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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: 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
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