"The treaty, Mr. President, of 1819, was a great oversight on the part of the Southern States. We went into it blindly, I must say. The great importance of Florida, to which the public mind was strongly awakened at that time by peculiar circumstances, led us precipitately into a measure by which we threw a gem away that would have bought ten Floridas. Under any circumstances, Florida would have been ours in a short time; but our impatience induced us to purchase it by a territory ten times as large--a hundred times as fertile, and to give five millions of dollars into the bargain. Sir, I resign myself to what is done; I acquiesce in the inexorable past; I propose no wild and chimerical revolution in the established order of things, for the purpose of remedying what I conceive to have been wrong originally. But this I do propose: that we should seize the fair and just occasion now presented to remedy the mistake which was made in 1819; that we should repair as far as we can the evil effect of a breach of the constitution; that we should re-establish the integrity of our dismembered territory, and get back into our Union, by the just and honorable means providentially offered to us, that fair and fertile province which, in an evil hour, we severed from the confederacy. "But the boundary line established by the treaty of 1819 not only deprives us of this extensive and fertile territory, but winds with "a deep indent" upon the valley of the Mississippi itself, running upon the Red River and the Arkansas. It places a foreign nation in the rear of our Mississippi settlements, and brings it within a stone's throw of that great outlet which discharges the commerce of half the Union. The mouth of the Sabine and the mouth of the Mississippi are of a dangerous vicinity. The great object of the purchase of Louisiana was to remove all possible interference of foreign States in the vast commerce of the outlet of so many States. By the cession of Texas, this policy was, to a certain extent, compromised.