Please understand me very clearly: I am not saying that it has not been far better for the world and for civilization that we should have become the rulers of all this land, instead of its being ruled by the Indians or by Spain, or by Mexico. That is not at all the point. I am merely reminding you of the means whereby we got the land. We got it mostly by force and fraud, by driving out of it through firearms and plots people who certainly were there first and who were weaker than ourselves. Our reason was simply that we wanted it and intended to have it. That is precisely what England has done. She has by various means not one whit better or worse than ours, acquired her possessions in various parts of the world because they were necessary to her safety and welfare, just as this continent was necessary to our safety and welfare. Moreover, the pressure upon her, her necessity for self-preservation, was far more urgent than was the pressure upon us. To make you see this, I must once again resort to some statistics. England’s area--herself and adjacent islands--is 120,832 square miles. Her population in 1811 was eighteen and one half millions. At that same time our area was 408,895 square miles, not counting the recent Louisiana Purchase. And our population was 7,239,881. With an area less than one third of ours (excluding the huge Louisiana) England had a population more than twice as great. Therefore she was more crowded than we were--how much more I leave you to figure out for yourself. I appeal to the fair-minded American reader who only “wants to be shown,” and I say to him, when some German or anti-British American talks to him about what a land-grabber England has been in her time to think of these things and to remember that our own past is tarred with the same stick. Let every one of us bear in mind that little sentence of the Kaiser’s, “Even now I rule supreme in the United States;” let us remember that the Armistice and the Peace Treaty do not seem to have altered German nature or German plans very noticeably, and don’t let us muddle our brains over the question of the land grabbed by the great-grandfathers of present England. Any American who is anti-British to-day is by just so much pro-German, is helping the trouble of the world, is keeping discord alight, is doing his bit against human peace and human happiness. There are some other little sentences of the Kaiser and his Huns of which I shall speak before I finish: we must now take up the controversy of those men in front of the bulletin board; we must investigate what lies behind that controversy. Those two men are types. One had learned nothing since he left school, the other had. Chapter VIII: History Astigmatic