Betty B.
speaker
3,598 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Betty B.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
or a long time to come.
The sum of our loan to France is so large that it equals $200 from every family in the United States, and as good business people, we ought to know the security upon which our mortgage is based.
If you had a $200 mortgage on a lot or farm in your neighborhood, would you not want to look at the property and know something about the man or woman to whom you made the loan?
That is just our position as to France.
and that is what I would have you remember in reading these chapters on France as I find her.
To begin with, what is France, by and large, and just where does it lie?
I shall first take up the Republic in Europe, for that is the heart of your mortgage.
France in Europe, with Alsace and Lorraine, and the other patches it got as a result of the war, contains a little more than 200,000 square miles.
It is just about equal to Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky,
Indiana, and Missouri put together.
It is more than 1 15th as big as the main body of the United States, and it is a very respectable part of all the dry land on the globe.
The scientists have measured the globe, and I figure that if the dry land were all gathered together into one block and divided into 260 acre farms, one acre in every one of these farms would belong to France in Europe.
But now let us take in addition the colonial possessions,
including those added to france by the world war put them together and they equal more than five million square miles they are about one eleventh of all the land on the earth so that if the division were made into eleven acre fields france would own one acre in every such field our mortgage grows better and better france has in asia alone a country more than ten times as large as south carolina she has in guiana on the north coast of south america
and in the West Indies, more land than in 10 states the size of Pennsylvania.
And her little islands in the Pacific Ocean are larger than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined.
Her biggest possessions are in Africa, where she has, including the vast areas she got from the Germans, almost one-third more territory than is comprised in the whole continent of Europe, and more than one and a half times as much land as we have in the United States, not including Alaska.
Although there are large tracts of fertile soil in colonial France, some of her colonies are not of great value.
I have set my foot upon nearly every one of them, and much of the land is not worth more than a sand spit on the ocean.
The desert of Sahara, although it has oases which combined are equal in area to the state of Ohio, is for the most part barren, and the jungles of the French Congo and the overflowed lands of Cambodia at the mouth of the Saigon River
Showing 161–180 of 3,598 · page 9 of 180
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