the treaty was signed by which the United States, for the sum of $15,000,000, came into possession of an immense territory extending from the North Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The loan necessary was negotiated through the celebrated house of Hope, of Amsterdam, the money was paid to France, and the United States entered upon its vast estate. The very next year President Jefferson sent out the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the headwaters of the Columbia River, and caused a complete survey to be made to its mouth. This river had been discovered in 1792, by Captain Robert Gray, a native of Tiverton, Rhode Island, and a famous navigator, who sailed in a ship fitted out by Boston merchants. Had Jefferson's energetic action been followed up with equal vigor by his successors we would never have had the Oregon boundary dispute, and Marcus Whitman would never have felt summoned to take that famous ride so worthily chronicled by Oliver W. Nixon. * * * With Aaron Burr's alleged treason I will deal very briefly. It will always be a disputed point whether that restless and unprincipled and yet gifted person plotted to alienate territory of the United States, or only to play the part of a Northman in territory belonging to Spain. Admitting Burr to be innocent of designs against the United States, he was nevertheless guilty of quasi-treason if he schemed to erect a separate government within Spanish possessions to which the American Republic was already heir apparent. The murder of Alexander Hamilton by Burr under the forms of a duel, which preceded his mysterious expedition in the southwest, and his subsequent attempt to claim British allegiance on the ground that he had been a British subject before the Revolution, were other extraordinary incidents in the career of a man in whom distinguished talents were utterly without the anchor of morality. * * *