blocked us up, and rioted unchecked along our coasts? You probably did

know that the British burned Washington, and you accordingly hated them
for this barbarous vandalism--but did you know that we had burned Toronto

a year earlier?
I left school knowing none of this--it wasn't in my school book, and I

learned it in mature years with amazement. I then learned also that
England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting

Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, and that this was
uncommonly lucky for us--as lucky quite as those ships from France under

Admiral de Grasse, without whose help Washington could never have caught
Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781. Did

you know that there were more French soldiers and sailors than Americans
at Yorktown? Is it well to keep these things from the young? I have not

done with the War of 1812. There is a political aspect of it that I shall
later touch upon--something that my school books never mentioned.

My next question is, what did you know about the Mexican War of 1846-1847,
when you came out of school? The names of our victories, I presume, and

of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; and possibly the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby Mexico ceded to us the whole of Texas, New

Mexico, and Upper California, and we paid her fifteen millions. No doubt
you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General, had a wooden leg. Well,

there is more to know than that, and I found it out much later. I found
out that General Grant, who had fought with credit as a lieutenant in the

Mexican War, briefly summarized it as "iniquitous." I gradually, through
my reading as a man, learned the truth about the Mexican War which had

not been taught me as a boy--that in that war we bullied a weaker power,
that we made her our victim, that the whole discreditable business had

the extension of slavery at the bottom of it, and that more Americans
were against it than had been against the War of 1812. But how many

Americans ever learn these things? Do not most of them, upon leaving
school, leave history also behind them, and become farmers, or merchants,

or plumbers, or firemen, or carpenters, or whatever, and read little but
the morning paper for the rest of their lives?

The blackest page in our history would take a long while to read. Not a
word of it did I ever see in my school textbooks. They were written on

the plan that America could do no wrong. I repeat that, just as we love
our friends in spite of their faults, and all the more intelligently

because we know these faults, so our love of our country would be just as
strong, and far more intelligent, were we honestly and wisely taught in

our early years those acts and policies of hers wherein she fell below
her lofty and humane ideals. Her character and her record on the whole

from the beginning are fine enough to allow the shadows to throw the
sunlight into relief. To have produced at three stages of our growth

three such men as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, is quite sufficient
justification for our existence

Chapter VII: Tarred with the Same Stick
The blackest page in our history is our treatment of the Indian. To speak

of it is a thankless task--thankless, and necessary.
This land was the Indian's house, not ours. He was here first, nobody

knows how many centuries first. We arrived, and we shoved him, and shoved
him, and shoved him, back, and back, and back. Treaty after treaty we

made with him, and broke. We drew circles round his freedom, smaller and
smaller. We allowed him such and such territory, then took it away and

gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout a century our promises to
him were a whole basket of scraps of paper. The other day I saw some

Indians in California. It had once been their place. All over that region
they had hunted and fished and lived according to their desires, enjoying

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We came. To-day the hunting
and fishing are restricted by our laws--not the Indian's--because we

wasted and almost exterminated in a very short while what had amply
provided the Indian with sport and food for a very long while.

In that region we have taken, as usual, the fertile land and the running
water, and have allotted land to the Indian where neither wood nor water

exist, no crops will grow, no human life can be supported. I have seen
the land. I have seen the Indian begging at the back door. Oh, yes, they

were an "inferior race." Oh, yes, they didn't and couldn't use the land
to the best advantage, couldn't build Broadway and the Union Pacific

Railroad, couldn't improve real estate. If you choose to call the whole
thing "manifest destiny," I am with you. I'll not dispute that what we

have made this continent is of greater service to mankind than the
wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been--once conceding,

as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you,
nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we

could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we
gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it

because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could
always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there was

our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on a new
thing in the world, proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope yet born,

that "All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights," and that these were now to be protected by law. Ah, no, look at

it as you will, it is a black page, a raw deal. The officers of our
frontier army know all about it, because they saw it happen. They saw the

treaties broken, the thieving agents, the trespassing settlers, the
outrages that goaded the deceived Indian to despair and violence, and

when they were ordered out to kill him, they knew that he had struck in
self-defense and was the real victim.

It is too late to do much about it now. The good people of the Indian
Rights Association try to do something; but in spite of them, what little

harm can still be done is being done through dishonest Indian agents and
the mean machinery of politics. If you care to know more of the long, bad

story, there is a book by Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor; it
is not new. It assembles and sets forth what had been perpetrated up to

the time when it was written. A second volume could be added now.
I have dwelt upon this matter here for a very definite reason, closely

connected with my main purpose. It's a favorite trick of our anti-British
friends to call England a "land-grabber." The way in which England has

grabbed land right along, all over the world, is monstrous, they say.
England has stolen what belonged to whites, and blacks, and bronzes, and

yellows, wherever she could lay her hands upon it, they say. England is a
criminal. They repeat this with great satisfaction, this land-grabbing

indictment. Most of them know 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