In any analysis of the influences affecting the course of civil government in Oregon a prominent place should be given to that slow yet powerful westward movement of population. It consisted of a people aggressive and assertive of their own desires, patriotic, and upright in the main, with a consciousness of their own wants and their ability to get them, and possessing but little knowledge of, or reverence for, the intricacies of international usage, or the restrictions of a conservative legislative body. Being a part of the people, they were the sovereign power, and if they determined upon having the west, it must finally be had. This was a movement which led thousands of intrepid immigrants to anticipate the government in going to remote regions. Those who remained behind had now a greater interest in the country, and ere long it was to be the impulse from this movement which aroused the national consciousness to the importance of the Oregon question, gave it a place among the problems of the nation, put it upon the platform of a political party as a prominent issue, and forced a settlement of the boundary, and finally secured a civil government. After all other difficulties were overcome, after the barrier of distance was removed, after the stormy season of threatened war over the boundary line had passed away, civil government in Oregon became inevitably connected with another question which was to affect its destiny. The deepening bitterness between the north and the south was drawing everything into the maelstrom of slavery discussion, and particularly was this true in the case of every piece of newly acquired territory whose destiny was inseparably connected with the defeat or justification of the system of slavery.