The things we do!

" [Footnote: McMaster, "History of the People of the United
States," 2:630.]
Napoleon had, indeed, made a good bargain for France, selling a
wilderness, which at best he could not well have kept long, for a price
which all the specie currency in the poor young republic would not be
adequate to meet.
It was of this domain (a part of the claim of La Salle for Louis XIV in
1682, divided between England and Spain in 1763, made one again in 1803 by
the will of Napoleon, under the control of the United States, added to by
the purchase of Florida from Spain and the acquisition of Texas, filling
all the Great Valley)--it was of this valley that, as late as the early
fifties, a member of Congress (afterward to become vice-president of the
United States, then President), Andrew Johnson, although an earnest
advocate of a liberal land policy, predicted that it would take "seven
hundred years to dispose of the public lands at the rate we have been
disposing of them." [Footnote: Speech on the Homestead bill, April 29,
1852.


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