It is not intended to enter into the merits of the question, which has been completely discussed, since the object of this paper is only to show that there remain on both sides certain debatable questions; and that therefore both Governments may, if so disposed, recede from some of their pretensions, without any abandonment of positive rights, and without impairing national honor and dignity. Although Great Britain seems, in this discussion, to have relied almost exclusively on the right derived from actual occupancy and settlement, she cannot reject absolutely those derived from other sources. She must admit that, both in theory and practice, the claims derived from prior discovery, from contiguity, from the principle which gives to the first discoverer of the mouth of a river and of its course a claim to the whole country drained by such river, have all been recognized to a certain, though not well-defined extent, by all the European nations claiming various portions of America. And she cannot deny the facts, that (as Mr. Greenhow justly concludes) the seashore had been generally examined from the 42d, and minutely from the 45th to the 48th degree of latitude, Nootka Sound discovered, and the general direction of the coast from the 48th to the 58th degree of latitude ascertained, by the Spanish expeditions, in the years 1774 and 1775, of Perez, Heceta, and Bodego y Quadra; that the American Captain Gray was the first who, in 1792, entered into and ascertained the existence of the River Columbia, and the place where it empties into the sea; that, prior to that discovery, the Spaniard Heceta was the first who had been within the bay, called Deception Bay by Meares, into which the river does empty; that, of the four navigators who had been in that bay prior to Gray's final discovery, the Spaniard Heceta and the American Gray were the only ones who had asserted that a great river emptied itself into that bay, Heceta having even given a name to the river (St. Roc), and the entrance having been designated by his own name (Ensennada de Heceta), whilst the two English navigators, Meares and Vancouver, had both concluded that no large river had its mouth there; that, in the year 1805, Lewis and Clarke were the first who descended the river Columbia, from one of its principal western sources to its mouth; that the first actual occupancy in that quarter was by Mr. Astor's company, on the 24th of March, 1811, though Mr. Thompson, the astronomer of the British Northwest Company, who arrived at Astoria on the 15th of July, may have wintered on or near some northern source of the river in 52 degrees north latitude; that amongst the factories established by that American company one was situated at the confluence of the Okanagan with the Columbia, in about 49 degrees of latitude; that the 42d degree is the boundary, west of the Stony Mountains, established by treaty between Spain, now Mexico, and