The Daily Astorian

For the Portland Lobby.

The Washington territorial assembly will meet one week from next Monday. We understand that the Portland board of trade, not satisfied with the painstaking efforts of Captain Flavel and Captain A. M. Simpson to do the piloting on the Columbia river bar without losses, have decided to ask the territorial assembly to create new offices and increase the number of pilots on the bar, so that the little Dundee and "British colony" at Portland may succeed in getting up an opposition on the bar between rival companies; and thus, by taking desperate chances occasionally, as all opposition steamers do, they can pile up a few wrecks here, (a thing which has been unknown since the tug Astoria came on the bar.) And then these over-zealous board of trade fellows may publish to the world with some plausibility, that the British bark this, and the British ship that, were wrecked on entering Columbia river bar. They want a few vessels lost here, to serve their purpose of driving commerce away; they cannot blackmail nor browbeat Captains Flavel and Simpson. They tried to get their bill through the Oregon assembly last session, but the fraud was too transparent; now they boast that they will secure from Washington territory what they failed to secure in Oregon. As Brother Newell of the Walla Walla Statesman, says: "If persistent lying will accomplish anything," they may get their jobs through, but we have too much confidence in the members of the territorial assembly to believe that they will enact a law in the interest of the Portland grain ring, affecting the commerce of this city—we may say the entire Columbia river basin—a law which was repudiated by the Oregon assembly.