Construction and Reconstruction
at the close of the war, Russia indicated a readiness to sell the territory to the United States. The first great Republican Secretary of State, Seward, welcomed the proposal, partly because of its accordance with the Monroe and Polk doctrines and partly because of some strange prescience of the material value of the territory. Since under the doctrines mentioned the United States would not permit a European power to transfer its American territory to another European power, this country was morally obligated itself to take such territory off the hands of the power which wished to get rid of it. For that reason, if for no other, Seward would have purchased Alaska. But in addition he believed it to be a region of vast wealth, and he regarded the Pacific as “the Ocean of the Future” and deemed it desirable for the United States to establish itself as fully and extensively as possible upon its shores. Seeing that Alaska today has an import trade of $45,000,000 and an export trade of $75,000,000 a year, there is in the fact that Seward purchased the whole territory outright for only $7,200,000 a most impressive memorial of the shrewdness, the foresight and the wisdom of the Republican statesmanship of that day.
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