Stern daughter of the Voice of God,O Duty! If that name thou love—
Stern daughter of the Voice of God,O Duty! If that name thou love—
Stern daughter of the Voice of God,
O Duty! If that name thou love—
in that name we beg for a study of what the new situation that is upon us, the new world opening around us, now demand at our hands.
The people of the United States will not refuse an appeal in that name. They never have. They had been so occupied, since the Civil War, first in repairing its ravages, and then in occupying and possessing their own continent, they had been so little accustomed, in this generation or the last, to even the thought of foreign war, that one readily understands why at the outset they hardly realized how absolute is the duty of an honorable conqueror to accept and discharge the responsibilities of his conquest. But this is no longer a child-nation, irresponsible in its nonage and incapable of comprehending or assuming the responsibilities of its acts. A child that breaks a pane of glass or sets fire to a house may indeed escape. Are we to plead the baby act, and claim that we can flounce around the world, breaking international china and burning property, and yet repudiate the bill because we have not come of age? Who dare say that a self-respecting Power could have sailed away from Manila and repudiated the responsibilities of its victorious belligerency? After going into a war for humanity, were we so craven that we should seek freedom from further trouble at the expense of civilization?
If we did not want those responsibilities we ought not to have gone to war, and I, for one, would have been content. But having chosen to go to war, and having been speedily and overwhelmingly successful, we should be ashamed even to think of running away from what inexorably followed. Mark what the successive steps were, and how link by link the chain that binds us now was forged.
The moment war was foreseen the fleet we usually have in Chinese waters became indispensable, not merely, as before, to protect our trade and our missionaries in China, but to checkmate the Spanish fleet, which otherwise held San Francisco and the whole Pacific coast at its mercy. When war was declared our fleet was necessarily ordered out of neutral ports. Then it had to go to Manila or go home. If it went home, it left the whole Pacific coast unguarded, save at the particular point it touched, and we should have been at once in a fever of apprehension, chartering hastily another fleet of the fastest ocean-going steamers we could find in the world, to patrol the Pacific from San Diego to Sitka, as we did have to patrol the Atlantic from Key West to Bar Harbor. Palpably this was to go the longest way around to do a task that had to be done in any event, as well as to demoralize our forces at the opening of the war with a manœuver in which our Navy has never been expert—that of avoiding a contest and sailing away from the enemy! The alternative was properly taken. Dewey went to Manila and sank the Spanish fleet. We thus broke down Spanish means for controlling the Philippines, and were left with the Spanish responsibility for maintaining order there—responsibility to all the world, German, English, Japanese, Russian, and the rest—in one of the great centers and highways of the world's commerce.
But why not turn over that commercial center and the island on which it is situated to the Tagals? To be sure! Under three hundred years of Spanish rule barbarism on Luzon had so far disappeared that this commercial metropolis, as large as San Francisco or Cincinnati, had sprung up and come to be thronged by traders and travelers of all nations. Now it is calmly suggested that we might have turned it over to one semi-civilized tribe, absolutely without experience in governing even itself, much less a great community of foreigners, probably in a minority on the island, and at war with its other inhabitants—a tribe which has given the measure of its fitness for being charged with the rights of foreigners and the care of a commercial metropolis by the violation of flags of truce, treachery to the living, and mutilation of the dead which have marked its recent wanton rising against the Power that was trying to help it!
If running away from troublesome responsibility and duty is our rôle, why did we not long ago take the opportunity, in our early feebleness, to turn over Tallahassee and St. Augustine to the Seminoles, instead of sending Andrew Jackson to protect the settlements and subdue the savages? Why, at the first Apache outbreak after the Gadsden Purchase, did we not hasten to turn over New Mexico and Arizona totheirinhabitants? Or why, in years within the memory of most of you, when the Sioux and Chippewas rose on our Northwestern frontier, did we not invite them to retain possession of St. Cloud, and even come down, if they liked, to St. Paul and Minneapolis?
Unless I am mistaken in regarding all these suggestions as too unworthy to be entertained by self-respecting citizens of a powerful and self-respecting nation, we have now reached two conclusions that ought to clear the air and simplify the problem that remains: First, we have ample constitutional power to acquire and govern new territory absolutely at will, according to our sense of right and duty, whether as dependencies, as colonies, or as a protectorate. Secondly, as the legitimate and necessary consequence of our own previous acts, it has become our national and international duty to do it.
The Policy for our Dependencies
How shall we set about it? What shall be the policy with which, when order has been inexorably restored, we begin our dealings with the new wards of the Nation? Certainly we must mark our disapproval of the treachery and barbarities of the present contest. As certainly the oppression of other tribes by the Tagals must be ended, or the oppression of any tribe by any other within the sphere of our active control. Wars between the tribes must be discouraged and prevented. We must seek to suppress crimes of violence and private vengeance, secure individual liberty, protect individual property, and promote the study of the arts of peace. Above all, we must give and enforce justice; and for the rest, as far as possible, leave them alone. By all means let us avoid a fussy meddling with their customs, manners, prejudices, and beliefs. Give them order and justice, and trust to these to win them in other regards to our ways. All this points directly to utilizing existing agencies as much as possible, developing native initiative and control in local matters as fast and as far as we can, and ultimately giving them the greatest degree of self-government for which they prove themselves fitted.
Under any conditions that exist now, or have existed for three hundred years, a homogeneous native government over the whole archipelago is obviously impossible. Its relations to the outside world must necessarily be assumed by us. We must preserve order in Philippine waters, regulate the harbors, fix and collect the duties, apportion the revenue, and supervise the expenditure. We must enforce sanitary measures. We must retain such a control of the superior courts as shall make justice certainly attainable, and such control of the police as shall insure its enforcement. But in all this, after the absolute authority has been established, the further the natives can themselves be used to carry out the details, the better.
Such a system might not be unwise even for a colony to which we had reason to expect a considerable emigration of our own people. If experience of a kindred nation in dealing with similar problems counts for anything, it is certainly wise for a distant dependency, always to be populated mainly, save in the great cities, by native races, and little likely ever to be quite able to stand alone, while, nevertheless, we wish to help it just as much as possible to that end.
The Duty of Public Servants.
Certainly this is no bed of flowery ease in the dreamy Orient to which we are led. No doubt these first glimpses of the task that lies before us, as well as the warfare with distant tribes into which we have been unexpectedly plunged, will provoke for the time a certain discontent with our new possessions. But on a far-reaching question of national policy the wise public man is not so greatly disturbed by what people say in momentary discouragement under the first temporary check. That which really concerns him is what people at a later day, or even in a later generation, might say of men trusted with great duties for their country, who proved unequal to their opportunities, and through some short-sighted timidity of the moment lost the chance of centuries.
It is quite true, as was recently reported in what seemed an authoritative way from Washington, that the Peace Commissioners were not entirely of one mind at the outset, and equally true that the final conclusion at Washington was apparently reached on the Commission's recommendation from Paris. As the cold fit, in the language of one of our censors, has followed the hot fit in the popular temper, I readily take the time which hostile critics consider unfavorable, for accepting my own share of responsibility, and for avowing for myself that I declared my belief in the duty and policy of holding the whole Philippine Archipelago in the very first conference of the Commissioners in the President's room at the White House, in advance of any instructions of any sort. If vindication for it be needed, I confidently await the future.
Whatisthe duty of a public servant as to profiting by opportunities to secure for his country what all the rest of the world considers material advantages? Even if he could persuade himself that rejecting them is morally and internationally admissible, is he at liberty to commit his country irrevocably to their rejection, because they do not wholly please his individual fancy? At a former negotiation of our own in Paris, the great desire of the United States representative, as well as of his Government, had been mainly to secure the settled or partly settled country adjoining us on the south, stretching from the Floridas to the city of New Orleans. The possession of the vast unsettled and unknown Louisiana Territory, west of the Mississippi, was neither sought nor thought of. Suddenly, on an eventful morning in April, 1803, Talleyrand astonished Livingston by offering, on behalf of Napoleon, to sell to the United States, not the Floridas at all, but merely Louisiana, "a raw little semi-tropical frontier town and an unexplored wilderness."
Suppose Livingston had rejected the offer? Or suppose Gadsden had not exceeded his instructions in Mexico and boldly grasped the opportunity that offered to rectify and make secure our Southwestern frontier? Would this generation judge that they had been equal to their opportunities or their duties?
The difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own creation. It is not for any of us to think of attempting to apportion the blame. The only thing we are sure of is that it was for no lack of authority that we hesitated and drifted till the Tagals were convinced we were afraid of them, and could be driven out before reinforcements arrived. That was the very thing our officers had warned us against,—the least sign of hesitation or uncertainty,—the very danger every European with knowledge of the situation had dinned in our ears. Everybody declared that difficulties were sure to grow on our hands in geometrical proportion to our delays; and it was perfectly known to the respective branches of our Government primarily concerned that while the delay went on it was in neglect of a duty we had voluntarily assumed.
For the American Commissioners, with due authority, distinctly offered to assume responsibility, pending the ratification of the treaty, for the protection of life and property and the preservation of order throughout the whole archipelago. The Spanish Commissioners, after consultation with their Government, refused this, but agreed that each Power should be charged, pending the ratification, with the maintenance of order in the places where it was established. The American assent to that left absolutely no question as to the diminished but still grave responsibility thus devolved.8That responsibility was avoided from the hour the treaty was signed till the hour when the Tagal chieftain, at the head of an army he had been deliberately gathering and organizing, took things in his own hand and made the attack he had so long threatened. Disorder, forced loans, impressment, confiscation, seizure of waterworks, contemptuous violations of our guard-lines, and even the practical siege of the city of Manila, had meantime been going on within gunshot of troops held there inactive by the Nation which had volunteered responsibility for order throughout the archipelago, and had been distinctly left with responsibility for order in the island on which it was established. If the bitterest enemy of the United States had sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest trouble in the shortest time, he could have devised for that end no policy more successful than the one we actually pursued. There may have been controlling reasons for it. An opposite course might perhaps have cost more elsewhere than it saved in Luzon. On that point the public cannot now form even an opinion. But as to the effect in Luzon there is no doubt; and because of it we have the right to ask a delay in judgment about results there until the present evil can be undone.
The Carnival of Captious Objection.
Meantime, in accordance with a well-known and probably unchangeable law of human nature, this is the carnival and very heyday of the objectors. The air is filled with their discouragement.
Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of colonizing or of managing colonies; that there is something in our national character or institutions that wholly disqualifies us for the work. Yet the most successful colonies in the whole world were the thirteen original colonies on our Atlantic coast; and the most successful colonists were our own grandfathers! Have the grandsons so degenerated that they are incapable of colonizing at all, or of managing colonies? Who says so? Is it any one with the glorious history of this continental colonization bred in his bone and leaping in his blood? Or is it some refugee from a foreign country he was discontented with, who now finds pleasure in disparaging the capacity of the new country he came to, while he has neither caught its spirit nor grasped the meaning of its history?
Some bewail the alleged fact that, at any rate, our system has little adaptability to the control of colonies or dependencies. Has our system been found weaker, then, than other forms of government, less adaptable to emergencies, and with people less fit to cope with them? Is the difficulty inherent, or is it possible that the emergency may show, as emergencies have shown before, that whatever task intelligence, energy, and courage can surmount the American people and their Government can rise to?
It is said the conditions in our new possessions are wholly different from any we have previously encountered. This is true; and there is little doubt the new circumstances will bring great modifications in methods. That is an excellent reason, among others, for some doubt at the outset as to whether we know all about it, but not for despairing of our capacity to learn. It might be remembered that we have encountered some varieties of conditions already. The work in Florida was different from that at Plymouth Rock; Louisiana and Texas showed again new sets of conditions; California others; Puget Sound and Alaska still others; and we did not always have unbroken success and plain sailing from the outset in any of them.
It is said we cannot colonize the tropics, because our people cannot labor there. Perhaps not, especially if they refuse to obey the prudent precautions which centuries of experience have enjoined upon others. But what, then, are we going to do with Porto Rico? How soon are our people going to flee from Arizona? And why is life impossible to Americans in Manila and Cebu and Iloilo, but attractive to the throngs of Europeans who have built up those cities? Can we mine all over the world, from South Africa to the Klondike, but not in Palawan? Can we grow tobacco in Cuba, but not in Cebu; or rice in Louisiana, but not in Luzon?
An alarm is raised that our laboring classes are endangered by competition with cheap tropical labor or its products. How? The interpretation of the Constitution which would permit that is the interpretation which has been repudiated in an unbroken line of decisions for over half a century. Only one possibility of danger to American labor exists in our new possessions—the lunacy, or worse, of the dreamers who want to prepare for the admission of some of them as States in the American Union. Till then we can make any law we like to prevent the immigration of their laborers, and any tariff we like to regulate the admission of their products.
It is said we are pursuing a fine method for restoring order, by prolonging the war we began for humanity in order to force liberty and justice on an unwilling people at the point of the bayonet. The sneer is cheap. How else have these blessings been generally diffused? How often in the history of the world has barbarism been replaced by civilization without bloodshed? How were our own liberty and justice established and diffused on this continent? Would the process have been less bloody if a part of our own people had noisily taken the side of the English, the Mexican, or the savage, and protested against "extreme measures"?
Some say a war to extend freedom in Cuba or elsewhere is right, and therefore a duty; but the war in the Philippines now is purely selfish, and therefore a crime. The premise is inaccurate; it is a war we are in duty bound to wage at any rate till order is restored—but let that pass. Suppose it to be merely a war in defense of our own just rights and interests. Since when did such a war become wrong? Is our national motto to be, "Quixotic on the one hand, Chinese on the other"?
How much better it would have been, say others, to mind our own business! No doubt; but if we were to begin crying over spilt milk in that way, the place to begin was where the milk was spilled—in the Congress that resolved upon war with Spain. Since that congressional action we have been minding what it made our own business quite diligently, and an essential part of our business now is the responsibility for our own past acts, whether in Havana or Manila.
Some say that since we began the war for humanity, we are disgraced by coming out of it with increased territory. Then a penalty must always be imposed upon a victorious nation for presuming to do a good act. The only nation to be exempt from such a penalty upon success is to be the nation that was in the wrong! It is to have a premium, whether successful or not; for it is thus relieved, even in defeat, from the penalty which modern practice in the interest of civilization requires—the payment of an indemnity for the cost of an unjust war. Furthermore, the representatives of the nation that does a good act are thus bound to reject any opportunity for lightening the national load it entails. They must leave the full burden upon their country, to be dealt with in due time by the individual taxpayer!
Again, we have superfine discussions of what the United States "stands for." It does not stand, we are told, for foreign conquest, or for colonies or dependencies, or other extensions of its power and influence. It stands solely for the development of the individual man. There is a germ of a great truth in this, but the development of the truth is lost sight of. Individual initiative is a good thing, and our institutions do develop it—and its consequences! There is a species of individualism, too, about a bulldog. When he takes hold he holds on. It may as well be noticed by the objectors that that is a characteristic much appreciated by American people. They, too, hold on. They remember, besides, a pregnant phrase of their fathers, who "ordained this Constitution," among other things, "to promote the general welfare." That is a thing for which "this Government stands" also; and woe to the public servant who rejects brilliant opportunities to promote it—on the Pacific Ocean no less than the Atlantic, by commerce no less than by agriculture or manufactures.
It is said the Philippines are worthless—have, in fact, already cost us more than the value of their entire trade for many years to come. So much the more, then, are we bound to do our duty by them. But we have also heard in turn, and from the same quarters, that every one of our previous acquisitions was worthless.
Again, it is said our continent is more than enough for all our needs, and our extensions should stop at the Pacific. What is this but proposing such a policy of self-sufficient isolation as we are accustomed to reprobate in China—planning now to develop only on the soil on which we stand, and expecting the rest of the world to protect our trade if we have any? Can a nation with safety set such limits to its development? When a tree stops growing, our foresters tell us, it is ripe for the ax. When a man stops in his physical and intellectual growth he begins to decay. When a business stops growing it is in danger of decline. When a nation stops growing it has passed the meridian of its course, and its shadows fall eastward.
Is China to be our model, or Great Britain? Or, better still, are we to follow the instincts of our own people? The policy of isolating ourselves is a policy for the refusal of both duties and opportunities—duties to foreign nations and to civilization, which cannot be respectably evaded; opportunities for the development of our power on the Pacific in the Twentieth Century, which it would be craven to abandon. There has been a curious "about face," an absolute reversal of attitude toward England, on the part of our Little Americans, especially at the East and among the more educated classes. But yesterday nearly all of them were pointing to England as a model. There young men of education and position felt it a duty to go into politics. There they had built up a model civil service. There their cities were better governed, their streets cleaner, their mails more promptly delivered. There the responsibilities of their colonial system had enforced the purification of domestic politics, the relentless punishment of corrupt practices, and the abolition of bribery in elections, either by money or by office. There they had foreign trade, and a commercial marine, and a trained and efficient foreign service, and to be an English citizen was to have a safeguard the whole world round. Our young men were commended to their example; our legislators were exhorted to study their practice and its results. Suddenly these same teachers turn around. They warn us against the infection of England's example. They tell us her colonial system is a failure; that she would be stronger without her colonies than with them; that she is eaten up with "militarism"; that to keep Cuba or the Philippines is what a selfish, conquering, land-grabbing, aristocratic government like England would do, and that her policy and methods are utterly incompatible with our institutions. When a court thus reverses itself without obvious reason (except a temporary partizan purpose), our people are apt to put their trust in other tribunals.
The Future.
"I had thought," said Wendell Phillips, in his noted apology for standing for the first time in his antislavery life under the flag of his country, and welcoming the tread of Massachusetts men marshaled for war—"I had thought Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton-dust and cankered with gold." If Little Americans have thought so of their country in these stirring days, and have fancied that initial reverses would induce it to abandon its duty, its rights, and its great permanent interests, they will live to see their mistake. They will find it giving a deaf ear to these unworthy complaints of temporary trouble or present loss, and turning gladly from all this incoherent and resultless clamor to the new world opening around us. Already it draws us out of ourselves. The provincial isolation is gone; and provincial habits of thought will go. There is a larger interest in what other lands have to show and teach; a larger confidence in our own; a higher resolve that it shall do its whole duty to mankind, moral as well as material, international as well as national, in such fashion as becomes time's latest offspring and its greatest. We are grown more nearly citizens of the world.
This new knowledge, these new duties and interests, must have two effects—they must extend our power, influence, and trade, and they must elevate the public service. Every returning soldier or traveler tells the same story—that the very name "American" has taken a new significance throughout the Orient. The shrewd Oriental no longer regards us as a second- or third-class Power. He has just seen the only signs he recognizes of a nation that knows its rights and dare maintain them—a nation that has come to stay, with an empire of its own in the China Sea, and a Navy which, from what he has seen, he believes will be able to defend it against the world. He straightway concludes, after the Oriental fashion, that it is a nation whose citizens must henceforth be secure in all their rights, whose missionaries must be endured with patience and even protected, and whose friendship must be sedulously cultivated. The national prestige is enormously increased, and trade follows prestige—especially in the farther East. Not within a century, not during our whole history, has such a field opened for our reaping. Planted directly in front of the Chinese colossus, on a great territory of our own, we have the first and best chance to profit by his awakening. Commanding both sides of the Pacific, and the available coal-supplies on each, we command the ocean that, according to the old prediction, is to bear the bulk of the world's commerce in the Twentieth Century. Our remote but glorious land between the Sierras and the sea may then become as busy a hive as New England itself, and the whole continent must take fresh life from the generous blood of this natural and necessary commerce between people of different climates and zones.
But these developments of power and trade are the least of the advantages we may hopefully expect. The faults in American character and life which the Little Americans tell us prove the people unfit for these duties are the very faults that will be cured by them. The recklessness and heedless self-sufficiency of youth must disappear. Great responsibilities, suddenly devolved, must sober and elevate now, as they have always done in natures not originally bad, throughout the whole history of the world.
The new interests abroad must compel an improved foreign service. It has heretofore been worse than we ever knew, and also better. On great occasions and in great fields our diplomatic record ranks with the best in the world. No nation stands higher in those new contributions to International Law which form the high-water mark of civilization from one generation to another. At the same time, in fields less under the public eye, our foreign service has been haphazard at the best, and often bad beyond belief—ludicrous and humiliating. The harm thus wrought to our national good name and the positive injury to our trade have been more than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them now, and when the American people wake up to a wrong they are apt to right it.
More important still should be the improvement in the general public service at home and in our new possessions. New duties must bring new methods. Ward politics were banished from India and Egypt as the price of successful administration, and they must be excluded from Porto Rico and Luzon. The practical common sense of the American people will soon see that any other course is disastrous. Gigantic business interests must come to reinforce the theorists in favor of a reform that shall really elevate and purify the Civil Service.
Hand in hand with these benefits to ourselves, which it is the duty of public servants to secure, go benefits to our new wards and benefits to mankind. There, then, is what the United States is to "stand for" in all the resplendent future: the rights and interests of its own Government; the general welfare of its own people; the extension of ordered liberty in the dark places of the earth; the spread of civilization and religion, and a consequent increase in the sum of human happiness in the world.
VIII
LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES
This address was delivered on the invitation of the Board of Trustees, at Princeton University, in Alexander Hall, on October 21, 1899.
LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES
The invitation for to-day with which Princeton honored me was accompanied with the hint that a discussion of some phase of current public affairs would not be unwelcome. That phase which has for the past year or two most absorbed public attention is now more absorbing than ever. Elsewhere I have already spoken upon it, more, perhaps, than enough. But I cannot better obey the summons of this honored and historic University, or better deserve the attention of this company of scholars, gentlemen, and patriots, than by saying with absolute candor what its present aspects prompt.
Questions that have been Disposed of.
And first, the chaos of opinion into which the country was thrown by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War ceases to be wholly without form and void. The discussions of a year have clarified ideas; and on some points we may consider that the American people have substantially reached definite conclusions.
There is no need, therefore, to debate laboriously before you whether Dewey was right in going to Manila. Everybody now realizes that, once war was begun, absolutely the most efficient means of making it speedily and overwhelmingly victorious, as well as of defending the most exposed half of our own coast, was to go to Manila. "Find the Spanish fleet and destroy it" was as wise an order as the President ever issued, and he was equally wise in choosing the man to carry it out.
So, also, there is no need to debate whether Dewey was right in staying there. From that come his most enduring laurels. The American people admire him for the battle which sank the Spanish navy; but they trust and love him for the months of trial and triumph that followed. The Administration that should have ordered him to abandon the Eastern foothold he had conquered for his country—to sail away like a sated pirate from the port where his victory broke down all civilized authority but our own, and his presence alone prevented domestic anarchy and foreign spoliation—would have deserved to be hooted out of the capital.
So, again, there is no need to debate whether the Peace Commissioners should have thrown away in Paris what Dewey had won in Manila. The public servant who, without instructions, should in a gush of irresponsible sentimentality abandon great possessions to which his country is justly entitled, whether by conquest or as indemnity for unjust war, would be not only an unprofitable but a faithless servant. It was their obvious duty to hold what Dewey had won, at least till the American people had time to consider and decide otherwise.
Is there any need to debate whether the American people will abandon it now? Those who have a fancy for that species of dialectics may weigh the chances, and evolve from circumstances of their own imagination, and canons of national and international obligation of their own manufacture, conclusions to their own liking. I need not consume much of your time in that unprofitable pursuit. We may as well, here and now, keep our feet on solid ground, and deal with facts as they are. The American people are in lawful possession of the Philippines, with the assent of all Christendom, with a title as indisputable as the title to California; and, though the debate will linger for a while, and perhaps drift unhappily into partizan contention, the generation is yet unborn that will see them abandoned to the possession of any other Power. The Nation that scatters principalities as a prodigal does his inheritance is too sentimental and moon-shiny for the Nineteenth Century or the Twentieth, and too unpractical for Americans of any period. It may flourish in Arcadia or Altruria, but it does not among the sons of the Pilgrims, or on the continent they subdued by stern struggle to the uses of civilization.
Nevertheless, our people did stop to consider very carefully their constitutional powers. I believe we have reached a point also where the result of that consideration may be safely assumed. The constitutional arguments have been fully presented and the expositions and decisions marshaled. It is enough now to say that the preponderance of constitutional authorities, with Gouverneur Morris, Daniel Webster, and Thomas H. Benton at their head, and the unbroken tendency of decisions by the courts of the United States for at least the last fifty years, from Mr. Chief Justice Waite and Mr. Justice Miller and Mr. Justice Stanley Matthews, of the Supreme Court, down to the very latest utterance on the subject, that of Mr. Justice Morrow of the Circuit Court of Appeals, sustain the power to acquire "territory or other property" anywhere, and govern it as we please.9Inhabitants of such territory (not obviously incapable) are secure in the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution; but they have no political rights under it, save as Congress confers them. The evidence in support of this view has been fully set forth, examined, and weighed, and, unless I greatly mistake, a popular decision on the subject has been reached. The constitutional power is no longer seriously disputed, and even those who raised the doubt do not seem now to rely upon it.
Contributions to International Law and Morality.
In thus summarizing what has been already settled or disposed of in our dealings with the questions of the war, I may be permitted to pause for a moment on the American contributions it brought about to international morality and law. On the day on which the American Peace Commissioners to Paris sailed for home after the ceremonial courtesy with which their labors were concluded, the most authoritative journal in the world published an interview with the eminent President of the corresponding Spanish Commission, then and for some time afterward President also of the Spanish Senate, in which he was reported as saying: "We knew in advance that we should have to deal with an implacable conqueror, who would in no way concern himself with any pre-existing International Law, but whose sole object was to reap from victory the largest possible advantage. This conception of International Law is absolutely new; it is no longer a case of might against right, but of might without right.... The Americans have acted as vainqueurs parvenus."10
Much may be pardoned to the anguish of an old and trusted public servant over the misfortunes of his native land. We may even, in our sympathy, endeavor to forget what country it was that proposed to defy the agreements of the Conference of Paris and the general judgment of nations by resorting to privateering, or what country it was that preferred to risk becoming an asylum for the criminals of a continent rather than revive, even temporarily, that basic and elementary implement of modern international justice, an extradition treaty, which had been in force with acceptable results for over twenty years. But when Americans are stigmatized as "vainqueurs parvenus," who by virtue of mere strength violate International Law against a prostrate foe, and when one of the ablest of their American critics encourages the Spanish contention by talking of our "bulldog diplomacy at Paris," it gives us occasion to challenge the approval of the world—as the facts amply warrant—for the scrupulous conformity to existing International Law, and the important contributions to its beneficent advancement that have distinguished the action of the United States throughout these whole transactions. Having already set these forth in some detail before a foreign audience,11I must not now do more than offer the briefest summary.
The United States ended the toleration of Privateering. It was perfectly free to commission privateers on the day war was declared. Spain was equally free, and it was proclaimed from Madrid that the Atlantic would soon swarm with them, sweeping American commerce from the ocean. Under these circumstances one of the very first and noblest acts of the President was to announce that the United States would not avail itself of the right to send out privateers, reserved under the Declaration of Paris. The fast-thickening disasters of Spain prevented her from doing it, and thus substantially completed the practice or acquiescence of the civilized world, essential to the acceptance of a principle in International Law. It is safe to assume that Christendom will henceforth treat Privateering as under international ban.
The United States promoted the cause of genuine International Arbitration by promptly and emphatically rejecting an insidious proposal for a spurious one. It taught those who deliberately prefer War to Arbitration, and, when beaten at it, seek then to get the benefit of a second remedy, that honest Arbitration must come before War, to avert its horrors, not after War, to evade its penalties.
The United States promoted peace among nations, and so served humanity, by sternly enforcing the rule that they who bring on an unjust war must pay for it. For years the overwhelming tendency of its people had been against any territorial aggrandizement, even a peaceful one; but it unflinchingly exacted the easiest, if not the only, payment Spain could make for a war that cost us, at the lowest, from four to five hundred million dollars, by taking Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It requires some courage to describe this as either a violation of International Law, or a display of unprecedented severity by an implacable conqueror, in the very city and before the very generation that saw the Franco-Prussian War concluded, not merely by a partition of territory, but also by a cash payment of a thousand millions indemnity.
The United States promoted the peaceful liberalizing of oppressive rule over all subject peoples by making it more difficult to negotiate loans in the markets of the world to subdue their outbreaks. For it firmly rejected in the Cuban adjustments the immoral doctrine that an ill-treated and revolting colony, after gaining its freedom, must still submit to the extortion from it of the cost of the parent country's unsuccessful efforts to subdue it. We therefore left the so-called Cuban bonds on the hands of the Power that issued them, or of the reckless lenders who advanced the money. At the same time the United States strained a point elsewhere in the direction of protecting any legitimate debt, and of dealing generously with a fallen foe, by a payment which the most carping critic will some day be ashamed to describe as "buying the inhabitants of the Philippines at two dollars a head."12
All these are acts distinctly in accord with International Law so far as it exists and applies, and distinctly tending to promote its humane and Christian extension. Let me add, in a word, that the peace negotiations in no way compromised or affected the Monroe Doctrine, which stands as firm as ever, though much less important with the disappearance of any probable opposition to it; and that the prestige they brought smoothed the way for the one hopeful result of the Czar's Conference at The Hague, a response to the American proposal for a permanent International Court of Arbitration.
A trifling but characteristic inaccuracy concerning the Peace Commission may as well be corrected before the subject is left. This is the statement, apparently originating from Malay sources, but promptly indorsed in this country by unfriendly critics, to the effect that the representative of Aguinaldo was uncivilly refused a hearing in Paris. It was repeated, inadvertently, no doubt, with many other curious distortions of historic facts, only the other day, by a distinguished statesman in Chicago.13As he put it, the doors were slammed in their faces in Washington as well as in Paris. Now, whatever might have happened, the door was certainly never slammed in their faces in Paris, for they never came to it. On the contrary, every time Mr. Agoncillo approached any member of the Commission on the subject, he was courteously invited to send the Commissioners a written request for a hearing, which would, at any rate, receive immediate consideration. No such request ever came, and any Filipino who wrote for a hearing in Paris was heard.
The Present Duty.
Meanwhile we are now in the midst of hostilities with a part of the native population, originating in an unprovoked attack upon our troops in the city they had wrested from the Spaniards, before final action on the treaty. It is easy to say that we ought not to have got into this conflict, and to that I might agree. "I tell you, they can't put you in jail on that charge," said the learned and disputatious counsel to the client who had appealed from his cell for help. "But Iamin," was the sufficient answer. The question just then was not what might have been done, but what can be done. I wish to urge that we can only end this conflict by manfully fighting through it. The talk one hears that the present situation calls for "diplomacy" seems to be mistimed. That species of diplomacy which consists in the tact of prompt action in the right line at the right time might, quite possibly, have prevented the present hostilities. Any diplomacy now would seem to our Tagal antagonists the raising of the white flag—the final proof that the American people do not sustain their Army in the face of unprovoked attack. Every witness who came before the American Peace Commission in Paris, or sent it a written statement, English, German, Belgian, Malay, or American, said the same thing. Absolutely the one essential for dealing with the Filipinos was to convince them at the very outset that what you began you stood to; that you did not begin without consideration of right and duty, or quail then before opposition; that your purpose was inexorable and your power irresistible, while submission to it would always insure justice. On the contrary, once let them suspect that protests would dissuade and turbulence deter you, and all the Oriental instinct for delay and bargaining for better terms is aroused, along with the special Malay genius for intrigue and double-dealing, their profound belief that every man has his price, and their childish ignorance as to the extent to which stump speeches here against any Administration can cause American armies beyond the seas to retreat.
No; the toast which Henry Clay once gave in honor of an early naval hero fits the present situation like a glove. He proposed "the policy which looks to peace as the end of war, and war as the means of peace." In that light I maintain that the conflict we are prosecuting is in the line of national necessity and duty; that we cannot turn back; that the truest humanity condemns needless delay or half-hearted action, and demands overwhelming forces and irresistible onset.
Eliminate Temporary Discouragements.
But in considering this duty, just as in estimating the Treaty of Paris, we have the right to eliminate all account of the trifling success, so far, in the Philippines, or of the great trouble and cost. What it was right to do there, and what we are bound to do now, must not be obscured by faults of hesitation or insufficient preparation, for which neither the Peace Commissioners nor the people are responsible. I had occasion to say before a college audience last June what I now repeat with the additional emphasis subsequent events have warranted—that the difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own making; and I repeat that it is still not for us, here and now, to apportion the blame. We have not the knowledge to say just who, or whether any man or body, is wholly at fault. What we do know is that the course of hesitation and inaction which the Nation pursued in face of an openly maturing attack was precisely the policy sure to give us the greatest trouble, and that we are now paying the penalty. If the opposite course had been taken at the outset—unless all the testimony from foreign observers and from our own officers is at fault—there would have been either no outbreak at all, or only one easily controlled and settled to the general satisfaction of most of the civilized and semi-civilized inhabitants of the island.
On the personal and partizan disputes already lamentably begun, as to senatorial responsibility, congressional responsibility, or the responsibility of this or that executive officer, we have no occasion here to enter. What we have a right to insist on is that our general policy in the Philippines shall not be shaped now merely by the just discontent with the bad start. The reports of continual victories, that roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted—all these are beside the real question. They must not obscure the duty of restoring order in the regions where our troops have been assailed, or prejudice our subsequent course.
I venture to say of that course that neither our duty nor our interest will permit us to stop short of a pacification which can only end in the establishment of such local self-government as the people are found capable of conducting, and its extension just as far and as fast as the people prove fit for it.
Pacification and Natural Course of Organization.
The natural development thus to be expected would probably proceed safely, along the lines of least resistance, about in this order: First, and till entirely clear that it is no longer needed, Military Government. Next, the rule of either Military or Civil Governors (for a considerable time probably the former), relying gradually more and more on native agencies. Thirdly, the development of Dependencies, with an American Civil Governor, with their foreign relations and their highest courts controlled by us, and their financial system largely managed by members of a rigidly organized and jealously protected American Civil Service, but in most other respects steadily becoming more self-governing. And, finally, autonomous governments, looking to us for little save control of their foreign relations, profiting by the stability and order the backing of a powerful nation guarantees, cultivating more and more intimate trade and personal relations with that nation, and coming to feel themselves participants of its fortunes and renown.
Such a course Congress, after full investigation and deliberation, might perhaps wisely formulate. Such a course, with slight modifications to meet existing limitations as to his powers, has already been entered upon by the President, and can doubtless be carried on indefinitely by him until Congress acts. This action should certainly not be precipitate. The system demands most careful study, not only in the light of what the English and Dutch, the most successful holders of tropical countries, have done, but also in the light of the peculiar and varied circumstances that confront us on these different and distant islands, and among these widely differing races—circumstances to which no previous experience exactly applies, and for which no uniform system could be applicable. If Congress should take as long a time before action to study the problem as it has taken in the Sandwich Islands, or even in Alaska, the President's power would still be equal to the emergency, and the policy, while flexible, could still be made as continuous, coherent, and practical as his best information and ability would permit.
Evasions of Duty.
Against such a conscientious and painstaking course in dealing with the grave responsibilities that are upon us in the East, two lines of evasion are sure to threaten. The one is the policy of the upright but short-sighted and strictly continental patriot—the same which an illustrious statesman of another country followed in the Sudan: "Scuttle as quick as you can."
The other is the policy of the exuberant patriot who believes in the universal adaptability and immediate extension of American institutions. He thinks all men everywhere as fit to vote as himself, and wants them for partners. He is eager to have them prepare at once, in our new possessions, first in the West Indies, then in the East, to send Senators and Representatives to Congress, and his policy is: "Make Territories of them now, and States in the American Union as soon as possible." I wish to speak with the utmost respect of the sincere advocates of both theories, but must say that the one seems to me to fall short of a proper regard for either our duty or our interest, and the other to be national suicide.
Gentlemen in whose ability and patriotism we all have confidence have lately put the first of these policies for evading our duty in the form of a protest "against the expansion and establishment of the dominion of the United States, by conquest or otherwise, over unwilling peoples in any part of the globe." Of this it may be said, first, that any application of it to the Philippines probably assumes a factional and temporary outbreak to represent a settled unwillingness. New Orleans was as "unwilling," when Mr. Jefferson annexed it, as Aguinaldo has made Manila; and Aaron Burr came near making the whole Louisiana Territory far worse. Mr. Lincoln, you remember, always believed the people of North Carolina not unwilling to remain in the Union, yet we know what they did. But next, this protest contemplates evading the present responsibility by a reversal of our settled policy any way. Mr. Lincoln probably never doubted the unwillingness of South Carolina to remain in the Union, but that did not change his course. Mr. Seward never inquired whether the Alaskans were unwilling or not. The historic position of the United States, from the day when Jefferson braved the envenomed anti-expansion sentiment of his time and bought the territory west of the Mississippi, on down, has been to consider, not the willingness or unwillingness of any inhabitants, whether aboriginal or colonists, but solely our national opportunity, our own duty, and our own interests.
Is it said that this is Imperialism? That implies usurpation of power, and there is absolutely no ground for such a charge against this Administration at any one stage in these whole transactions. If any complaint here is to lie, it must relate to the critical period when we were accepting responsibility for order at Manila, and must be for the exercise of too little power, not too much. It is not Imperialism to take up honestly the responsibility for order we incurred before the world, and continue under it, even if that should lead us to extend the civil rights of the American Constitution over new regions and strange peoples. It is not Imperialism when duty keeps us among these chaotic, warring, distracted tribes, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous, to help them, as far as their several capacities will permit, toward self-government, on the basis of those civil rights.
A terser and more taking statement of opposition has been recently attributed to a gentleman highly honored by this University and by his townsmen here. I gladly seize this opportunity, as a consistent opponent during his whole political life, to add that his words carry great weight throughout the country by reason of the unquestioned ability, courage, and patriotic devotion he has brought to the public service. He is reported as protesting simply against "the use of power in the extension of American institutions." But does not this, if applied to the present situation, seem also to miss an important distinction? What planted us in the Philippines was the use of our power in the most efficient naval and military defense then available for our own institutions where they already exist, against the attack of Spain. If the responsibility entailed by the result of these acts in our own defense does involve some extension of our institutions, shall we therefore run away from it? If a guaranty to chaotic tribes of the civil rights secured by the American Constitution does prove to be an incident springing from the discharge of the duty that has rested upon us from the moment we drove Spain out, is that a result so objectionable as to warrant us in abandoning our duty?
There is, it is true, one other alternative—the one which Aguinaldo himself is said to have suggested, and which has certainly been put forth in his behalf with the utmost simplicity and sincerity by a conspicuous statesman at Chicago. We might at once solicit peace from Aguinaldo. We might then encourage him to extend his rule over the whole country,—Catholic, pagan, and Mohammedan, willing and unwilling alike,—and promise him whatever aid might be necessary for that task. Meantime, we should undertake to protect him against outside interference from any European or Asiatic nation whose interests on that oceanic highway and in those commercial capitals might be imperiled!14I do not desire to discuss that proposition. And I submit to candid men that there are just those three courses, and no more, now open to us—to run away, to protect Aguinaldo, or to back up our own army and firmly hold on!
Objections to Duty.
If this fact be clearly perceived, if the choice between these three courses be once recognized as the only choice the present situation permits, our minds will be less disturbed by the confused cries of perplexity and discontent that still fill the air. Thus men often say, "If you believe in liberty for yourself, why refuse it to the Tagals?" That is right; they should have, in the degree of their capacity, the only kind of liberty worth having in the world, the only kind that is not a curse to its possessors and to all in contact with them—ordered liberty, under law, for which the wisdom of man has not yet found a better safeguard than the guaranties of civil rights in the Constitution of the United States. Who supposes that to be the liberty for which Aguinaldo is fighting? What his people want, and what the statesman at Chicago wishes us to use the Army and Navy of the United States to help him get, is the liberty to rule others—the liberty first to turn our own troops out of the city and harbor we had in our own self-defense captured from their enemies; the liberty next to rule that great commercial city, and the tribes of the interior, instead of leaving us to exercise the rule over them that events have forced upon us, till it is fairly shown that they can rule themselves.
Again it is said, "You are depriving them of freedom." But they never had freedom, and could not have it now. Even if they could subdue the other tribes in Luzon, they could not establish such order on the other islands and in the waters of the archipelago as to deprive foreign Powers of an immediate excuse for interference. What we are doing is in the double line of preventing otherwise inevitable foreign seizure and putting a stop to domestic war.
"But you cannot fit people for freedom. They must fit themselves, just as we must do our own crawling and stumbling in order to learn to walk." The illustration is unfortunate. Must the crawling baby, then, be abandoned by its natural or accidental guardian, and left to itself to grow strong by struggling, or to perish, as may happen? Must we turn the Tagals loose on the foreigners in Manila, and on their enemies in the other tribes, that by following their instincts they may fit themselves for freedom?
Again, "It will injure us to exert power over an unwilling people, just as slavery injured the slaveholders themselves." Then a community is injured by maintaining a police. Then a court is injured by rendering a just decree, and an officer by executing it. Then it is a greater injury, for instance, to stop piracy than to suffer from it. Then the manly exercise of a just responsibility enfeebles instead of developing and strengthening a nation.
"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." "No man is good enough to govern another against his will." Great truths, from men whose greatness and moral elevation the world admires. But there is a higher authority than Jefferson or Lincoln, Who said: "If a man smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." Yet he who acted literally on even that divine injunction toward the Malays that attacked our Army in Manila would be a congenital idiot to begin with, and his corpse, while it lasted, would remain an object-lesson of how not to deal with the present stage of Malay civilization and Christianity.
Why mourn over our present course as a departure from the policy of the fathers? For a hundred years the uniform policy which they began and their sons continued has been acquisition, expansion, annexation, reaching out to remote wildernesses far more distant and inaccessible then than the Philippines are now—to disconnected regions like Alaska, to island regions like Midway, the Guano Islands, the Aleutians, the Sandwich Islands, and even to quasi-protectorates like Liberia and Samoa. Why mourn because of the precedent we are establishing? The precedent was established before we were born. Why distress ourselves with the thought that this is only the beginning, that it opens the door to unlimited expansion? The door is wide open now, and has been ever since Livingston in Paris jumped at Talleyrand's offer to sell him the wilderness west of the Mississippi instead of the settlements eastward to Florida, which we had been trying to get; and Jefferson eagerly sustained him. For the rest, the task that is laid upon us now is not proving so easy as to warrant this fear that we shall soon be seeking unlimited repetitions of it.
Evasion by Embrace.
That danger, in fact, can come only if we shirk our present duty by the second of the two alternative methods of evasion I have mentioned—the one favored by the exuberant patriot who wants to clasp Cuban, Kanaka, and Tagal alike to his bosom as equal partners with ourselves in our inheritance from the fathers, and take them all into the Union as States.
We will be wise to open our eyes at once to the gravity and the insidious character of this danger—the very worst that could threaten the American Union. Once begun, the rivalry of parties and the fears of politicians would insure its continuance. With Idaho and Wyoming admitted, they did not dare prolong the exclusion even of Utah, and so we have the shame of seeing an avowed polygamist with a prima facie right to sit in our Congress as a legislator not merely for Utah, but for the whole Union. At this moment scarcely a politician dares frankly avow unalterable opposition to the admission of Cuba, if she should seek it. Yet, bad as that would be, it would necessarily lead to worse. Others in the West Indies might not linger long behind. In any event, with Cuba a State, Porto Rico could not be kept a Territory. No more could the Sandwich Islands. And then, looming direct in our path, like a volcano rising out of the mist on the affrighted vision of mariners tempest-tossed in tropic seas, is the specter of such States as Luzon and the Visayas and Haiti.
They would have precedents, too, to quote, and dangerous ones. When we bought Louisiana we stipulated in the treaty that "the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States." We made almost identically the same stipulation when we bought Florida. When one of the most respected in the long line of our able Secretaries of State, Mr. William L. Marcy, negotiated a treaty in 1854 for the annexation of the Sandwich Islands, he provided that they should be incorporated as a State, with the same degree of sovereignty as other States, and on perfect equality with them. The schemes prior to 1861 for the purchase or annexation of Cuba practically all looked to the same result. Not till the annexation of San Domingo was proposed did this feature disappear from our treaties. It is only candid to add that the habit of regarding this as the necessary destiny of any United States Territory as soon as it has sufficient population has been universal. It is no modern vagary, but the practice, if not the theory, of our whole national life, that would open the doors of our Senate and House, and give a share in the Government to these wild-eyed newcomers from the islands of the sea.
The calamity of admitting them cannot be overrated. Even in the case of the best of these islands, it would demoralize and degrade the national suffrage almost incalculably below the point already reached. To the Senate, unwieldy now, and greatly changed in character from the body contemplated by the Constitution, it would be disastrous. For the present States of the Union it would be an act of folly like that of a business firm which blindly steered for bankruptcy by freely admitting to full partnership new members, strangers, and non-residents, not only otherwise ill qualified, but with absolutely conflicting interests. And it would be a distinct violation of the clause in the preamble that "we, the people,... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States ofAmerica."
There is the only safe ground—on the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. It contemplated a Continental Union of sovereign States. It limited that Union to the American Continent. The man that takes it farther sounds its death-knell.
The General Welfare.
I have designedly left to the last any estimate of the material interests we serve by holding on in our present course. Whatever these may be, they are only a subordinate consideration. We are in the Philippines, as we are in the West Indies, because duty sent us; and we shall remain because we have no right to run away from our duty, even if it does involve far more trouble than we foresaw when we plunged into the war that entailed it. The call to duty, when once plainly understood, is a call Americans never fail to answer, while to calls of interest they have often shown themselves incredulous or contemptuous.
But the Constitution we revere was also ordained "to promote the general welfare," and he is untrue to its purpose who squanders opportunities. Never before have they been showered upon us in such bewildering profusion. Are the American people to rise to the occasion? Are they to be as great as their country? Or shall the historian record that at this unexampled crisis they were controlled by timid ideas and short-sighted views, and so proved unequal to the duty and the opportunity which unforeseen circumstances brought to their doors? The two richest archipelagos in the world are practically at our disposal. The greatest ocean on the globe has been put in our hands, the ocean that is to bear the commerce of the Twentieth Century. In the face of this prospect, shall we prefer, with the teeming population that century is to bring us, to remain a "hibernating nation, living off its own fat—a hermit nation," as Mr. Senator Davis has asked? For our first Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Hill, was right when he said that not to enter the Open Door in Asia means the perpetual isolation of this continent.
Have they any Value?
Are we to be discouraged by the cry that the new possessions are worthless? Not while we remember how often and under what circumstances we have heard that cry before. Half the public men of the period denounced Louisiana as worthless. Eminent statesmen made merry in Congress over the idea that Oregon or Washington could be of any use. Daniel Webster, in the most solemn and authoritative tones Massachusetts has ever employed, assured his fellow-Senators that, in his judgment, California was not worth a dollar.
Is it said that the commercial opportunities in the Orient, or at least in the Philippines, are overrated? So it used to be said of the Sandwich Islands. But what does our experience show? Before their annexation even, but after we had taken this little archipelago under our protection and into our commercial system, our ocean tonnage in that trade became nearly double as heavy as with Great Britain. Why? Because, while we have lost the trade of the Atlantic, superior advantages make the Pacific ours. Is it said that elsewhere on the Pacific we can do as well without a controlling political influence as with it? Look again! Mexico buys our products at the rate of $1.95 for each inhabitant; South America at the rate of 90 cents; Great Britain at the rate of $13.42; Canada at the rate of $14; and the Hawaiian Islands at the rate of $53.35 for each inhabitant. Look at the trade of the chief city on the Pacific coast. All Mexico and Central America, all the western parts of South America and of Canada, are as near to it as is Honolulu; and comparison of the little Sandwich Islands in population with any of them would be ridiculous. Yet none of them bought as much salmon in San Francisco as Hawaii, and no countries bought more save England and Australia. No countries bought as much barley, excepting Central America; and even in the staff of life, the California flour, which all the world buys, only five countries outranked Hawaii in purchases in San Francisco.
No doubt a part of this result is due to the nearness of Hawaii to our markets, and her distance from any others capable of competing with us, and another part to a favorable system of reciprocity. Nevertheless, nobody doubts the advantage our dealers have derived in the promotion of trade from controlling political relations and frequent intercourse. There are those who deny that "trade follows the flag," but even they admit that it leaves if the flag does. And, independent of these advantages, and reckoning by mere distance, we still have the better of any European rivals in the Philippines. Now, assume that the Filipino would have far fewer wants than the Kanaka or his coolie laborer, and would do far less work for the means to gratify them. Admit, too, that, with the Open Door, our political relations and frequent intercourse could have barely a fifth or a sixth of the effect there they have had in the Sandwich Islands. Roughly cast up even that result, and say whether it is a value which the United States should throw away as not worth considering!
And the greatest remains behind. For the trade in the Philippines will be but a drop in the bucket compared to that of China, for which they give us an unapproachable foothold. But let it never be forgotten that the confidence of Orientals goes only to those whom they recognize as strong enough and determined enough always to hold their own and protect their rights! The worst possible introduction for the Asiatic trade would be an irresolute abandonment of our foothold because it was too much trouble to keep, or because some Malay and half-breed insurgents said they wanted us away.
The Future.
Have you considered for whom we hold these advantages in trust? They belong not merely to the seventy-five millions now within our borders, but to all who are to extend the fortunes and preserve the virtues of the Republic in the coming century. Their numbers cannot increase in the startling ratio this century has shown. If they did the population of the United States a hundred years hence would be over twelve hundred millions. That ratio is impossible, but nobody gives reasons why we should not increase half as fast. Suppose we do actually increase only one fourth as fast in the Twentieth Century as in the Nineteenth. To what height would not the three hundred millions of Americans whom even that ratio foretells bear up the seething industrial activities of the continent! To what corner of the world would they not need to carry their commerce? What demands on tropical productions would they not make? What outlets for their adventurous youth would they not require? With such a prospect before us, who thinks that we should shrink from an enlargement of our national sphere because of the limitations that bound, or the dangers that threatened, before railroads, before ocean steamers, before telegraphs and ocean cables, before the enormous development of our manufactures, and the training of executive and organizing faculties in our people on a constantly increasing scale for generations?
Does the prospect alarm? Is it said that our Nation is already too great, that all its magnificent growth only adds to the conflicting interests that must eventually tear it asunder? What cement, then, like that of a great common interest beyond our borders, that touches not merely the conscience but the pocket and the pride of all alike, and marshals us in the face of the world, standing for our own?
What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? Hold fast! Stand firm in the place where Providence has put you, and do the duty a just responsibility for your own past acts imposes. Support the army you sent there. Stop wasting valuable strength by showing how things might be different if something different had been done a year and a half ago. Use the educated thought of the country for shaping best its course now, instead of chiefly finding fault with its history. Bring the best hope of the future, the colleges and the generation they are training, to exert the greatest influence and accomplish the most good by working intelligently in line with the patriotic aspirations and the inevitable tendencies of the American people, rather than against them. Unite the efforts of all men of good will to make the appointment of any person to these new and strange duties beyond seas impossible save for proved fitness, and his removal impossible save for cause. Rally the colleges and the churches, and all they influence, the brain and the conscience of the country, in a combined and irresistible demand for a genuine, trained, and pure Civil Service in our new possessions, that shall put to shame our detractors, and show to the world the Americans of this generation, equal still to the work of civilization and colonization, and leading the development of the coming century as bravely as their fathers led it in the last.