position on the Oregon Question. The tone of his inaugural is rather more conservative upon this subject than might have been expected from the circumstances of his election. His position, as stated in this paper, was sufficiently advanced, however, to alarm the British government. In a letter of April 3, addressed to Packenham, British Minister at Washington, Lord Aberdeen said: "The inaugural speech of President Polk has impressed a very serious character on our actual relations with the United States, and the manner in which he has referred to the Oregon Question, so different from the language of his predecessor, leaves little reason to hope for any favorable result of the existing negotiation." And yet Mr. Polk, shortly after entering upon office, took up the negotiation as he found it then pending, and made an honest effort to effect a settlement upon the compromise line of his predecessors. In explanation of his course, in his annual message to congress, December following, he said: "Though entertaining the settled conviction that the British pretensions of title could not be maintained to any portion of the Oregon Territory, upon any principle of public law recognized by nations, yet, in deference to what had been done by my predecessors, and especially in consideration that propositions of compromise had been thrice made by two preceding administrations to adjust the question on the parallel of the forty-ninth degree of latitude,
and in two of them yielding the free navigation of the Columbia, and that the pending negotiations had been commenced on the basis of compromise, I deemed it my duty not abruptly to break it off. In consideration, too, that under the conventions of 1818 and 1827 the citizens and subjects of the two powers held a joint occupancy of the country, I was induced to make another effort to settle this long pending controversy in the spirit of moderation which had given birth to the renewed discussion."
