preciative of their representatives now in our midst, and would have less friction in settling the question of how many more are to be admitted. We can never adequately mobilize our Christian forces to help China in her period of transition while the mass of our church members know little more of her and her problems than they do of Timbuctu. How can we expect anything but abortive plans, friction, and failure in our diplomacy if our diplomats, frequently none too well informed to begin with, must be subject to the control of an apathetic, or an uninformed, blindly prejudiced public opinion? We have had, for instance, at least one public man who has vociferously prophesied an early war with Japan, thereby proclaiming his own ignorance and the ignorance of the audiences that have tolerated him. Such ignorance, if it continues, cannot but be disastrous. We cannot escape playing some part in the Far East, and that part will be anything but wise or glorious if we know no more than we do now of its peoples and its cultures, of its problems and its difficulties.

One is not surprised at our widespread ignorance, after he has examined the curricula of our educational institutions. Even in our Pacific Coast states a careful inquiry fails to show one high school that offers even an elective course on the Far East. Our text books on the history of the Nineteenth Century usually take up the question of the Far East in connection with the expansion of Europe. But in one of our most widely used manuals on medieval and modern history for secondary schools only thirteen pages out of a total of seven hundred and eight are devoted to China and Japan, and that is better than the average. Several entirely fail to mention them. Four of our principal texts on American history for secondary schools give out of a total of twenty-five hundred and ninety-one pages only five pages to our relations with China and Japan. Two entirely fail to mention them. The teacher is seldom especially trained to present the topic and at best the pupil escapes with a week or less devoted to gaining a series of general and imperfect impressions.

Nor is the situation in the colleges much better. An examination of the catalogues of two hundred and thirty-four institutions of higher learning gives some interesting results. These institutions include all the principal universities, and nearly all the leading colleges. In only twenty-five are courses offered specifically in the Far East. In four of these twenty-five it is taken up only from the standpoint of its relations to American diplomacy. In these four there is apparently no serious attempt to understand the peoples of these countries, their history, their culture, or their special problems. Only eight of the twenty-five offer more than a one-semester course to the Far East. Such one-semester courses in the crowded condition of our present day curricula represent perhaps all the time that we can expect the average student to give to the question and are certainly much better than nothing, but one semester is scarcely enough to give more than a general knowledge of peoples whose history and culture are so alien to our own. More

than eight institutions ought to offer courses in which the student who wishes it could get more than a general knowledge. The distribution of the twentyfive institutions is uneven. Seven of them, as might be expected, are in the Pacific Coast states. Only one of these is in Oregon, and that is a privately endowed institution that has about ten per cent. of the college student body of the state. Two are in the state institutions of Washington. The remaining four are in California, where Stanford and the State University each offer quite a choice of courses. One of the twenty-five is in the Rocky Mountain district, two are in the South, nine are in the North Atlantic States, only six are in the great district of the Middle West. Of these six three are small colleges. The three remaining, state universities, offer only a onesemester course each. One looks in vain for courses in such institutions as Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Even in theological seminaries, supposed to be partly devoted to training men for foreign missionary service and leaders in missionary interest at home, one looks in vain, after a few notable and noble exceptions, for courses on the countries that present to the church of to-day some of its greatest problems.

In nearly all the colleges, courses on the history of the Nineteenth Century are offered, and some of these have something to say about the Far East. Three of the leading college texts on the period devote to the subject sixty pages out of a total eighteen hundred and sixty-six pages, or a little more than three per cent. of their space. This, of course, while it is better than nothing, can give only a most general discussion of these countries and must confine itself largely to recent events. At best it could only awaken in the student a desire to go further. Our American history courses as a rule do more poorly. For instance out of the seventeen volumes of the histories of the American Nation series that cover the years during which we have had relations with the Far East, not seventy-five pages are devoted to that field. In one of our latest and most widely advertised manuals on American history, the work of a prominent member of the history faculty of one of our most scholarly and progressive universities, Ningpo is located in Japan, and serious errors of fact are made in the brief mention of our relations with the Orient, errors which an adequate knowledge of our relations with Japan and China would enable one to detect instantly.

The

Moreover it is of interest to note that of these two hundred and thirty-four institutions, at least one hundred and fifteen offered courses in the history of Greece and Rome and of the Ancient Near East, seventy-five of which covered more than one semester. This is, of course, not without justification. thread of our Occidental history and culture goes back through these countries. Have we not, however, failed to keep up with the times when we devote so much attention to these ancient cultures and neglect the study of those with which we are thrown in increasingly intimate contact? There seems to be

originally consisted of the basin of the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi to the Perdido.

By the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France ceded all of Eastern Louisiana, except the Isle of Orleans, to England and guaranteed to British subjects the free navigation of the Mississippi to the sea. By the same treaty Spain ceded Florida to England. To compensate Spain for the loss of Florida, France had ceded Western Louisiana and the Isle of Orleans to Spain by a secret treaty the year before.2 The Isle of Orleans was the island upon which stood the city of New Orleans, lying east of the Mississippi and cut off on the north from the mainland by the Iberville River and by Lakes Maurepas, Pontchartrain and Borgne. Henceforth Louisiana consisted of the western basin of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans. Spain did not take possession of the province until 1769, and with this extent France possessed it" from 1763 to 1769, a period of six years. England erected the former Spanish province of Florida and all that part of Louisiana, which she had received from France, that bordered upon the Gulf, into the provinces of East and West Florida, dividing them by the line of the Appalachicola River.

3

During the American Revolution, Spain entered the war as the ally of France, but obstinately refused to assist the United States. The chief reason for this refusal was the rivalry of both for the possession of the western territory, and this territory was wanted by both chiefly because it controlled the Mississippimere land being at that time a drug on the market.1 At the close of the American Revolution Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States, with the Mississippi as its western boundary as far south as the 31st parallel, and granted to the United States the right which she had received from France of navigating the Mississippi below that parallel to its mouth. At the same time England ceded to Spain the two Floridas, which included, as we have seen, original Spanish Florida, and that part of Louisiana, bordering upon the Gulf, which she had received from France. Spain thus acquired the territory on both sides of all the outlets of the Mississippi. She contended that the English right to navigate the river to the sea had been lost, when she lost her posts on the

2 See W. R. Shepard, "The Cession of Louisiana to Spain," in "Political Science Quarterly," XIX, 439-58.

3 The former channel of the Iberville is represented on the modern map by Bayou Manchac and the Amité River. Bayou Manchac has been filled to prevent overflow of the Mississippi.

4 For a full presentation of this situation, see P. C. Phillips's "The West in the Diplomacy of the American Revolution," University of Illinois Studies in Social Sciences, 1913.

lower river, and that in undertaking to cede this right to the United States she had ceded what she did not have. The United States maintained on the other hand that the British right of navigation was a condition under which Spain had received Louisiana, and that it was independent of possession since England had never possessed either bank of the Mississippi below the Iberville.

The movement of population across the Alleghenies began before the Revolution and proceeded with great rapidity after it. By the census of 1800 there were over 326,000 people in Kentucky and Tennessee alone. These people were wholly dependent upon the Mississippi for an outlet for their produce, since transportation across the mountains was impracticable. In 1786 Jay negotiated a treaty with Spain, which proposed to waive the navigation of the lower Mississippi for twenty-five years, and, although the treaty was rejected, the mere fact that the proposal was considered created in the West a profound distrust of the Federal Government. After 1786 the navigation of the lower river was closed to the Americans, and the export of their produce could be effected only by the payment of heavy duties or the bribery of the Spanish officials. Finally, in 1795, in order to forestall a possible alliance between the United States and England, Spain, by the treaty of San Lorenzo, granted to the United States the right of navigating the river to the sea, and granted a right of deposit at New Orleans for three years, with the promise that it would either be continued thereafter or an equivalent establishment provided elsewhere.

In the years following the American Revolution, both England and France engaged in a long series of intrigues to secure possession of the Mississippi valley. It was the policy of France to establish a colonial empire in the West Indies and to recover Louisiana in order to establish a source of food supply for the West Indian empire that would render it independent of the United States. The first step in this program was taken in 1795 in securing the cession of St. Domingo from Spain by the treaty of Basel. Napoleon desired to recover Louisiana at the same time, but Spain refused to cede more. In 1800 he sent his minister of war, Berthier, to Spain and he forced the "retrocession of Louisiana by the secret treaty of St. Ildefonso. Louisiana was receded

with the extent that it now has in the hands of Spain and that it had when France possessed it."

This extent was the Isle of Orleans and the western basin of the Mississippi, in which form France had possessed the province from 1763 to 1769. It did not include any part of the Floridas, since Spain had received them from England and could not retrocede" to France territory which she had not received from her. To guard against American opposition to

5 See F. J. Turner, "Diplomatic Contest for the Mississippi Valley," in "Atlantic Monthly," Vol. 93, and "Policy of France toward the Mississippi Valley," in "American Historical Review," Vol. 10. P. C: Phillips has shown that Turner is in error in accepting as genuine a "Memoire" printed in 1802 as the work of Vergennes.

his colonial projects, Napoleon at this time adjusted outstanding difficulties with the United States by the Convention of 1800. In the public treaty of Madrid, signed March 21, 1801, Lucien Bonaparte secured a confirmation of the secret cession of Louisiana by the treaty of 1800.

It was not until the European war drew to a close that Napoleon found time to take possession of St. Domingo. Late in 1801 he sent out General Leclerc, his brother-in-law, for the purpose. Formal peace with England was signed at Amiens in March, 1802, and Napoleon turned to plans for taking possession of Louisiana. It was only by giving a formal pledge that he would never alienate the province that he could secure from the Spanish King an order for its delivery. Meantime the pacification of St. Domingo was proving much more difficult than had been anticipated. Yellow fever destroyed Leclerc's army, and the rumored re-establishment of slavery aroused the blacks to insurrection. September 16, 1802, Leclerc wrote Napoleon that 28,000 men had already been sacrificed and that only 4,000 remained. Three weeks later he wrote that 12,000 men and $1,200,000 in money must be sent immediately, else St. Domingo would be forever lost to France.

6

The last of March, 1801, Rufus King wrote from London that it was rumored that Spain had ceded Louisiana and the Floridas to France, and in September Robert R. Livingston, American minister to France, was instructed to purchase West Florida, if it had been acquired. A year later, when ill news came from St. Domingo, Napoleon began to consider the advisability of abandoning the colonial project. Dr. T. M. Marshall has recently shown that it was at this time, instead of in the following spring, as supposed by Henry Adams, that the famous bathroom quarrel between Napoleon and his brothers, Lucien and Joseph, took place. October 28, 1802, Livingston wrote that Joseph Bonaparte had asked him two days before whether the United States preferred West Florida to Louisiana, thus intimating that Louisiana might be ceded, but not communicating the fact that West Florida had not been acquired. Livingston replied that he was instructed to secure only West Florida, and Napoleon resumed his plans for occupying Louisiana. November 26, 1802, he issued orders instructing General Victor to occupy the territory from the Iberville to the Rio Grande. Mr. Adams discovered these instructions in the French archives and regarded them as confirming the American claim that Louisiana included Texas. The assumption that evidence of Napoleon's intention to take anything is proof of his right to take it is grotesque. It only shows that great historians as well as small ones sometimes make the mistake of exaggerating the importance of their own discoveries. Victor, detained by reports of continued disaster at St. Domingo, and by rumors of probable renewal of European war, never sailed for America.

"History of the Western Boundary of the Louisiana Purchase," page 4, University of California Publications,

1914.

In October of 1802 the Spanish local authorities suspended the right of deposit at New Orleans, without providing for deposit at any other point, as guaranteed by the treaty of 1795. This act caused great excitement in the United States. Coming upon the heels of the cession of Louisiana to France, the suspension was naturally, though as it proved erroneously, supposed to have been dictated by Napoleon, and to indicate a fixed intention upon his part to close the Mississippi to American trade. Jefferson took the ground that the possession of New Orleans by France. would drive the United States into alliance with England. In January, 1803, he sent Monroe as special envoy to France and Spain with instructions to purchase New Orleans and West Florida, if possible, and, if not possible, to at least recover the right of deposit.

Before Monroe reached Paris, Napoleon had decided to sell Louisiana. It was Mr. Adams, who first pointed out that the American acquisition of Louisiana resulted from the French failure in St. Domingo. In January of 1803 Napoleon received report of the death of Leclerc and the demand of his successor that 35,000 men be immediately sent to the island. Trouble with England thickened and renewal of European war threatened. Sunday morning, April 10, Napoleon summoned Marbois, minister of the treasury, and Berthier, minister of war, and proposed the sale of Louisiana. Marbois had been intendant at St. Domingo and from his knowledge of conditions there argued in favor of the sale of the province. Berthier had secured the treaty of retrocession and argued against it. Early Monday morning, April 11, receiving positive reports of English preparations to renew the war, Napoleon summoned Marbois and ordered him to sell Louisiana. Later in the day Talleyrand offered Louisiana to Livingston, but Livingston refused it. ston, but Livingston refused it. The next day, Tuesday, April 12, regretting his refusal, Livingston tried to get Talleyrand to make the cession. At noon Monroe reached Paris. Wednesday night, April 13, Livingston entertained Monroe and Marbois at dinner, and, late at night, after Monroe had withdrawn, Livingston agreed with Marbois to purchase Louisiana. Some weeks were spent in haggling over the price, which was finally settled by two treaties, the first signed May 2 and the second May 8 or 9, but both dated April 30. By the first treaty the United States was to pay France 11 1-4 million dollars, and by the second the United States was to pay her own citizens in satisfaction of their claims against France 3 3-4 million dollars, making a total of 15 millions. Consummated just at the moment of Monroe's arrival in Paris, the impression was produced that he had secured the cession and Livingston felt that he was deprived of the credit to which he was entitled. In point of fact, neither was entitled to any other credit than that of reluctantly receiving what was thrust upon them. They had asked for West Florida and received an empire. It was not Louisiana but the navigation of the Mississippi that they wanted. Napoleon ceded Louisiana to put it beyond the reach

of England, and to keep the United States from joining England in the approaching war. It was thus Napoleon, rather than Canning, who first "called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old."

Jefferson had doubts about the constitutionality of the purchase, and originally proposed a constitutional amendment in order to validate it, but, hearing from Livingston that there was danger that Napoleon might change his mind he wrote that "the less we say about constitutional difficulties the better," and urged in several private letters that whatever was necessary be done sub-silentio." The treaty was attacked in both Houses of Congress by the Federalists. No one questioned the right of the United States to acquire territory, but it was charged that the provision of the treaty, which promised that the inhabitants should be incorporated in the Union, exceeded the treaty-making power. As this promise was conditioned by the clause, according to the principles of the Federal constitution," it may be regarded as unassailable. The most significant fact is that the treaty was negotiated by Jefferson and Madison as President and Secretary of State, and defended in Congress by Breckenridge, Taylor and Nicolas, the very men who had been most prominent in passing the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, and who were thus forever afterward committed to a broad construction of the Constitution.

Napoleon had ceded what he did not yet possess. November 30, 1803, Louisiana was delivered by the Spanish officers to the French prefect, Laussat, and December 20, twenty days later, it was delivered to the United States. The province was ceded as fully and in the same manner as it had been acquired by France by the treaty of St. Ildefonso. It therefore consisted of the western basin of the Mississippi and of the Isle of Orleans. The United States immediately set up the claim that Louisiana included that part of West Florida, extending to the Perdido, which formed a part of the original province of Louisiana, and also that it included Texas as far as the Rio Grande. The first pretension was persisted in until we forced Spain to sell both Floridas by the treaty of 1819, and the second pretension was revived when we finally acquired Texas in 1845 under the pretext of re-annexation." The United States has often been exasperated by the dilatory and devious diplomacy of Spain, but we have taken small account of the exasperation that Spain must have felt from our insistence upon two utterly invalid claims. If the student is puzzled to understand how Germans can at the present day convince themselves that they are waging a war of self-defense, let him recall the fact that Americans for two generations convinced themselves, in the face of the plainest evidence to the contrary, that West Florida and Texas were both a part of Louisiana, and that many writers and nearly all official documents still cling to both pretensions. There is no greater menace to the future safety of the United States than the teaching of what is called patriotic history. On the other hand, there is no

66

greater guarantee of that safety than the teaching of history in such a way that students will relentlessly recognize the truth irrespective of national preten

By the Spanish treaty of 1819 the western boundary of Louisiana was fixed along the Sabine, Red and Arkansas Rivers, and thence to the 42d parallel and the Rocky Mountains. By the same treaty Spain ceded to the United States such claims as she had to Oregon, in virtual exchange, as Dr. T. M. Marshall points out, for the factitious claims which we had set up to Texas. Already by the Convention of 1818 with England, the northern boundary of Louisiana had been fixed as the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. By this Convention we secured so much of the basin of the Red River of the North as lay south of the 49th parallel, but sacrificed further to the west some portion of the basin of the Missouri that lay north of it. We may, therefore, be regarded as having exchanged one for the other. The basin of the Red River, although not geographically a part of Louisiana, came to us therefore as a result of the Louisiana purchase. From the 42d to the 49th parallels, the western boundary of Louisiana was of course the crest of the Rocky Mountains.

It was inevitable that the importance of the purchase of Louisiana should not be recognized at the time. Livingston wrote that the sum to be paid for Louisiana could be raised by the sale of the territory west of the Mississippi to some European power whose proximity we should not fear." Opponents of the purchase predicted that it would weaken the United States by scattering her population, and that republican institutions could not be maintained over so large an area. Even Jefferson thought that the most important use to which the acquired territory would ever be put would be to furnish a permanent home for the Red Man. From the vantage point of the present day, it is easy to see that the purchase is one of the most momentous events in American history. It was the first step in a series of territorial accessions that carried our boundaries to the Pacific. It rendered possible that tremendous movement of population which has given us the command of North America and the leadership in the Western Hemisphere. sphere. Scarcely less important is the fact that by committing the Jeffersonian party to broad construction, it rendered possible the development of a government strong enough to save itself in time of stress, and eventually to take its place among the great powers of the world.

There are general accounts of the Louisiana purchase in the first volume of Schouler's "History of the United States," in the second and third volumes of McMaster's "History of the People of the United States." and in Channing's "Jeffersonian System," which is the twelfth volume of Hart's "American Nation" series. By far the most important account is in Volumes I and II of Henry Adams's "History of the United States," but it is too long for secondary