s
always ready to pay a fair price for the island. A more moderate man
succeeded Soule, but the subject was pressed at Madrid with increasing
persistence during the remainder of that and the next Administration.

The third item of the Democratic policy, the expansion of American
commerce, was furthered by a continuation of the subsidies to steamship
companies like the Collins line, which put upon the ocean many vessels
of the best and largest build. Even more was planned in offering Robert
J. Walker the mission to China, and the appointment of Townsend Harris,
a wealthy New York merchant, as consul to Ningpo, Japan. Walker
declined, but Harris accepted, and within two years, with the assistance
of Commodore Perry, he succeeded in opening the hermit kingdom to the
civilization and commerce of the United States. It was the beginning of
modern Japan, and it marked a new stage in the development of American
trade in the Orient. In all these measures Pierce met with some
opposition in the East, particularly in the rough handling of the Cuban
question; and there was much dislike of the Southern filibustering
against Lower California and, especially at the close of the
Administration, against Nicaragua, which was seized by William Walker,
the Tennessee imperialist already mentioned, and proclaimed in 1856 a
slave State. But the opposition was rather to the spirit and tone of
things, and the very plain subserviency of the President to Southern
wishes, than against expansion as such. The real resistance to Pierce
came on another matter and in the most unexpected way, in the struggle
over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

The stone rejected of the builders really became the head of the corner,
for in spite of all that the Pierce Administration could do, the problem
of the Northwest, which Douglas personified, became the bone of
contention between the sections, and again, as in 1850, the South, the
East, and the Northwest struggled for supremacy. When the Davis plans
for a southern Pacific railroad were maturing, Senator Douglas, the head
of the Senate Committee on Territories, was preparing to renew his
six-year fight for the opening of the wide Nebraska hinterland of his
section. The squatters of the Kansas and the Platte River Valleys were
already confronted with hostile Indians who protested against the
unlawful seizure of their lands. And now that wheat and corn were
becoming great staple crops, the Northwestern pioneers were loudl