Tras dar muchas vueltas al tema del desarrollo de los Estados Unidos y de las relaciones entre los colonos británicos y los nativos que poblaban las tierras de norteamérica, en 1826 el jurista James Kent acabó por esgrimir el único argumento posible para describir e intentar justificar el proceso de "adquisición" de tierras:
"Each nation claimed the right to regulate for itself, in exclusion of all others, the relation which was to subsist between the discoverer and the Indians. That relation necessarily impaired, to a considerable degree, the rights of the original inhabitants, and an ascendency was asserted in consequence of the superior genius of the Europeans, founded on civilization and Christianity, and their superiority in the means and in the art of war. (...) The settlement of that part of America now composing the United States has been attended with as little violence and aggression, on the part of the whites (...) as is compatible with the fact of entry of a race of civilized men into the territory of savages".
Unas décadas más tarde, Theodore Roosevelt, quien sería presidente de los Estados Unidos entre 1901 y 1909, tampoco se andaba por las ramas:
" To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent - that is, to consider the dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of thousand square miles as owning it outright- necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horsethief, or wandering cattle-man. (...) With the best of intentions, it was wholly impossible for any government to evolve order out of such chaos without resort to the ultimate arbitrator -the sword".
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