Starting out from St. Louis, a small band of Americans under the two Virginians, Lewis and Clarke, crossed the Rocky Mountains and made their way to where the Columbia River enters the Pacific Ocean. At a cost of $2,500, Jefferson, through the work of these explorers, not only acquired knowledge of the Louisiana purchase, but laid the foundation to our claim to the Oregon country, whose value Mr. Webster was so far from understanding.

Mr. Roosevelt, in his Winning of the West, grudges Mr. Jefferson any credit for the Louisiana purchase, being far less generous to the Southern statesman than was another great Northern writer, James G. Blaine.

In his Twenty Years of Congress, Mr. Blaine bears frank and full testimony to Jefferson, and he clearly demonstrates how much our republic gained by Jefferson's initiative and promptitude.

Mr. Roosevelt contends that the American people would have got the territory anyhow. It was only a question of time. How could Mr. Roosevelt know that? We have wanted Canada bad enough, several times, but we have never got it. Even as these lines are being written (May, 1903) American citizens by the thousand are pouring into Canadian territory from our Northwest, but England still holds the land and our Americans will become subjects of Great Britain.

Emigration cares less about forms of government and national names than it does about conditions of soil, climate, wages, cost of living, richness of mines, and a freedom of opportunity.

So as to Louisiana. Americans would have streamed across the Mississippi to settle the land beyond, but had England been its sovereign the emigrant might have had as little thought of throwing off the British dominion as he now has when he settles in Canada.

Had Mr. Jefferson been "timid, weak, and vacillating," had he waited just a few days longer, the breaking out of the war would have caught him with the Louisiana business unsettled, and Great Britain would have seized it is French territory. He is a prophet, indeed, who can predict that we "would have got Louisiana anyhow" had England been allowed to get her strong hands on it.

During former administrations the Mohammedan powers of the Mediterranean had remained our 66 great and good friends," at a cost of $2,000,000. Jefferson determined to put an end to tributepaying. Recurring to his old Paris plans, he sent war-vessels to the Mediterranean and began to persuade the infidels with guns. Partly by hard fighting, and partly by negotiation and one final ransom of $60,000, Jefferson wrung an honorable peace

from the Mohammedans and they troubled him no

more.

In the year 1800, John Adams being President, Commodore Bainbridge was compelled by the Dey of Algiers to carry Algerine despatches to the Sultan at Constantinople, and the American man-ofwar, the George Washington, sailed through the Dardanelles with the "pirate" flag at the masthead.

Adams did nothing about it; Jefferson did. He made it impossible for that kind of degradation to befall us again.

CHAPTER XLIII

JOHN RANDOLPH, OF ROANOKE

THE leader of Mr. Jefferson's administration on the floor of the House in Congress was one of the most vividly picturesque figures that has ever appeared in our political history. John Randolph, of Roanoke, was born in 1773, and among his ancestors he counted not only the Scotch Earls of Murray, but Pocahontas, the daughter of a king. Whether a lineage of this sort justifies inordinate pride is a fair question for debate. That the Scotch Earls of Murray at some time or other were cattle thieves, just as most of the other feudal lords of Normandy, France, Germany, and England were plunderers by sea or land, need not be seriously doubted; yet, as earls go, they stood high. Pocahontas, too, was only the daughter of a naked Indian, who cooked his fish with the scales on and the entrails undisturbed within,' while the little princess, in all the charms of unclothed nature, would play with the Jamestown boys, "turning a somerset " equal to any of them. Yet, after all, she was a princess; and just as the Prince of Wales in England walked

1 Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century.

behind the African chief because he was a king, so the descendants of Pocahontas were proud of their descent from the alleged savior of Smith because she was a princess. Besides family pride, John Randolph inherited vast family estates-lands, houses, negroes, horses, cattle-but no cash to speak of, and the inevitable British debt. Randolph complained, early and feelingly, of the condition in which he found his estate, and refers to "the scuffle with negroes and overseers for something like a pittance of rent and profit upon my land and stock."

A Charleston bookseller, who saw Randolph in 1776, describes him as “a tall, gawky, flaxen-haired stripling, with a complexion of good parchment color, beardless chin, and as much assumed selfconfidence as any two-footed animal I ever saw." Later in life Randolph looked like an old shriveld woman. His bones had no flesh, his voice was a feminine shriek, his face was literally covered with countless wrinkles, and his color was that of old, yellow parchment. Beard he never had; and he was a bundle of nerves, whose capacity for suffering was pathetic. Things which other men of less sensitive organization would never notice tortured him to distraction. He was quick to love and to hate. There was a quality which we call "womanish" in both his loves and his hates.

He was the slave of impulse and temper, irri