WHITELAW REID (continued 3)

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.¹³ As 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 I am in," 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!¹⁴ I 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 of America."

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.

IX

A CONTINENTAL UNION

This speech was delivered on the invitation of the Massachusetts Club, at their regular dinner in Boston, March 3, 1900.

A CONTINENTAL UNION

A third of a century ago I had the honor to be a guest at this club, which met then, as now, in Young's Hotel. It has ever since been a pleasure to recall the men of Boston who gathered about the board, interested, as now, in the affairs of the Republic to which they were at once ornament and defense. Frank Bird sat at the head. Near him was Henry Wilson. John M. Forbes was here, and John A. Andrew, and George S. Boutwell, and George L. Stearns, and many another, eager in those times of trial to seek and know the best thing to be done to serve this country of our pride and love. They were practical business men, true Yankees in the best sense; and they spent no time then in quarreling over how we got into our trouble. Their one concern was how to get out to the greatest advantage of the country.

Honored now by another opportunity to meet with the club, I can do no better than profit by this example of your earlier days. You have asked me to speak on some phase of the Philippine question. I would like to concentrate your attention upon the present and practical phase, and to withdraw it for the time from things that are past and cannot be changed.

Things that Cannot be Undone.

Stare decisis. There are some things settled. Have we not a better and more urgent use for our time now than in showing why some of us would have liked them settled differently? In my State there is a dictum by an eminent judge of the Court of Appeals, so familiar now as to be a commonplace, to the effect that when that court has rendered its decision, there are only two things left to the disappointed advocate. One is to accept the result attained, and go to work on it as best he can; the other, to go down to the tavern and "cuss" the court. I want to suggest to those who dislike the past of the Philippine question that there is more important work pressing upon you at this moment than to cuss the court. You cannot change the past, but you may prevent some threatened sequences which even in your eyes would be far greater calamities.

There is no use bewailing the war with Spain. Nothing can undo it, and its results are upon us. There is no use arguing that Dewey should have abandoned his conquest. He didn't. There is no use regretting the Peace of Paris. For good or for ill, it is a part of the supreme law of the land. There is no use begrudging the twenty millions. They are paid. There is no use depreciating the islands, East or West. They are the property of the United States by an immutable title which, whatever some of our own people say, the whole civilized world recognizes and respects. There is no use talking about getting rid of them—giving them back to Spain, or turning them over to Aguinaldo, or simply running away from them. Whoever thinks that any one of these things could be done, or is still open to profitable debate, takes his observations—will you pardon me the liberty of saying it?—takes his observations too closely within the horizon of Boston Bay to know the American people.

They have not been persuaded and they cannot be persuaded that this is an inferior Government, incapable of any duty Providence (through the acts of a wicked Administration, if you choose) may send its way—duties which other nations could discharge, but we cannot. They do not and will not believe that it was any such maimed, imperfect, misshapen cripple from birth for which our forefathers made a place in the family of nations. Nor are they misled by the cry that, in a populous region, thronged by the ships and traders of all countries, where their own prosecution of a just war broke down whatever guaranties for order had previously existed, they are violating the natural rights of man by enforcing order. Just as little are they misled by the other cry that they are violating the right of self-government, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States by preparing for the distracted, warring tribes of that region such local government as they may be found capable of conducting, in their various stages of development from pure barbarism toward civilization. The American people know they are thus proceeding to do just what Jefferson did in the vast region he bought from France—without the consent, by the way, either of its sovereign or its inhabitants. They know they are following in the exact path of all the constructive statesmen of the Republic, from the days of the man who wrote the Declaration, and of those who made the Constitution, down to the days of the men who conquered California, bought Alaska, and denied the right of self-government to Jefferson Davis. They simply do not believe that a new light has been given to Mr. Bryan, or to the better men who are aiding him, greater and purer than was given to Washington, or to Jefferson, or to Lincoln.

And so I venture to repeat, without qualification or reserve, that what is past cannot be changed. Candid and dispassionate minds, knowing the American people of all political shades and in all sections of the country, can see no possibility that any party in power, whether the present one or its opponent, would or could, now or soon, if ever, abandon or give back one foot of the territory gained in the late war, and ours now by the supreme law of the land and with the assent of the civilized world. As well may you look to see California, which your own Daniel Webster, quite in a certain modern Massachusetts style, once declared in the Senate to be not worth a dollar, now abandoned to Mexico.

No Abstractions or Apologies or Attacks.

It seems to me, then, idle to thresh over old straw when the grain is not only winnowed, but gone to the mill. And so I am not here to discuss abstract questions: as, for example, whether in the year 1898 the United States was wise in going to war with Spain, though on that I might not greatly disagree with the malcontents; or as to the wisdom of expansion; or as to the possibility of a republic's maintaining its authority over a people without their consent. Nor am I here to apologize for my part in making the nation that was in the wrong and beaten in the late war pay for it in territory. I have never thought of denying or evading my own full share of responsibility in that matter. Conscious of a duty done, I am happily independent enough to be measurably indifferent as to a mere present and temporary effect. Whatever the verdict of the men of Massachusetts to-day, I contentedly await the verdict of their sons.

But, on the other hand, I am not here either to launch charges of treason against any opponent of these policies, who nevertheless loves the institutions founded on these shores by your ancestors, and wishes to perpetuate what they created. Least of all would it occur to me to utter a word in disparagement of your senior Senator, of whom it may be said with respectful and almost affectionate regard that he bears a warrant as authentic as that of the most distinguished of his predecessors to speak for the conscience and the culture of Massachusetts. Nor shall any reproach be uttered by me against another eminent son of the commonwealth and servant of the Republic, who was expected, as one of the officers of your club told me, to make this occasion distinguished by his presence. He has been represented as resenting the unchangeable past so sternly that he now hopes to aid in defeating the party he has helped to lead through former trials to present glory. If so, and if from the young and unremembering reproach should come, be it ours, silent and walking backward, merely to cast over him the mantle of his own honored service.

Common Duty and a Common Danger.

No, no! Let us have a truce to profitless disputes about what cannot be reversed. Censure us if you must. Even strike at your old associates and your own party if you will and when you can, without harming causes you hold dear. But for the duty of this hour, consider if there is not a common meeting-ground and instant necessity for union in a rational effort to avert present perils. This, then, is my appeal. Disagree as we may about the past, let us to-day at least see straight—see things as they are. Let us suspend disputes about what is done and cannot be undone, long enough to rally all the forces of good will, all the undoubted courage and zeal and patriotism that are now at odds, in a devoted effort to meet the greater dangers that are upon us.

For the enemy is at the gates. More than that, there is some reason to fear that, through dissensions from within, he may gain the citadel. In their eagerness to embarrass the advocates of what has been done, and with the vain hope of in some way undoing it, and so lifting this Nation of seventy-five millions bodily backward two years on its path, there are many who are still putting forth all their energies in straining our Constitution and defying our history, to show that we have no possessions whose people are not entitled to citizenship and ultimately to Statehood. Grant that, and instead of reversing engines safely in mid-career, as they vainly hope, they must simply plunge us over the precipice. The movement began in the demand that our Dingley tariff—as a matter of right, not of policy, for most of these people denounce the tariff itself as barbarous—that our Dingley tariff should of necessity be extended over Porto Rico as an integral part of the United States. Following an assent to this must have come inevitably all the other rights and privileges belonging to citizenship, and then no power could prevent the admission of the State of Porto Rico.

Some may think that in itself would be no great thing, though it is for you to say how Massachusetts would relish having this mixed population, a little more than half colonial Spanish, the rest negro and half-breed, illiterate, alien in language, alien in ideas of right, interests, and government, send in from the mid-Atlantic, nearly a third of the way over to Africa, two Senators to balance the votes of Mr. Hoar and Mr. Lodge; for you to say how Massachusetts would regard the spectacle of her senatorial vote nullified, and one third of her representation in the House offset on questions, for instance, of sectional and purely Northern interest, in the government of this continent, and in the administration of this precious heritage of our fathers.

Or, suppose Massachusetts to be so little Yankee (in the best sense still) that she could bear all this without murmur or objection—is it to be imagined that she can lift other States in this generation to her altruistic level? How would Kansas, for example, enjoy being balanced in the Senate, and nearly balanced in the House, on questions relating to the irrigation of her arid plains, or the protection of her beet-root industry, or on any others affecting the great central regions of this continent, by these voices from the watery waste of the ocean? Or how would West Virginia or Oregon or Connecticut, or half a dozen others of similar population, regard it to be actually outvoted in their own home, on their own continent, by this Spanish and negro waif from the mid-Atlantic?

All this, in itself, may seem to some unimportant, negligible, even trivial. At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it. But make its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a State. Then behind Porto Rico stands Cuba, and behind Cuba, in time, stand the whole of the West Indies, on whom that law of political gravitation which John Quincy Adams described will be perpetually acting with redoubled force. And behind them—no, far ahead of them, abreast of Porto Rico itself—stand the Philippines! The Constitution which our fathers reverently ordained for the United States of America is thus tortured by its professed friends into a crazy-quilt, under whose dirty folds must huddle the United States of America, of the West Indies, of the East Indies, and of Polynesia; and Pandemonium is upon us.

The Degradation of the Republic.

I implore you, as thinking men, pause long enough to realize the degradation of the Republic thus calmly contemplated by those who proclaim this to be our constitutional duty toward our possessions. The republican institutions I have been trained to believe in were institutions founded, like those of New England, on the Church and the school-house. They constitute a system only likely to endure among a people of high virtue and high intelligence. The republican government built up on this continent, while the most successful in the history of the world, is also the most complicated, the most expensive, and often the slowest. Such are its complications and checks and balances and interdependencies, which tax the intelligence, the patience, and the virtue of the highest Caucasian development, that it is a system absolutely unworkable by a group of Oriental and tropical races, more or less hostile to each other, whose highest type is a Chinese and Malay half-breed, and among whom millions, a majority possibly, are far below the level of the pure Malay.

What holds a nation together, unless it be community of interests, character, and language, and contiguous territory? What would more thoroughly insure its speedily flying to pieces than the lack of every one of these requisites? Over and over, the clearest-eyed students of history have predicted our own downfall even as a continental republic, in spite of our measurable enjoyment of all of them. How near we all believed we came to it once or twice! How manifestly, under the incongruous hodge-podge of additions to the Union thus proposed, we should be organizing with Satanic skill the exact conditions which have invariably led to such downfalls elsewhere!

Before the advent of the United States, the history of the world's efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure. Your very school-boys are taught the reason. It was because the average of intelligence and morality was too low; because they lacked the self-restrained, self-governing quality developed in the Anglo-Saxon bone and fiber through all the centuries since Runnymede; because they grew unwieldy and lost cohesion by reason of unrelated territory, alien races and languages, and inevitable territorial and climatic conflicts of interest.

On questions vitally affecting the welfare of this continent it is inconceivable, unthinkable, that even altruistic Massachusetts should tolerate having her two Senators and thirteen Representatives neutralized by as many from Mindanao. Yet Mindanao has a greater population than Massachusetts, and its Mohammedan Malays are as keen for the conduct of public affairs, can talk as much, and look as shrewdly for the profit of it.

There are cheerful, happy-go-lucky public men who assure us that the national digestion has been proved equal to anything. Has it? Are we content, for example, with the way we have dealt with the negro problem in the Southern States? Do we think the suffrage question there is now on a permanent basis which either we or our Southern friends can be proud of, while we lack the courage either honestly to enforce the rule of the majority, or honestly to sanction a limitation of suffrage within lines of intelligence and thrift? How well would our famous national digestion probably advance if we filled up our Senate with twelve or fourteen more Senators, representing conditions incomparably worse?

Is it said this danger is imaginary? At this moment some of the purest and most patriotic men in Massachusetts, along with a great many of the very worst in the whole country, are vehemently declaring that our new possessions are already a part of the United States; that in spite of the treaty which reserved the question of citizenship and political status for Congress, their people are already citizens of the United States; and that no part of the United States can be arbitrarily and permanently excluded from Statehood.

The immediate contention, to be sure, is only about Porto Rico, and it is only a very little island. But who believes he can stop the avalanche? What wise man, at least, will take the risk of starting it? Who imagines that we can take in Porto Rico and keep out nearer islands when they come? Powerful elements are already pushing Cuba. Practically everybody recognizes now that we must retain control of Cuba's foreign relations. But beyond that, the same influences that came so near hurrying us into a recognition of the Cuban Republic and the Cuban debt are now sure that Cuba will very shortly be so "Americanized" (that is, overrun with American speculators) that it cannot be denied admission—that, in fact, it will be as American as Florida! And, after Cuba, the deluge! Who fancies that we could then keep San Domingo and Haiti out, or any West India island that applied, or our friends the Kanakas? Or who fancies that after the baser sort have once tasted blood, in the form of such rotten-borough States, and have learned to form their larger combinations with them, we shall still be able to admit as a matter of right a part of the territory exacted from Spain, and yet deny admission as a matter of right to the rest?

The Nation has lately been renewing its affectionate memories of a man who died in his effort to hold on, with or without their consent, to the States we already have on this continent, but who never dreamed of casting a drag-net over the world's archipelagos for more. Do we remember his birthday and forget his words? "This Government"—meaning that under the Constitution ordained for the United States of America—"this Government cannot permanently endure, half slave, half free." Who disputes it now? Well, then, can it endure half civilized and enlightened, half barbarous and pagan; half white, half black, brown, yellow, and mixed; half Northern and Western, half tropical and Oriental; one half a homogeneous continent, the rest in myriads of islands scattered half-way around the globe, but all eager to participate in ruling this continent which our fathers with fire and sword redeemed from barbarism and subdued to the uses of the highest civilization?

Clamor that Need not Disturb.

I will not insult your intelligence or your patriotism by imagining it possible that in view of such considerations you could consent to the madman's policy of taking these islands we control into full partnership with the States of this Union. Nor need you be much disturbed by the interested outcries as to the injustice you do by refusing to admit them.

When it is said you are denying the natural rights Mr. Jefferson proclaimed, you can answer that you are giving these people, in their distant islands, the identical form of government Mr. Jefferson himself gave to the territories on this continent which he bought. When it is said you are denying our own cardinal doctrine of self-government, you can point to the arrangements for establishing every particle of self-government with which these widely different tribes can be safely trusted, consistently with your responsibility for the preservation of order and the protection of life and property in that archipelago, and the pledge of more the moment they are found capable of it. When you are asked, as a leading champion¹⁵ asked the other night at Philadelphia, "Does your liberation of one people give you the right to subjugate another?" you can answer him, "No; nor to allow and aid Aguinaldo to subjugate them, either, as you proposed." When the idle quibble that after Dewey's victory Spain had no sovereignty to cede is repeated, it may be asked, "Why acknowledge, then, that she did cede it in Porto Rico and relinquish it in Cuba, yet deny that she could cede it in the Philippines?" Finally, when they tell you in mock heroics, appropriated from the great days of the anti-slavery struggle for the cause now of a pinchbeck Washington, that no results of the irrevocable past two years are settled, that not even the title to our new possessions is settled, and never will be until it is settled according to their notions, you can answer that then the title to Massachusetts is not settled, nor the title to a square mile of land in most of the States from ocean to ocean. Over practically none of it did we assume sovereignty by the consent of the inhabitants.

Where is your Real Interest?

Quite possibly these controversies may embarrass the Government and threaten the security of the party in power. New and perplexing responsibilities often do that. But is it to the interest of the sincere and patriotic among the discontented to produce either result? The one thing sure is that no party in power in this country will dare abandon these new possessions. That being so, do those of you who regret it prefer to lose all influence over the outcome? While you are repining over what is beyond recall, events are moving on. If you do not help shape them, others, without your high principle and purity of motive, may. Can you wonder if, while you are harassing the Administration with impracticable demands for an abandonment of territory which the American people will not let go, less unselfish influences are busy presenting candidates for all the offices in its organization? If the friends of a proper civil service persist in chasing the ignis fatuus of persuading Americans to throw away territory, while the politicians are busy crowding their favorites into the territorial offices, who will feel free from self-reproach at the results? Grant that the situation is bad. Can there be a doubt of the duty to make the best of it? Do you ask how? By being an active patriot, not a passive one. By exerting, and exerting now when it is needed, every form of influence, personal, social, political, moral,—the influence of the clubs, the Chambers of Commerce, the manufactories, the colleges, and the churches,—in favor of the purest, the ablest, the most scientific, the most disinterested—in a word, the best possible civil service for the new possessions that the conscience and the capacity of America can produce, with the most liberal use of all the material available from native sources.

I have done. I have no wish to argue, to defend, or to attack. I have sought only to point out what I conceive to be the present danger and the present duty. It is not to be doubted that all such considerations will summon you to the high resolve that you will neither shame the Republic by shirking the task its own victory entails, nor despoil the Republic by abandoning its rightful possessions, nor degrade the Republic by admissions of unfit elements to its Union; but that you will honor it, enrich it, ennoble it, by doing your utmost to make the administration of these possessions worthy of the Nation that Washington founded and Lincoln preserved. My last word is an appeal to stand firm and stand all together for the Continental Union and for a pure civil service for the Islands.

X

OUR NEW INTERESTS

This address was delivered on Charter Day at the University of California, on March 23, 1900.

OUR NEW INTERESTS

My subject has been variously stated in your different newspapers as "Current National Questions," or "The Present National Question," or "General Expositions; Not on Anything in Particular." When your President honored me with his invitation to a duty so high and so sudden that it might almost be dignified by the name of a draft, he gave me nearly equal license. I was to speak "on anything growing out of the late war with Spain."

How that war resembles the grippe! You remember the medical definition by an authority no less high than our present distinguished Secretary of State. "The grippe," said Colonel Hay, "is that disease in which, after you have been cured, you get steadily worse every day of your convalescence"! There are people of so little faith as to say that this exactly describes the late war with Spain.

If one is to speak at all of its present aspects, on this high-day of your University year, he should do so only as a patriot, not as a partizan. But he cannot avoid treading on ground where the ashes are yet warm, and discussing questions which, in spite of the present intermingling of party lines and confusion of party ideas, will presently be found the very battle-ground of campaign oratory and hostile hosts. You will credit me, I hope, with sufficient respect for the proprieties of this platform to avoid partizan arguments, under the warrant of your distinguished President to discuss national questions from any point of view that a patriot can take. It is profoundly to be regretted that on these questions, which pure patriotism alone should weigh and decide, mere partizanship is already grasping the scales. One thing at least I may venture to promise before this audience of scholars and gentlemen on this Charter Day of your great University: I shall ask the Democrat of the present day to agree with me no farther than Thomas Jefferson went, and the Republican of the day no farther than Abraham Lincoln went. To adapt from a kindred situation a phrase by the greatest popular orator of my native State, and, I still like to think, one of the greatest of the country in this century,—a phrase applied by him to the compromise measures of 1848, but equally fitting to-day,—"If we are forced to part company with some here whom it has been our pleasure and pride to follow in the past, let us console ourselves by the reflection that we are following in the footsteps of the fathers and saviors of the Republic, their garments dyed with the blood of the Red Sea, through which they led us out of the land of bondage, their locks still moist with the mists of the Jordan, across which they brought us to this land of liberty."¹⁶

To be Taken for Granted now.

Yet, even with those from whom we must thus part company there are elemental truths of the situation on which we must still agree. Some things reasonable men may take for granted—some that surely have been settled in the conflict of arms, of diplomacy, and of debate since the spring of 1898. Regret them if you choose, but do not, like children, seek to make them as though they were not, by shutting your eyes to them.

The new territories in the West Indies and the East are ours, to have and to hold, by the supreme law of the land, and by a title which the whole civilized world recognizes and respects. We shall not speedily get rid of them—whoever may desire it. The American people are in no mood to give them back to Spain, or to sell them, or to abandon them. We have all the power we need to acquire and to govern them. Whatever theories men may quote from Mr. Calhoun or from Mr. Chief Justice Taney, the uniform conduct of the National Administration throughout a century, under whatever party, justifies the triumphant declaration of Daniel Webster to Mr. Calhoun, over half a century ago, and the consenting opinions of the courts for a long term since, down to the very latest in the line, by your own Judge Morrow, to the effect, in a word, that this Government, like every other one in the world, has power to acquire "territory and other property" anywhere, and govern it as it pleases.¹⁷

On these points I make bold to repeat what I felt warranted in saying a fortnight ago within sight of Bunker Hill—that there is every evidence that the American people have distinctly and definitely made up their minds. They have not been persuaded and they cannot be persuaded that this is an inferior government, incapable of any duty Providence may send its way—duties which other nations could discharge, but we cannot. So I venture to affirm the impossibility that any party in power, whether the present one or its opponent, could soon, if ever, abandon one foot of the territory gained in the late war.

We are gathered on another old Spanish territory taken by our country in war. It shows what Americans do with such acquisitions. Before you expect to see Porto Rico given back to Spain or the Philippines abandoned to Aguinaldo, wait till we are ready to declare, as Daniel Webster did in the Senate, that this California of your pride and glory is "not worth a dollar," and throw back the worthless thing on the hands of unoffending Mexico. Till then, let us as practical and sensible men recognize that what is past is settled.

Duty First; but then Interest also.

Thus far have we come in these strange courses and to these unexpected and unwelcome tasks by following, at each succeeding emergency, the path of clear, absolute, and unavoidable duty. The only point in the whole national line of conduct, from the spring of 1898 on to this March morning of 1900, at which our Government could have stopped with honor, was at the outset. I, for one, would gladly have stopped there. How was it then with some at the West who are discontented now? Shake not your gory locks at me or at my fellow-citizens in the East. You cannot say we did it. In 1898, just as a few years earlier in the debate about Venezuela, the loudest calls for a belligerent policy came not from the East, "the cowardly, commercial East," as we were sometimes described, but from the patriotic and warlike West. The farther West you came, the louder the cry for war, till it reached its very climax on what we used to call the frontier, and was sent thundering Eastward upon the National Capital in rolling reverberations from the Sierras and the Rockies which few public men cared to defy. At that moment, perhaps, if this popular and congressional demand had not pushed us forward, we might have stopped with honor—certainly not later. From the day war was flagrant down to this hour there has been no forward step which a peremptory national or international obligation did not require. To the mandate alone of Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God, the American people have bowed, as, let us hope, they always will. It is not true that, in the final decision as to any one step in the great movement hitherto, our interests have been first or chiefly considered.

But in all these constitutional discussions to which we have referred, one clause in the Constitution has been curiously thrust aside. The framers placed it on the very forefront of the edifice they were rearing, and there declared for our instruction and guidance that "the people do ordain and establish this Constitution ... to promote the general welfare." By what right do statesmen now venture to think that they can leave our national interests out of the account? Who and where is the sentimentalist who arraigns us for descending to too sordid a level when we recognize our interest to hold what the discharge of duty has placed in our hand? Since when has it been statesmanship to shut our eyes to the interests of our own country, and patriotism to consider only the interests or the wishes of others? For my own part, I confess to a belief in standing up first for my own, and find it difficult to cherish much respect for the man who won't: first for my own family rather than some other man's; first for my own city and State rather than for somebody else's; first for my own country—first, please God! for the United States of America. And so, having in the past, too fully, perhaps, and more than once, considered the question of our new possessions in the light of our duty, I propose now to look at them further, and unblushingly, in the light of our interests.

The Old Faith of Californians.

Which way do your interests lie? Which way do the interests of California and the city of San Francisco lie?

Three or four days ago, when your President honored me with the summons I am now obeying, there came back to me a vague memory of the visions cherished by the men you rate the highest in California, your "Pioneers" and "Forty-Niners," as to the future of the empire they were founding on this coast. There lingered in my mind the flavor at least of an old response by a California public man to the compliment a "tenderfoot" New-Yorker, in the innocence of his heart, had intended to pay, when he said that with this splendid State, this glorious harbor, and the Pacific Ocean, you have all the elements to build up here the New York of the West. The substance of the Californian's reply was that, through mere lack of knowledge of the country to which he belonged, the well-meaning New-Yorker had greatly underrated the future that awaited San Francisco—that long before Macaulay's New-Zealander had transferred himself from the broken arches of London Bridge to those of Brooklyn, it would be the pride and boast of the denizens of those parts that New York had held its own so finely as still to be fairly called the San Francisco of the East!

While the human memory is the most tenacious and nearest immortal of all things known to us, it is also at times the most elusive. Even with the suggestions of Mr. Hittell and the friendly files of the Mechanics' Library, I did not succeed in finding that splendid example of San Francisco faith which my memory had treasured. Yet I found some things not very unlike it to show what manner of men they were that laid the foundations of this commonwealth on the Pacific, what high hopes sustained them, and what radiant future they confidently anticipated.

Here, for example, was Mr. William A. Howard, whom I found declaring, not quite a third of a century ago, that San Francisco would yet be the largest American city on the largest ocean in the world. At least, so he is reported in "The Bulletin" and "The Call," though "The Alta" puts it with an "if," its report reading: "If the development of commerce require that the largest ocean shall have the largest city, then it would follow that as the Atlantic is smaller than the Pacific, so in the course of years New York will be smaller than San Francisco."

And here, again, was Mr. Delos Lake, maintaining that the "United States is now on a level with the most favored nations; that its geographical position, its line of palatial steamers established on the Pacific Ocean by American enterprise, and soon to be followed by ocean telegraphs, must before long render this continent the proper avenue of commerce between Europe and Asia, and raise this metropolis of the Pacific to the loftiest height of monetary power."

There was a reason, too, widely held by the great men of the day, whose names have passed into history, for some such faith. Thus an old Californian of high and happy fame, Major-General Henry W. Halleck, speaking of San Francisco, said: "Standing here on the extreme Western verge of the Republic, overlooking the coast of Asia and occupying the future center of trade and commerce of the two worlds,... if that civilization which so long has moved westward with the Star of Empire is now, purified by the principles of true Christianity, to go on around the world until it reaches the place of its origin and makes the Orient blossom again with its benign influences, San Francisco must be made the abutment, and International Law the bridge, by which it will cross the Pacific Ocean. The enterprise of the merchants of California has already laid the foundation of the abutments; diplomacy and steam and telegraph companies are rapidly accumulating material for the construction of the bridge." Thus far Halleck. But have the Californians of this generation abandoned the bridge? Are we to believe those men of to-day who tell us it is not worth crossing?

Here, again, was Eugene Casserly, speaking of right for the California Democracy of that date. Writing with deliberation more than a quarter of a century ago, he said: "We expect to stand on equal grounds with the most favored of nations. We ask no more in the contest for that Eastern trade which has always heretofore been thought to carry with it the commercial supremacy of the globe. America asks only a fair field, even as against her oldest and most formidable rivals. Nature, and our position as the nearest neighbors to eastern Asia, separated from her only by the great highways of the ocean, have placed in our hands all the advantages that we need.... Favored by vicinity, by soil and climate on our own territory, with a people inferior to none in enterprise and vigor, without any serious rivals anywhere, all this Pacific coast is ours or is our tributary.... We hold as ours the great ocean that so lately rolled in solitary grandeur from the equator to the pole. In the changes certain to be effected in the currents of finance, of exchange, and of trade, by the telegraph and the railroads, bringing the financial centers of Europe and of the United States by way of San Francisco within a few weeks of the ports of China and of the East, San Francisco must become at no distant day the banker, the factor, and the carrier of the trade of eastern Asia and the Pacific, to an extent to which it is difficult to assign limits." Are the people now lacking in the enterprise and vigor which Mr. Casserly claimed for them? Have the limits he scorned been since assigned, and do the Californians of to-day assent to the restriction?

Take yet another name, treasured, I know, on the roll of California's most worthy servants, another Democrat. Governor Haight, only a third of a century ago, said: "I see in the near future a vast commerce springing up between the Chinese Empire and the nations of the West; an interchange of products and manufactures mutually beneficial; the watchword of progress and the precepts of a pure religion uttered to the ears of a third of the human race." And addressing some representatives of that vast region, he added, with a burst of fine confidence in the supremacy of San Francisco's position: "As Chief Magistrate of this Western State of the Nation, I welcome you to the territory of the Republic,... in no selfish or narrow spirit, either of personal advantage or seeking exclusive privileges for our own over the other nations; and so, in the name of commerce, of civilization, of progress, of humanity, and of religion, on behalf not merely of California or America, but of Europe and of mankind, I bid you and your associates welcome and God-speed."

Perhaps this may be thought merely an exuberant hospitality. Let me quote, then, from the same man, speaking again as the Governor of the State, at the Capitol of the State, in the most careful oration of his life: "What shall be said of the future of California? Lift your eyes and expand your conceptions to take in the magnitude of her destiny. An empire in area, presenting advantages and attractions to the people of the Eastern States and Europe far beyond those presented by any other State or Territory—who shall set limits to her progress, or paint in fitting colors the splendor of her future?... Mismanagement may at times retard her progress, but if the people of California are true to themselves, this State is destined to a high position, not only among her sister States, but among the commonwealths of the world,... when her ships visit every shore, and her merchant princes control the commerce of the great ocean and the populous countries upon its borders."

Was Governor Haight alone, or was he in advance of his time? Go yet farther back, to the day when Judge Nathaniel Bennett was assigned by the people of San Francisco to the task of delivering the oration when they celebrated the admission of California into the Union, on October 29, 1850: "Judging from the past, what have we not a right to expect in the future? The world has never witnessed anything equal or similar to our career hitherto.... Our State is a marvel to ourselves, and a miracle to the rest of the world. Nor is the influence of California confined within her own borders.... The islands nestled in the embrace of the Pacific have felt the quickening breath of her enterprise.... She has caused the hum of busy life to be heard in the wilderness where rolls the Oregon, and where until recently was heard no sound save his own dashings. Even the wall of Chinese exclusiveness has been broken down, and the children of the Sun have come forth to view the splendors of her achievements.... It is all but a foretaste of the future.... The world's trade is destined soon to be changed.... The commerce of Asia and the islands of the Pacific, instead of pursuing the ocean track by the way of Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, or even taking the shorter route of the Isthmus of Darien or the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, will enter the Golden Gate of California and deposit its riches in the lap of our city.... New York will then become what London now is—the great central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America.... The responsibility rests upon us whether this first American State of the Pacific shall in youth and ripe manhood realize the promise of infancy. We may cramp her energies and distort her form, or we may make her a rival even of the Empire State of the Atlantic. The best wishes of Americans are with us. They expect that the Herculean youth will grow to a Titan in his manhood."

Nor was even Judge Bennett the pioneer of such ideas. Long before he spoke, or before the Stars and Stripes had been raised over Yerbabuena, as far back as in 1835, the English people and the British Government had been advised by Alexander Forbes that "The situation of California for intercourse with other countries and its capacity for commerce—should it ever be possessed by a numerous and industrious population—are most favorable. The port of San Francisco for size and safety is hardly surpassed by any in the world; it is so situated as to be made the center of the commercial relations which may take place between Asia and the western coast of America.... The vessels of the Spanish Philippines Company on their passage from Manila to San Blas and Acapulco generally called at Monterey for refreshments and orders.... Thus it appears as if California was designed by nature to be the medium of connecting commercially Asia with America, and as the depot of the trade between these two vast continents, which possess the elements of unbounded commercial interchange; the one overflowing with all the rich and luxurious commodities always characteristic of the East, the other possessing a superabundance of the precious metals and other valuable products to give in exchange.... If ever a route across the Isthmus shall be opened, California will then be one of the most interesting commercial situations in the world; it would in that case be the rendezvous for all vessels engaged in the trade between Europe and Asia by that route. It is nearly mid-voyage between these two countries, and would furnish provisions and all naval supplies in the most ample abundance, and most probably would become a mart for the interchange of the commodities of the three continents."

Has the State Lost Heart and Shriveled?

Let no man fancy that these sometimes exuberant expressions of a noble and far-seeing faith by your own predecessors and by a prescient foreigner have been revived in derision or even in doubt. Those were the days when, if some were for a party, at any rate all were for the State. These were great men, far-seeing, courageous, patriotic, the men of Forty-nine, who in such lofty spirit and with such high hope laid the foundation of this empire on the Pacific. Distance did not disturb them, nor difficulties discourage. There sits on your platform to-day a man who started from New York to California by what he thought the quickest route in December, 1848; went south from the Isthmus as the only means of catching a ship for the north, and finally entered this harbor, by the way of Chile, in June, 1849. He could go now to Manila thrice over and back in less time. And yet there are Californians of this day who profess to shrink in alarm from the remoteness and inaccessibility of our new possessions! Has the race shriveled under these summer skies? Has it grown old before its time; is its natural strength abated? Are the old energy and the old courage gone? Has the soul of this people shrunk within them? Or is it only that there are strident voices from California, sounding across the Sierras and the Rockies, that misrepresent and shame a State whose sons are not unworthy of their fathers?

The arm of the Californian has not been shortened, that he cannot reach out. The salt has not left him, that he cannot occupy and possess the great ocean that the Lord has given him. Nor has he forgotten the lesson taught by the history of his own race (and of the greatest nations of the world), that oceans no longer separate—they unite. There are no protracted and painful struggles to build a Pacific railroad for your next great step. The right of way is assured, the grading is done, the rails are laid. You have but to buy your rolling-stock at the Union Iron Works, draw up your time-table, and begin business. Or do you think it better that your Pacific railroad should end in the air? Is a six-thousand-mile extension to a through line worthless? Can your Scott shipyards only turn out men-of-war? Can your Senator Perkins only run ships that creep along the coast? Is the broad ocean too deep for him or too wide?

New Fields and the Need for them.

Contiguous land gives a nation cohesion; but it is the water that brings other nations near. The continent divides you from customers beyond the mountains; but the ocean unites you with the whole boundless, mysterious Orient. There you find a population of over six hundred millions of souls, between one fourth and one third of the inhabitants of the globe. You are not at a disadvantage in trading with them because they have the start of you in manufactures or skill or capital, as you would be in the countries to which the Atlantic leads. They offer you the best of all commerce—that with people less advanced, exchanging the products of different zones, a people awakening to the complex wants of a civilization that is just stirring them to a new life.

Have you considered what urgent need there will be for those new fields? It is no paltry question of an outlet for the surplus products of a mere nation of seventy-five millions that confronts you. Your mathematical professors will tell you that, at the ratio of increase established in this Nation by the census returns for the century just closing, its population would amount during the next century to the bewildering and incomprehensible figure of twelve hundred millions. The ratio, of course, will not be maintained, since the exceptional circumstances that caused it cannot continue. But no one gives reasons why it should not be half as great. Suppose it to turn out only one fourth as great. Is it the part of statesmanship—is it even the part of every-day, matter-of-fact common sense—to reject or despise these Oriental openings for the products of this people of three hundred million souls the Twentieth Century would need to nourish within our borders? Our total annual trade with China now—with this customer whom the friendly ocean is ready to bring to your very doors—is barely twenty millions. That would be a commerce of the gross amount of six and two third cents for each inhabitant of our country in the next century, with that whole vast region adjoining you, wherein dwell one fourth of the human race!

Even the Spanish trade with the Philippines was thirty millions. They are merely our stepping-stone. But would a wise man kick the stepping-stone away?

The New Blood Felt.

San Francisco is exceptionally prosperous now. So is the State of California. Why? Partly, no doubt, because you are sharing the prosperity which blesses the whole country. But is that all? What is this increase in the shipping at your wharves? What was the meaning of those crowded columns of business statistics your newspapers proudly printed last New Year's?—what the significance of the increase in exports and imports, far beyond mere army requirements? Why is every room taken in your big buildings? What has crowded your docks, filled your streets, quickened your markets, rented your stores and dwellings, sent all this new blood pulsing through your veins—made you like the worn Richelieu when, in that moment, there entered his spent veins the might of France?

Was it the rage you have witnessed among some of your own leaders against everything that has been done during the past two years—the warning against everything that is about to be done? Was it the proof of our unworthiness and misdeeds, to which we all penitentially listened, as so eloquently set forth from the high places of light and leading—the long lamentation over how on almost every field we had shown our incapacity; how unfit we were to govern cities, unfit to govern territories, unfit to govern Indians, unfit to govern ourselves—how, in good old theological phrase, we were from head to foot a mass of national wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, and there was no health in us? Was it the demonstration that what we needed was to sit under the live-oaks and "develop the individual man," nor dare to look beyond? Was it the forgetfulness that muscles grow strong only with exercise; that it is the duties of manhood that take the acrid humors out of a youth's blood; that it is great responsibility, manfully met, not cowardly evaded, that sobers and steadies and ennobles?

Some one has lately been quoting Lincoln's phrase, "We cannot escape history." It is a noble and inspiring thought. Most of us dare not look for a separate appearance at that greatest of human bars—may hope only to be reckoned in bulk with the multitude. But even so, however it may be with others on this coast, I, for one, want to be counted with those who had faith in my countrymen; who did not think them incapable of tasks which duty imposed and to which other nations had been equal; who did not disparage their powers or distrust their honest intentions or urge them to refuse their opportunities; to be counted with those who at least had open eyes when they stood in the Golden Gate!

Wards or Full Partners.

I do not doubt—you do not doubt—they are the majority. They will prevail. What Duty requires us to take, an enlightened regard for our own interests will require us to hold. The islands will not be thrown away. The American people have made up their minds on that point, if on nothing else.

Well, then, how shall the islands be treated? Are they to be our wards, objects of our duty and our care; or are they to be our full partners? We may as well look that question straight in the face. There is no way around it, or over or under or out of it; and no way of aimlessly and helplessly shuffling it off on the future, for it presses in the legislation of Congress to-day. Wards, flung on our hands by the shipwreck of Spain, helpless, needy, to be cared for and brought up and taught to stand alone as far as they can; or full partners with us in the government and administration of the priceless heritage of our fathers, the peerless Republic of the world and of all the centuries—that is the question!

Men often say—I have even heard it within a week on this coast—that all this is purely imaginary; that nobody favors their admission as States. Let us see. An ounce of fact in a matter of such moment is worth tons of random denial. Within the month a distinguished and experienced United States Senator from the North has announced that he sees no reason why Porto Rico should not be a State. Within the same period one of the leading religious journals of the continent has declared that it would be a selfish and brutal tyranny that would exclude Porto Rico from Statehood. Only a few weeks earlier one of our ablest generals, now commanding a department in one of our dependencies, a laureled hero of two wars, has officially reported to the Government in favor of steps for the admission of Cuba as a State. On every hand rise cries that in any event they cannot and must not be dependencies. Some of these are apparently for mere partizan effect, but others are the obvious promptings of a sincere and high-minded, however mistaken, conviction.

I shall venture, then, to consider it as a real and not an abstract question,—"academic," I think it is the fad of these later days to say,—and I propose again (and again unblushingly) to consider it from what has been called a low and sordid point of view—so low, in fact, so unworthy the respect of latter-day altruistic philosophers, that it merely concerns the interests of our country!

For I take it that if there is one subject on which this Union has a right to consult its own interests and inclinations, it is on the question of admitting new States, or of putting territory in a position where it can ever claim or expect admission; just as the one subject on which nobody disputes the right of a mercantile firm to follow its own inclinations is on that of taking in some unfortunate business man as a partner; or the right of an individual to follow his own inclinations about marrying some needy spinster he may have felt it a duty to befriend. Because they are helpless and needy and on our hands, must we take them into partnership? Because we are going to help them, are we bound to marry them?

The Porto Rican Question.

Partly through mere inadvertence, but partly also through crafty design, the wave of generous sympathy for the suffering little island of Porto Rico which has been sweeping over the country has come very near being perverted into the means of turning awry the policy and permanent course of a great Nation. To relieve the temporary distress by recognizing the Porto Ricans as citizens, and by an extension of the Dingley tariff to Porto Rico as a matter of constitutional right, foreclosed the whole question.

I know it is said, plausibly enough, in some quarters, that Congress cannot foreclose the question,—has nothing to do with it, in fact,—but that it is a matter to be settled only by the Supreme Law of the land, of which Congress is merely the servant. The point need not be disputed. But it is an unquestioned part of the Supreme Law of the land, as authoritative within its sphere and as binding as any clause in the Constitution itself, which declares, in the duly ratified Treaty of Paris, that the whole question of the civil rights and political status of the inhabitants in this newly acquired property of ours shall be reserved for the decision of Congress! Let those who invoke the Supreme Law of the land learn and bow to it.

As to the mere duty of prompt and ample relief for the distress in Porto Rico, there is happily not a shade of difference of opinion among the seventy-five millions of our inhabitants. Nor was the free-trade remedy, so vehemently recommended, important enough in itself to provoke serious objection or delay. Cynical observers might find, indeed, a gentle amusement in noting how in the name of humanity the blessings of free trade were invoked by means of the demand for an immediate application of the highest protective tariff known to the history of economics! The very men who denounce this tariff as a Chinese wall are the men who demand its application. They say, "Give Porto Rico free trade," but what their proposal means is, "Deprive Porto Rico of free trade, and put her within the barbarous Chinese wall." Their words sound like offering her the liberty of trade with all the world, but mean forbidding her to trade with anybody except the United States.

Importance of the Question.

The importance of the question from an economic point of view has been ludicrously exaggerated on both sides. The original proposal would have in itself done far less harm than its opponents imagined and far less good than its supporters hoped. Yet to the extent of its influence it would have been a step backward. It would have been the rejection of the modern and scientific colonial method, and the adoption instead of the method which has resulted in the most backward, the least productive, and the least prosperous colonies in the world—the method, in a word, of Spain herself. For the Spanish tariff, in fact, made with some little reference to colonial interests, we should merely have substituted our own tariff, made with sole reference to our own interests. A more distinct piece of blacksmith work in economic legislation for a helpless, lonely little island in the mid-Atlantic could not well be imagined. What had poor Porto Rico done, that she should be fenced in from all the Old World by an elaborate and highly complicated system of duties upon imports, calculated to protect the myriad varying manufactures and maintain the high wages of this vast new continent, and as little adapted to Porto Rico's simple needs as is a Jorgensen repeater for the uses of a kitchen clock? Why at the same stroke must she be crushed, as she would have been if the Constitution were extended to her, by a system of internal taxation, which we ourselves prefer to regard as highly exceptional, on tobacco, on tobacco-dealers, on bank-checks, on telegraph and telephone messages, on bills of lading, bills of exchange, leases, mortgages, life-insurance, passenger tickets, medicines, legacies, inheritances, mixed flour, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam? Did she deserve so badly of us that, even in a hurry, we should do this thing to her in the name of humanity?

All the English-speaking world, outside some members of the United States Congress perhaps, long since found a more excellent way. It is simplicity itself. It legislates for a community like Porto Rico with reference to the situation and wants of that community—not with reference to somebody else. It applies to Porto Rico a system devised for Porto Rico—not one devised for a distant and vastly larger country, with totally different situation and wants. It makes no effort to exploit Porto Rico for the benefit of another country. It does make a studied and scientific effort from the Porto Rico point of view (not from that of temporary Spanish holders of the present stocks of Porto Rican products) to see what system will impose the lightest burdens and bring the greatest benefits on Porto Rico herself. The result of that conscientious inquiry may be the discovery that the very best thing to provide for the wants and promote the prosperity of that little community out in the Atlantic Ocean is to bestow upon them the unmixed boon of the high protective Dingley tariff devised for the United States of America. If so, give them the Dingley tariff, and give it straight. If, on the other hand, it should be found that a lower and simpler revenue system, better adapted to a community which has practically no manufactures to protect, with freedom to trade on equal terms with all the world, would impose upon them lighter burdens and bring them greater benefits, then give them that. If it should be further found that, following this, such a system of reciprocal rebates as both Cuba and the United States thought mutually advantageous in the late years of Spanish rule, would be useful to Porto Rico, then give them that. But, in any case, the starting-point should be the needs of Porto Rico herself, intelligently studied and conscientiously met—not the blacksmith's offhand attempt to fit on her head, like a rusty iron pot, an old system made for other needs, other industries, a distant land, and another people.