ying between the Ohio and the Lakes. Excellent
persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a
disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that
has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen
similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico. The annexation
of Louisiana, including the entire territory between the northern
Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, aroused such frantic opposition in
the old-settled regions of the country, and especially in the
Northeast, as to call forth threats of disunion, the language used by
the opponents of our expansion into the Far West being as violent as
that sometimes used in denouncing our acquisition of the Philippines.
The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave
question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general
opposition to expansion--that is, to national growth and national
greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been
people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American
civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally
the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against
the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the
Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the
believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed.
Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of
greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders
who felt within them the lift towards mighty things. Like every really
strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife
and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty
future.

At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the
problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement.
Whether the prize of the moment was Louisiana or Florida, Oregon or
Alaska, mattered little. The same forces, the same types of men, stood
for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness,
at the end of the century as at the beginning.

My non-literary work has been so engrossing during the years that have
elapsed since my fourth volume was published, that I have been unable
to go on with "The Winning of the West"; but my design is to continue
the narrative as soon as I can get leisure, carrying it through the
stages which marked the taking