Juliet Signal

From the Washington Union.

The President's Course on the Oregon Question.

It is a fact very significant, and well worth noting, that the whig journals most unscrupulous in their hostility to the administration, can now find no more hopeful method of attack against it than a most vain and futile attempt to convict the President of self-contradiction or inconsistency in the conduct of the Oregon negotiation--and this, too, after that whole matter has been finally settled in accordance with the preliminary advice, and subsequent ratification, of more than two-thirds of the Senate the co-ordinate branch of the treaty-making power! What a tribute is thus unwillingly paid to the merit of the administration by its most rancorous enemies, when, for very want of other pretexts, this old and settled topic- now among the "by gones"--is thus raked up in the delusive and desperate hope that it may at least furnish something --however weak and false-for the leading opposition journals to say against the official course of the President! Yet this is just the case. Both the National Intelligencer, and Baltimore American, among other journals, come to us this morning with long leading articles devoted to this subject, which, by the way, the Intelligencer has been laboring at for several days. And yet, neither of their articles shakes at all, nor indeed, makes what can be called any serious attempt to shake, any of the positions taken by us in our brief explanation, of the subject published on Tuesday last.

Now, at the risk of depriving these journals of their last broken weapon of attack--their one spavined and jaded cheval de bataille we will meet them on this field once more.

We confidently assert--and we will prove by a full citation of official documents and instructions running through the whole period intervening between the inaugural address on the 4th of March, 1845, and the President's last message to the Senate submitting to them according to their advice, the Oregon treaty for ratification on the 16th of June, 1846 --that the whole position and course of the President in relation to the Oregon negotiation, have been entirely uniform and consistent.

We will show in the same manner that
the President continually reiterated, as occasion required and in various forms of official statement, throughout this whole period his settled conviction that our title to the whole of the Oregon Territory up to 54° 40', was clearly and unquestionably the best title in existence.

We will show, in the same manner, that with this full conviction as to our title, the President did yet hold himself, as the representative of the American government, obligated and constrained by the action of predecessors, and the previous course of the government, to make a proposition in the first instance, or the partition of that territory on the line of 49.

We will show, in like manner, that the President; from the first to the last deem any other settlement of the question on any basis substantially more unfavorable to the United States, entirely inadmissible under any circumstances and at any hazard.

We will show, in the same manner, that after the proposition of partition on the line of 49, as first made by the President solely in deference to the previous action of our government, had been rejected and thereupon withdrawn, the President at once falling back upon our valid title to the whole territory as always asserted by him signified to our minister in London that any other proposition emanating from the British government, and not admitting our right to the whole territory, could only be submitted by the President to the Senate for its previous approval; and that the only question which the President would undertake to decide with regard to any such proposition from England, would be the propriety of such a submission of it to the Senate.

And lastly, we will prove in the same manner that the language held by the President to both houses of Congress, in all his official communications to them on the subject, subsequent to his withdrawal of his proposition for a partition of the territory, was in strict conformity to this intimation so given to our minister in London.

These positions, if they can be established, put the question of the President's consistency in reference to the Oregon question at rest forever. We will establish them to the letter by citations from the documents at an early day.

We may add, further, that after the proposition for a partition of the territory made by the President had been withdrawn, the "Notice," which he then recommended to be given, became, in his view, the main instrument by which the negotiation must be brought, if brought at all to a satisfactory conclusion. And we believe that all candid and intelligent men are now just coming to believe that if this great measure had been promptly carried out by Congress as recommended by the President, it would have been effectual to procure for the United States an adjustment of the controversy on terms then more advantageous to this country than those which have even now obtained.