Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
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| from a people long accustomed to a considerable measure of liberty, and all their surroundings in their new home tended to foster an independent and self-reliant spirit. They would not have tolerated a despotism like that of France or Spain for a day; and it was inevitable that they would eventually try to throw off even England’s milder yoke, unless she adopted a course of colonial policy which was at that time understood by none but the most far-seeing or lofty-minded. Nor, indeed, is it certain that the colonists themselves, split up as they were by their province lines into jarring fragments, would have been capable of appreciating and profiting by such a course of colonial policy, even had the mother country adopted it. |
| The European theory of a colony was that it was planted by the home government for the benefit of the home government and home people, not for the benefit of the colonists themselves. Hardly any one grasped the grandeur of the movement by which the English-speaking race was to spread over the world’s waste spaces, until a fourth of the habitable globe was in its hands, and until it became the mightiest race on which the sun has ever shone. Those in power did not think of the spread of a mighty people, and of its growth by leaps and bounds, but of the planting of new trading-posts; they did not realize the elementary fact that if the men who stretch abroad the race limits by settlement |