"Only a small portion of the land is capable of cultivation. It is a case where the American people have been misled, as to soil and climate. In a few years all that gave life to the country, both the hunter and his prey, will be extinct, and their places supplied by a thin half-breed population, scattered along the fertile valleys, who will gradually degenerate into a barbarism far more offensive than backwoodsmen." In view of the utterances of the American press and statesmen, we remain silent in any criticism of England. It was acting no dishonorable part in Oregon. They were simply using to their great profit a vast territory the United States owned, but did not want to be troubled with. They, it is true, knew more of its worth than did Americans, but as far as the Hudson Bay people were concerned, they did not covet immigration, even of their own kind, only enough to hold the balance of power, and keep themselves in readiness to organize the territory, and retain it under terms of the treaty of 1818. They had great interests at stake. Modern writers have asserted over and over again that "the United States was never in any danger of losing Oregon, and needed no Whitman and his missionaries to save it!" But they cannot do away with the record which I have only tersely recited. A volume could be written, along the same line, to prove the utter lack of interest in that country. But if statesmen, in Congress and out, and the press had been silent, the single official act of the government, in signing the treaty of 1818, giving entire control of the land to England (for the Hudson Bay Company represented England), would tell the whole story of the neglect of Oregon. When ever before or since has the United States made such a deal, giving by solemn treaty, a country thirty times as large as Massachusetts, for a full twenty years and more, without a dollar of compensation, to a great foreign nation, and unresistingly seen American traders driven out or starved out of the entire country? Those making the charge of "no danger of losing Oregon by the United States" would do well to explain _this one act, which was official_, even if they make light of the utterances of the men who refused, for more than fifty years, to legislate by a single act for Oregon. It is true the treaty said: "It should not be to the prejudice of either of the high contracting parties, the only object being to prevent disputes and differences among themselves!"