By a purchase, of which we frankly announced that the alternative would be war, we acquired from France the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana.
Teddy Roosevelt
The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
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In doing this they not only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also won the land from its European owners.
The Americans when they became a nation continued even more successfully the work which they had begun as citizens of the several English colonies.
The Indians have shrunk back before our advance only after fierce and dogged resistance.
Their presence has caused the process of settlement to go on at unequal rates of speed in different places; the flood has been hemmed in at one point, or has been forced to flow round an island of native population at another.
Relatively to their numbers, they have shown themselves far more to be dreaded than the Zulus or even the Maoris.
By the time the English had consolidated the Atlantic colonies under their rule, the Indians had become what they have remained ever since, the most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock.
When the whites first landed, the superiority and, above all, the novelty of their arms gave them a very great advantage.
Many other tribes stayed for a time the oncoming white flood, or even drove it back; in Maine the settlers were for a hundred years confined to a narrow strip of sea-coast.
The Iroquois, for instance, held their own against all comers for two centuries.
In what now forms the United States, taking the country as a whole, the foes who had to be met and overcome were very much more formidable.
The gold miner, the transcontinental railway, and the soldier have been the pioneers of civilization.
When these continents were settled they contained the largest tracts of fertile, temperate, thinly peopled country on the face of the globe.
The English-speaking peoples now hold more and better land than any other American nationality or set of nationalities.
They also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land.
It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them.
The vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled cannot be rightly understood if considered solely by itself.
England's insular position, moreover, permitted it to work out its own fate comparatively unhampered by the presence of outside powers; so that it developed a type of nationality totally distinct from the types of the European mainland.
More important still were the radical changes brought by the Norman conquest; chief among them the transformation of the old English tongue into the magnificent language which is now the common inheritance of so many widespread peoples.
Yet the rule and the race of Goth, Frank, and Burgund have vanished from off the earth; while the sons of the unknown Saxon, Anglian, and Friesic warriors now hold in their hands the fate of the coming years.
There sprang up in conquered southern Britain, when its name had been significantly changed to England, that branch of the Germanic stock which was in the end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, and by its overshadowing growth to…
The day when the keels of the low-Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast was big with the doom of many nations.
The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John.
The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande.
The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents.
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