Politics & Power Quote by John Moody

Moody’s sentence reads like a calm report, but it’s really a sales pitch for empire dressed up as common sense. The key move is scale: “practically half a continent” turns the messy, contested acquisition of California into a tidy real-estate upgrade. It compresses Indigenous dispossession, war with Mexico, and political fracture into a single corporate metric: acreage, potential, return.

The phrase “People began to understand” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. It implies that expansion wasn’t merely a policy choice but an inevitable awakening, as if history itself leaned westward and the public simply caught up. That passive construction launders agency. Nobody is named as making the deal, seizing the land, or paying the human costs; “the nation” is the only actor that matters, and it acts as a unified investor.

Then comes the clincher: “future possibilities were almost unlimited.” It’s booster language with a pious sheen, the American version of boundless upside. Moody ties that upside explicitly to “natural resources” and “production of wealth,” revealing the governing assumption of his business-minded worldview: land is valuable insofar as it can be extracted from, subdivided, financed, and turned into growth. “General production” even suggests a broad civic benefit, implying that enrichment will diffuse outward rather than concentrate.

In context, this is the voice of late-19th/early-20th century commercial nationalism, when railroads, mining, agriculture, and finance linked western territory to eastern capital. The subtext isn’t just optimism; it’s moral authorization. If wealth is the measure of destiny, then acquisition becomes progress, and progress becomes alibi.