tions of any sort, no points of contact, nothing to make them digestible; and because a nation's first duty is to its own integrity, is to keep itself strong and healthy and definite and united, that so it may do well its work for the world. If there are conditions which make "expansion" proper and profitable, none of these conditions exist in connection with the Philippines; there would be, for us, everything to risk and nothing to gain.

Yesterday's newspaper had the following word from the United States consul at Shanghai. We incorporate it as being as good an illustration as could be asked for of the devil's gospel which has been preached to America in this time by a thousand men of standing, even in pulpits and missionary societies, confounding the confusion which presses so hard upon the plain people so sincerely anxious to know and do what is sensible and progressive and right..

"We should hold the Philippine islands, the Caroline islands and the Ladrone islands, also Cuba and Porto Rico. It does not matter whether we call them war indemnity or what. We need them in our business. You have no idea and cannot have until you get out here how all nations are fighting for trade and what an intense jealousy there is of the United States. Just now the continental peoples seem more jealous of us than even of England. If we are to have anything to say we must have a navy. To have a navy, we must have coaling stations. That means the Sandwich islands and the Philippines."

It does not matter how we get them, or what we call it; we need them in our business! The conscienceless brigandage of the position does not seem once to dawn on this official of our government. But worse, if possible, in an official, than the wickedness of words like these is their wantonness and folly, the adventurism stealing the livery of statesmanship, oblivious of a hundred complications dangerous and looming clearly up, forgetful of all the high responsibilities with which the republic is charged, of every precious thing

with which it is freighted in trust for humanity, and blinded by materialism. and the proximity of petty things to the fact that every argument for what they urge is an obvious and decisive. argument against it.

But our duty to the Philippine people? Is not giving them back to Spain like giving back fugitive slaves in 1850? Is not our duty, once having them in our power, to hold them for freedom and a better life, under the protection of the republic? We believe in the American people in such a way as makes us confident that this is the principal question with them. We decline to believe that the American people are thieves and robbers. With great matters such as they never dreamed of when the war began suddenly thrust upon them by its course, they have been unable to think as fast as events have transpired, and their minds are not ripe. either as to their true interest or as to their duty. The possible obligation to the people of the Philippines, the possible opportunity for freedom and progress there under our ægis, have presented themselves so strongly as to make good people forget their obligation to Spain, to worthy international usage, to the national security, stability and welfare, and to those republican principles in whose preservation, integrity and power alone we can continue to be of real service to freedom and humanity, or continue permanently to be at all. There are indeed wrong things in the Philippines to be righted; there are wrong things to be righted in China and Siam, wrong things in Honduras and Hayti, and Turkey and Italy. We are responsible, to the extent of our proper influence, for all. Our duty as a people is to keep our ears and hearts open to all the wrongs in all the world. There are a hundred ways by which, if we are indeed in earnest, we can help to right them. The true wayeither as concerns the Philippines or any other place is not that whereby we endanger international honor or

endanger the nation itself. Without any such danger, without any taint of gambling, there are ways by which, from our present point of vantage, we can insist, through an international protectorate or otherwise, upon better government in the Philippines. Let us insist upon it.

This has been the first great war in human history waged professedly, and we believe really, on altruistic grounds, not in behalf of ourselves, but in behalf of oppressed and suffering neighbors. It was an unnecessary war. It accuses us of immaturity and lack of self-control that we did not achieve its really valuable and desirable results in another way. By and by we shall achieve such things in better ways, because the whole nation will rise to the level of its to-day's best thinkers. But the primary and determining motive of the war was noble, -sympathy with the oppressed and suffering. "The great mass of the American people," as we said in these pages when the war began, "have taken the position which they have taken in obedience to righteous and heroic impulses, to instincts and convictions which are the safeguard of liberty and humanity. That which is aroused in them is not selfishness, not greed, not any grubbing instinct, but the instinct of justice and sympathy." "It is a war," said Senator Hoar at Washington, "in which there does not enter the slightest thought or desire of foreign conquest or of national gain or advantage. I have not heard throughout this whole discussion in Senate or House an expression of a desire to subjugate and occupy Cuba for the purposes of our own country. There is nothing of that kind suggested. It is disclaimed by the President, disclaimed by the committee, disclaimed by everybody." And when the declaration of war came, an express resolution declared that entered upon it with no thought or

we

purpose of territorial aggrandizement.

So, says one, we entered upon the war of the Revolution with no thought or purpose of independence. The men of Lexington and Bunker Hill had no thought of it; Washington disclaimed it, Congress disclaimed it, everybody disclaimed it. They were thinking only of resisting unjust taxation; the thought of independence only gradually ripened. So we entered upon the Civil War with no purpose of emancipation, but only of preserving the Union. Lincoln solemnly protested, in his inaugural address, that he had no power or purpose to emancipate the slaves, and he continued to disclaim that purpose for a year and a half. Who can foretell the changing chances and problems and duties of war? Shall we be literally bound forever by abstract, general declarations? No, we shall not. This only shall we be bound by, through every changing circumstance, as Washington was bound and Lincoln, the Congress of the Revolution and the Congress of the Civil War: that no high resolution ever decline into a lower, that no great cause ever become a selfish and a mean one. It may well become our duty, on some morrow or other, to annex Cuba and Porto Rico to the United States; it may be that both islands will desire it, and that every true interest of theirs will be subserved by annexation. If so, we shall not be hampered nor affected in the slightest degree by any reference to the resolution in our declaration of war, nor by any sneers in Spain or Austria or anywhere else that the appropriation of Cuba and Porto Rico was what we were really concerned with at the beginning and the real motive of the war. No man and no nation confident of their own purposes, conscious of rectitude, ever bother themselves about such criticism. Only they must be conscious of rectitude, their purpose and their policy must be honest and true, consistent with their own principles. It would not be consistent in our republic, and it would not be

right, to impose ourselves upon Cuba or Porto Rico, to do with them as we please without their consent. The fundamental principle of this republic is that all governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." This is no glittering particularity, true for Massachusetts and Virginia, possibly for Anglo-Saxondum. It is the great truth for which the American republic stands in this world, which it came into being to emphasize and illustrate to the world, at possession so much more precious than the possession of Porto Rico or Cuba that these beside it are but as the fine dust in the balance. Our duty, our most simple and plain duty, to Cuba and to Porto Rico is to help them to that good government which they themselves elect. If one of these days they elect to come to us, then it is for us to determine whether our national welfare and the welfare of the world will be best served by making them integral parts of the republic. We have no suspicion that we have done Porto Rico wrong by cutting her loose from Spain. Although it has been said that she has been the most loyal of all Spanish dependencies, the hearty and even jubilant reception everywhere of General Miles's army shows how slack was her allegiance, and how grateful and happy she is for a new chance in life. But we should do her great wrong, having cut the bonds of her allegiance, if we did not let her determine what her own new chance shall be and, in faithfulest remembrance of Sam Adams and of Jefferson, keep from imposing our will upon her, contrary to her judgment and her own wishes. The case with Porto Rico is precisely like the case with Cuba; and as there is no doubt that we shall let the larger island elect her own destiny, so there should be no doubt about the smaller island.

If we understand the American people aright, there is no doubt. As, by declining to ask of Spain any indemnity, the republic, in this war to

liberate our oppressed neighbors, has shown itself superior to the poor money consideration which has marked the close of previous wars, so we believe she will be true to the higher opportunity and demand of civilization. The theory that good men have a right to steal so long as they steal from bad men—and that we may determine for ourselves whether we are the good — will no longer pass muster in the world's politics any more than in the Berkshire village. The theory that strong men have a right to steal from weak men is also passing. The theory that conquerors must be honest and magnanimous to the conquered, that Americans must do unto Spaniards as they would have Spaniards do unto them in similar extremity, is coming in. No longer anything that will not be approved as a "square deal" in the "Captains'

Room"!

*

It was, we think, a convention of Latter-Day Saints which once passed these resolutions: "Resolved, that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Resolved, second, that the Lord hath given the earth to his saints. Resolved, third, that we are the saints."

This is what sinners calling themselves saints have been resolving through all the former and the latter days, Spanish sinners once, AngloSaxon sinners lately, and putting their resolutions into practice. "The right of conquest" has been the chief right alleged for the most gigantic thieveries and crimes in human history. The right of conquest! The new conscience, the mind of the dawning century, thunders that that "right" will be recognized no more. The time past will suffice for that superfluity of naughtiness; God now commandeth all nations everywhere to repent. The "laws of war" sanction this and that! The laws of the new era will make short work with these

"laws of war," as, please God, at a vastly earlier day than some men dream, they will make short work with war itself. "The right of conquest," "the laws of war,"-the republic invoked them quite sufficiently, steeped itself in their infamy quite enough, in the day of its crimes against Mexico. Let there be no second chapter. If we began this war in the service of humanity, let us end it in a higher service to humanity, nor sell the mighty space of our large

honors for any trash. God sets before the republic to-day blessing and cursing. We can go on indulging in the "original sin of nations." We can strike such a high, new note in the settlement of the problems left us by the war as shall purify and ennoble our whole national life, make every people honor us, and enable the historian to look back to this hour as the beginning of a great and beneficent. new epoch for America and for mankind.

Mr. Ananias Bounce

Has the honor to announce

The first issue of The Day,

Number Naughty-Naught, Broadway.

Nothing ever seen as yet

Touches it; videlicet:

Its supreme desire shall be

Not for size, but brevity.

All the news, with sober sense,

It will test, assort, condense,
Throw the straw and husks away,
Give the kernel in The Day.

When it does not chance to know,
It will dare to tell you so.
When a thing should not be told,
Though editions might be sold,
Though its readers' optics itch,
It will scorn to handle pitch.
What it honestly believes,
It will wear upon its sleeves,
Though the whole two-cented town
Shall unite to "call it down."
As to parties, it will dare
Get its truth from everywhere.
As to news, it will report

More the church and less the court,
More the good that men have done
Than the sin beneath the sun.

It will not attempt to be

A diurnal library:

Comic Weekly, Art Review,

Fashion Journal, Sporting, too,
Literary Magazine,

Scientific Bulletin,

Children's Paper, Kitchen Guide,
Sermon Digest, Poet's Pride!
Thus it will have time to be
Quite a Newspaper, you see!
As for its advertisements,
(Listen, O ye men of sense!)
Fake or honest, large or small,
It will print no "ad" at all.
Now that it may meet with ease
Probable emergencies-
Not a buyer in the crowd-
It is suitably endowed.
Thus its virtue will endure;
Thus its courage we insure;
For if buyers, in the end,
Fail, for foe or lack of friend,
We're prepared on any day
Just to give the sheet away!
Knowing how success succeeds,
When a man no friendship needs,
On immediate favor counts
MR. ANANIAS BOUNCE.

-By Amos R. Wells.