"Heretofore there has always been in the history of the world a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus populations"
About this Quote
Strong writes like someone calmly inventorying the globe, and that calm is the tell. The sentence turns conquest into a pressure valve: the East is "crowded", the West is "comparatively unoccupied", and "surplus populations" flow as if by natural law. It’s demographic hydraulics, a moral alibi disguised as geography. By framing migration and settlement as an inevitable pour, he scrubs away the messy verbs of history: taking, displacing, conquering.
The specific intent is to normalize westward expansion as both pragmatic and providential. Strong, a clergyman steeped in late-19th-century Anglo-American Protestant confidence, is not just observing a pattern; he’s authorizing it. "Heretofore" lends the claim an air of objective scholarship, as if he’s summarizing a neutral trend rather than advancing a program. The subtext is that the West exists to be used - a waiting room for "surplus" humans from older civilizations - and that those humans can be moved without moral remainder.
Context sharpens the edge. Strong is writing in the era of high imperialism, mass European emigration, and American Manifest Destiny’s afterglow, when the closing of the U.S. frontier was becoming a national anxiety and overseas expansion was on the table. "Comparatively unoccupied" is the most loaded phrase here: it nods at Indigenous presence only to minimize it into statistical noise. The line works because it wraps domination in the language of inevitability and necessity, converting a violent choice into a tidy historical habit.
The specific intent is to normalize westward expansion as both pragmatic and providential. Strong, a clergyman steeped in late-19th-century Anglo-American Protestant confidence, is not just observing a pattern; he’s authorizing it. "Heretofore" lends the claim an air of objective scholarship, as if he’s summarizing a neutral trend rather than advancing a program. The subtext is that the West exists to be used - a waiting room for "surplus" humans from older civilizations - and that those humans can be moved without moral remainder.
Context sharpens the edge. Strong is writing in the era of high imperialism, mass European emigration, and American Manifest Destiny’s afterglow, when the closing of the U.S. frontier was becoming a national anxiety and overseas expansion was on the table. "Comparatively unoccupied" is the most loaded phrase here: it nods at Indigenous presence only to minimize it into statistical noise. The line works because it wraps domination in the language of inevitability and necessity, converting a violent choice into a tidy historical habit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis — Josiah Strong, 1885. |
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