TERRITORIES: God's Gift of Thought

God and His manifest destiny gave the U. S. the better part of North America but President McKinley added to that gift 7,083 islands (4,642 of them nameless) in the Malay Archipelago. That was stretching Manifest Destiny to the point of manifest absurdity. In 1916 Congress declared that ''it has always been the purpose of the people of the U. S." that the islands be given their freedom as soon as it could be conveniently arranged. Soon most of the islands' 12,000,000 people began crying in their eight languages and 87 dialects that...

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