settle upon the public lands and make improvements upon
them, before they are surveyed as well as afterwards, in all cases where
such settlements may be made after the Indian title shall have been
extinguished.

If the right of preemption be thus extended, it will embrace a large and
meritorious class of our citizens. It will increase the number of small
freeholders upon our borders, who will be enabled thereby to educate
their children and otherwise improve their condition, while they will be
found at all times, as they have ever proved themselves to be in the
hour of danger to their country, among our hardiest and best volunteer
soldiers, ever ready to attend to their services in cases of emergencies
and among the last to leave the field as long as an enemy remains to be
encountered. Such a policy will also impress these patriotic pioneer
emigrants with deeper feelings of gratitude for the parental care of
their Government, when they find their dearest interests secured to them
by the permanent laws of the land and that they are no longer in danger
of losing their homes and hard-earned improvements by being brought into
competition with a more wealthy class of purchasers at the land sales.

The attention of Congress was invited at their last and the preceding
session to the importance of establishing a Territorial government over
our possessions in Oregon, and it is to be regretted that there was no
legislation on the subject. Our citizens who inhabit that distant region
of country are still left without the protection of our laws, or any
regularly organized government. Before the question of limits and
boundaries of the Territory of Oregon was definitely settled, from the
necessity of their condition the inhabitants had established a temporary
government of their own. Besides the want of legal authority for
continuing such a government, it is wholly inadequate to protect them in
their rights of person and property, or to secure to them the enjoyment
of the privileges of other citizens, to which they are entitled under
the Constitution of the United States. They should have the right of
suffrage, be represented in a Territorial legislature and by a Delegate
in Congress, and possess all the rights and privileges which citizens of
other portions of the territories of the United States have heretofore
enjoyed or may now enjoy.

Our judicial system, revenue laws, laws regulating trade and intercourse
with the Indian tri