w little or nothing of
the facts, couldn't tell you the history of a single case. But what
are the facts to the man who asks, "What has England done in this war,
anyway?" The word "land-grabber" has been passed to him by German
and Sinn Fein propaganda, and he merely parrots it forth. He couldn't
discuss it at all. "Look at the Boers," he may know enough to reply, if
you remind him that England's land-grabbing was done a good while ago.
Well, we shall certainly look at the Boers in due time, but just now
we must look at ourselves. I suppose that the American who denounces
England for her land-grabbing has forgotten, or else has never known,
how we grabbed Florida from Spain. The pittance that we paid Spain in
one of the Florida transactions never went to her. The story is a plain
tale of land-grabbing; and there are several other plain tales that show
us to have been land-grabbers, if you will read the facts with an honest
mind. I shall not tell them here. The case of the Indian is enough in
the way of an instance. Our own hands are by no means clean. It is not
for us to denounce England as a land-grabber.

You cannot hate statistics more than I do. But at times there is no
dodging them, and this is one of the times. In 1803 we paid Napoleon
Bonaparte fifteen millions for what was then called Louisiana. Napoleon
had his title to this land from Spain. Spain had it from France. France
had it--how? She had it because La Salle, a Frenchman, sailed down the
Mississippi River. This gave him title to the land. There were people on
the bank already, long before La Salle came by.

It would have surprised them to be told that the land was no longer
theirs because a man had come by on the water. But nobody did tell them.
They were Indians. They had wives and children and wigwams and other
possessions in the land where they had always lived; but they were red,
and the man in the boat was white, and therefore they were turned into
trespassers because he had sailed by in a boat. That was the title to
Louisiana which we bought from Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Louisiana Purchase was a piece of land running up the Mississippi,
up the Missouri, over the Divide, and down the Columbia to the Pacific.
Before we acquired it, our area was over a quarter, but not half, a
million square miles. This added nearly a million square miles more. But
what had we really bought? Nothing but stolen goods. The Indians were
there before La Salle, from whose