Though he was but two years my senior, I felt like a boy in his presence. His maturity and self-possession and intellectual mastery of the hour kept me silent. He recalled what he had done to bring me to the comforts of Mrs. Spurgeon's house when I arrived in Jacksonville, ill and helpless. After that he did not exactly ignore me, but I seemed not to enter into the association of his ideas or their expression. He talked of the country. There was the matter of Texas, a territory half as large as central Europe. But if Texas seceded from Mexico he wished the country absorbed into the domain of the United States. Texas has a right to secede. All governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. Let moralists and dreamers say what they would, the course of America was toward mastery of the whole of North America. Yes, and there was Oregon. If the Louisiana Purchase of 1804 did not include Oregon, what of the Lewis and Clark expedition; what of the founding of Astoria by Mr. Astor of New York, on the shores of the Columbia River; what of the restoration of Astoria to the United States in 1818 after it had been forcibly seized by Great Britain in the War of 1812? Douglas looked forward to the day when Great Britain would not have an inch of land from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. All of this vast territory should be the abiding place of liberty forever. Homestead laws should be passed with reference to it, and settlers invited to reduce it to cultivation. It should be tilled by millions of husbandmen, the most intelligent and progressive of the world. It should be crossed by railroads and canals. Already there were the Mohawk and Hudson railroad, the Boston and Albany, and the Baltimore and Ohio. Illinois should have railroads and canals; the rivers and harbors should be improved. Lake Michigan should be connected with the Mississippi River by a canal joining Lake Michigan with the Illinois River. What was it all about? National wealth as a foundation for education, power, the supremacy of the white stocks having the greatest vitality.