It was a few days later when I met President Grant at an evening reception given by Colonel Forney, the Secretary of the Senate. I was somewhat surprised when I saw the President coming toward me from the opposite side of the room, saying: "Senator, you have not called to see me at the White House for some time, and I have been wanting to speak to you." All I could say in response was that I was very sorry to have missed a conversation I might have had with him, but that I knew him to be a busy man who should not be robbed of his time by merely conventional visits. He repeated that he wished very much to see me. Would I not call upon him at my earliest convenience some evening? I put myself at once at his service, and went to the White House the next night. He received me in the library room and invited me to sit with him on a sofa. He plunged forthwith into the subject he had at heart. "I hear you are a member of the Senate committee that has the San Domingo treaty under consideration," he said, "and I wish you would support the treaty. Won't you do that?" I thought it would be best not to resort to any circumlocution in answering so pointblank a summons, but to be entirely frank. I said I should be sincerely happy to act with his administration whenever and wherever I conscientiously could, but in this case, I was sorry to confess, I was not able to do as he wished, because I was profoundly convinced it would be against the best interests of the republic. Then I gave him some of my dominant reasons; in short, acquisition and possession of such tropical countries with indigestible, unassimilable populations would be highly obnoxious to the nature of our republican system of government; it would greatly aggravate the racial problems we had already to contend with; those tropical islands would, owing to their climatic conditions, never be predominantly settled by people of Germanic blood; this federative republic could not, without dangerously vitiating its vital principles, undertake to govern them by force, while the populations inhabitating them could not be trusted with a share in governing our country; to the difficulties we had under existing circumstances to struggle with in our Southern States, much greater and more enduring difficulties would be added; and for all this the plan offered absolutely no compensating advantages. Moreover, the conversations I had had with Senators convinced me that the treaty had no chance of receiving the two-thirds vote necessary for its confirmation, and I sincerely regretted to see his administration expose itself to a defeat which, as I thought, was inevitable. _The Liveryman and the Foreign Mission_