treaty of San Lorenzo, to extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf; would not all the country north of this line and east of the Mississippi--part of the very country conveyed by the treaty lately negotiated, and which gentlemen conceived we could not constitutionally hold--would not that country, at this time, compose a part of the United States? That the constitution should tie us down to particular limits, without expressing those limits; that we should be restrained to the then boundaries of the United States, when it is in