When, in February, 1843, the senate bill failed in the house, it was understood that the two governments were in communication on the subject of the Oregon Territory. It was this understanding more than anything else that led to the suppression of the Oregon bill in the Committee on Foreign Relations. No proposal had as yet been made in official form, but it is now known that the President and his secretary had a definite policy in mind, and that while desirous of checking any measures in congress which might hinder the negotiations which they aimed to bring about, they felt obliged to conceal the nature of their policy with the utmost care, for fear of arousing opposition in congress and the country. As it was, there was no little dissatisfaction in congress with the treaty which had just been negotiated by Webster and Lord Ashburton. Like most treaties on boundary lines, this treaty was a settlement by compromise. Many citizens from the section affected by the new boundary line, and enemies of the administration from all sections, were prompt to say that the secretary had yielded too much—that he had allowed the United States to be overreached in the negotiations. The friends of Oregon took alarm. They thought they saw in the omission of the Oregon boundary from the treaty an occasion for another compromise, in which there should be a surrender of territory justly claimed by the United States. That this fear was widespread in the states of the Mississippi Valley appears from the resolutions of state legislatures presented to congress early in the following session. In more than one set of these resolutions it was manifest, through plain statement or through implication, that apprehensions for Oregon had been awakened by the terms of settlement of the boundary line of Maine. There was reason for uneasiness in the well known leaning of Mr. Webster toward certain commercial advantages to be got by treaty from Great Britain, and his low estimate of the value of the Oregon Territory to the United States. We now know that for this and for other reasons the prevalent apprehensions of the time in regard to the Oregon Territory were not groundless. The evidence is now at hand that the President and his secretary did contemplate a treaty with England which would involve a surrender of territory on the North Pacific Coast such as no administration hitherto had been willing for a moment to consider. The compensation, however, for the territory surrendered was not, as was then surmised, to be found wholly, if at all, on the Atlantic Coast.