IN AMERICAN DIPLOMACY
95
On April 30th, 1803, the convention was signed. James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston had been sent to buy a town. They brought back a kingdom richer than Babylon and broader than France. The price was 60,000,000 francs, and the assumption by the United States of the then existing claims of Americans against France for depredations on the high seas.
From the great champion of Continental tyranny in the Nineteenth Century had been wrung the training ground whence in the Twentieth were to come armies to help deal the final blow to that same kind of tyranny.
