In 1821, however, three years after the convention of joint occupation, a movement was begun in the Congress of the United States toward an occupation of the territory in dispute, of a very different character, which, if it had actually been adopted as a measure enjoined upon the executive, and once been attempted to be carried out, would have met from Great Britain a very different response. In the house of representatives, December 10, 1821, on motion of Mr. Floyd, of Virginia, a committee was appointed to inquire into the expediency of occupying the Columbia River and the country adjacent thereto; and the committee had leave to report by bill or otherwise. Later in the same session this committee reported a bill providing for the occupation of the mouth of the Columbia. The occupation contemplated by this bill was to be, first of all, military occupation, or, as one of the advocates of the bill wished to make it by amendment, “an occupation by military force only, with some encouragement to settlers.” The view of the territorial rights of the United States in that region on which the bill was based was briefly and clearly put by another of its advocates: “The bill under consideration does not attempt a colonial settlement. The territory proposed to be occupied is already a part of the United States.” The convention of joint occupation of 1818 left the question of sovereignty of the entire territory westward of the Rocky Mountains in abeyance. All occupation, therefore, of any part of this territory, to be lawful under this convention, must be of such a nature as to leave the question of sovereignty to be settled by agreement of the powers participant in the convention. Whatever rights either of the two parties to the convention had, or conceived that it had, by the act of entering into the convention it agreed, so long as the convention was in force, neither to assert sovereignty, nor to do any act in the territory covered by the convention that could be justly construed as an act of sovereignty. What acts the two powers might lawfully do under the convention were not clear at first, but it is difficult at this day to understand how anyone who looked carefully into the question could have failed to see that the acts contemplated in this first bill providing for occupation were not such as could lawfully be done under the convention. The same may be said of all the measures proposed in congress in regard to the occupation of the territory during the earlier period of the convention. There were men in congress who saw the unlawful character of each measure as it was proposed, and opposed it on this ground. Others joined these actively, on the ground that the Oregon Territory, if settled, because of its distance and the barriers which separated it from the United States, never could become a part of the union. To these were added enough who based their opposition on other grounds to defeat every