I Reminded The Duke That General
Cass Had Said, "I Have An Awful Swallow ('swaller' Was His
Pronunciation) For Territory;
" And all Americans have that "awful
swallow." The dream of possessing a country extending from the Pole to
the Isthmus
Of Panama, if not to Cape Horn, has been the ambition of
the Great Republic - and it is a dangerous ambition for the rest of the
world. We have seen its effects in all our treaties. We have always
been asked for land. We gave up Michigan after the war of 1812.
We gave up that noble piece, the "Aroostook" country, now part of the
State of Maine, under the Ashburton Treaty in 1841. We have, again,
been shuffled out of our boundary at St. Juan on the Pacific, under an
arbitration which really contained its own award. The Reciprocity
Treaty was put an end to, in 1866, by the United States, not because
the Great West - who may govern the Union if they please - did not want
it, but because the Great West was cajoled by the cunning East into
believing that a restriction of intercourse between the United States
and the British Provinces would, at last, force the subjects of the
Queen to seek admission into the Republic. So it was, and is and will
be; and the only way to prevent aggression and war was, is, and will
be, to "put our foot down." Not to cherish the "peace-in-our-time"
policy, or to indulge in the half-hearted language, to which I shall
have hereafter to allude - but to combine and strengthen the sections of
our Colonial Empire in the West - to give to their people a greater
Empire still, a nobler history, and a prouder lot:
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