determining influence on the problem of mankind in China, I heard Prof. F. J. Turner of the University of Wisconsin, the highest authority on western history, who writes so forcibly on the Louisiana Purchase in the current number of the _Review of Reviews_, say, that "the occupation of the Pacific Coast by the American people was not only the greatest event in American history, but a great event in all history." That the American movement Oregonward and Pacificward followed strictly in the wake of the Lewis and Clark expedition has many proofs. Even before Lewis and Clark reached Saint Louis on their homeward journey they met parties of traders and trappers bound for the heart of the wilderness from which they were returning. These were acting on the information Lewis and Clark had sent back from their Mandan winter quarters. A few months after they reached Saint Louis the Missouri Fur Company was organized to conduct operations on the Upper Missouri, that is, on the trail of Lewis and Clark. Four years later John Jacob Astor organized the Pacific Fur Company, and devised plans including a great emporium at the mouth of the Columbia, trade with China on the west, with the Russian settlements on the north, and a line of trading posts overland on the Lewis and Clark route. Astor's scheme was a feasible one, but the war of 1812 came on and England dispatched a vessel to capture the American post on the Columbia. Before this reached Astoria the British sympathizers among Astor's partners sold him out. Astor was probably the first to have a vision not only of what the nation was to gain on this coast, but also of what more might have been gained had President Madison been as bold in regard to his enterprise as was Jefferson in the Louisiana purchase. Had this been so Captain Chittenden thinks "the political map of North America would not be what it is to-day," implying that there would have been an uninterrupted American Pacific coast line from the extreme north to the Mexican boundary.