a chance to capture it.... Our navy, so inferior to our neighbor's across
the Channel, will always cause our colonies to be exposed to great
risks.... As to the sea, my dear fellow, you must know that there we have
to lower the flag.... The English navy is, and long will be, too
dominant."

That was on April 17. On May 2, the Treaty of Cession was signed by the
exultant Livingston. Bonaparte, instead of establishing an outpost of
autocracy at New Orleans, sold to us not only the small piece of land
which we had originally in mind, but the huge piece of land whose
dimensions I have given above. We paid him fifteen millions for nearly a
million square miles. The formal transfer was made on December 17 of that
same year, 1803. There is my second jackstraw.

Thus, twenty years after the first time in 1783, Great Britain stood
between us and the designs of another nation. To that other nation her
fleet was the deciding obstacle. England did not love us so much, but she
loved France so much less. For the same reasons which I have suggested
before, self-interest, behind which lay her democratic kinship with our
ideals, ranged her with us.

To place my third jackstraw, which follows twenty years after the second,
uninterruptedly in this group, I pass over for the moment our War of 1812.
To that I will return after I have dealt with the third jackstraw,
namely, the Monroe Doctrine. It was England that suggested the Monroe
Doctrine to us. From the origin of this in the mind of Canning to its
public announcement upon our side of the water, the pattern to which I
have alluded is for the third time very clearly to be seen.

How much did your school histories tell you about the Monroe Doctrine? I