such measure, either in the senate or in the house, or, as was the case in the early history of congressional agitation, in both houses of congress. This early discussion in congress of our interests in Oregon, though it failed to reach any practicable plan of occupation, was not without valuable results. It served to clarify the minds of men in congress, and out of it, on the nature of the question involved, and through the information brought out and published in the course of the debates and reports went far toward enlightening the public mind on the character and resources of the territory in dispute. In the course of the negotiations that preceded the convention of 1818, and led up to it, Mr. Adams, as Secretary of State, in a letter of instructions to the American Plenipotentiaries, had expressed his government’s low estimate of the interests involved in the Oregon Question. “It may be proper,” he then wrote, “to remark the minuteness of the present interests, either to Great Britain or to the United States, involved in this concern, and the unwillingness, for this reason, of this government to include it among the objects of serious discussion with them.” Such words, written on the eve of the first congressional agitation of the question, could hardly have been written at the close of that discussion. For at that time the Oregon Question had become a matter of widespread interest, and both government and people were disposed to include it among objects of serious discussion. Agitation of the question in congress had the further effect of bringing the two governments to make another attempt to effect a settlement by convention. In 1824, when measures providing for occupation had been discussed in congress for three years, Mr. Adams, Secretary of State, wrote that though the government was aware that the convention of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain had four years to run, the President was of the opinion that the present was not an unsuitable moment for attempting a new and more definite adjustment of the claims of the two powers in question; that the Oregon Territory was a country daily assuming an aspect political, commercial, and territorial of more and more interest to the United States. Negotiations were at this time renewed between the two governments, but failed to issue in any agreement. Two years later they were resumed, on motion of the British government, but the two governments adhering substantially to their several positions of 1818, no settlement was reached. The third article of the convention of 1818 was, however, renewed for an indefinite period. In the communications of Mr. Clay to Mr. Gallatin during this period of negotiation, there is manifested an increase of interest in the question on the part of the American government, even over that of two years before.