Better success attended a bill he introduced to establish a trading-road from Missouri through the Indian country to New Mexico, which, after much debate, passed both houses and was signed by President Monroe. The road thus marked out and established became, and remained for many years, a great thoroughfare, and among the chief of the channels through which our foreign commerce flowed. Until Benton secured the enactment of this law, so important to the interests and development of the West, the overland trade with Mexico had been carried on by individual effort and at the cost of incalculable hazard, hardship, and risk of life. Mexico, with its gold and silver mines, its strange physical features, its population utterly foreign to us in race, religion, speech, and ways of life, and especially because of the glamour of mystery which surrounded it and partly shrouded it from sight, always dazzled and strongly attracted the minds of the Southwesterners, occupying much the same place in their thoughts that the Spanish Main did in the imagination of England during the reign of Elizabeth. The young men of the Mississippi valley looked upon an expedition with one of the bands of armed traders, who wound their way across Indian-haunted wastes, through deep canyons and over lofty mountain passes, to Santa Fé, Chihuahua, and Sonora, with the same feelings of eager excitement and longing that were doubtless felt by some of their forefathers more than two centuries previously in regard to the cruises of Drake and Hawkins. The long wagon trains or pack trains of the traders carried with them all kinds of goods, but especially cotton, and brought back gold and silver bullion, bales of furs and droves of mules; and, moreover, they brought back tales of lawless adventure, of great gains and losses, of fights against Indians and Mexicans, and of triumphs and privations, which still further inflamed the minds of the Western men. Where they had already gone as traders, who could on occasion fight, they all hoped on some future day to go as warriors, who would acquire gain by their conquests. These hopes were openly expressed, and with very little more idea of there being any right or wrong in the matter than so many Norse Vikings might have felt. The Southwesterners are credited with altogether too complex motives when it is supposed that they were actuated in regard to the conquest of northern Mexico by a desire to provide for additional slave states to offset the growth of the North; their emotions in regard to their neighbor's land were in the main perfectly simple and purely piratical. That the Northeast did not share in the greed for new territory felt by the other sections of the country was due partly to the decline in its militant spirit, (a decline on many accounts sincerely to be regretted,) and partly to its geographical situation, since it adjoined Canada, an unattractive and already well-settled