[sopo]

Certainly La purchase and other territorial expansion was the largest domestic policy expansion with the greatest rewards of all time. I love a quote I read years ago, the past is a foreign land.

[Verginius Rufus]

Just looked that up in "Bartlett's Quotations."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Attributed to Lesley Poles Hartley (1895-1972), prologue to The Go-Between (1953)