is not the mere gratification of the lust or pride of conquest. Let us all endeavor to look beyond into a visiible future and mark certain great tendencies, proceeding with all the force and regularity of a great geological process, and see what is meant by that which has thus been transpiring on the surface of human affairs within the last fifty years, the tendency (shall I call it of humanity, or shall I call it the forces which move the human race?) toward the Chinese Orientthe Asiatic East. I am not in favor of the dismemberment of the great Chinese Empire-an empire which was old when Alexander watered his steed in the Indus; an empire so ancient that it has undergone all the great experiences of the human race, and has, in the process, survived. I am in favor of the integrity of that empire, and desire that it may become accessible to all the civilized world and to its commerce. Accordingly, I have said, and I think, that it would safeguard the peace of the world for fifty years if Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, as to all those Oriental waters, and the lands bordering upon them north of the equator, should declare that there should be no dismemberment of that immemorial empire.

But above all things before us for present consideration, I am interested that this country shall have its share of the trade of that great empire. California, Washington, and Oregon have scarcely more than two millions of people. I want to see the commercial development of that part of our country expand until there shall be twenty millions of people there; and I do honestly and sincerely believe, from all I have studied and thought on that subject, that the retention of the Philippine Islands, and their adjustment to our needs and destiny, is a necessary and indispensable step in the advancement of the great results to which I have so imperfectly alluded.

The problem, what we shall do with the Philippine

Archipelago, is not now before us for immediate solution. We are actually now in the possession of all those islands. We own them, or shall own them when Spain ratifies the treaty of cession, and the question of their disposition ought not to be decided at once. Must we say now and at once that a territory, the possession of which may be necessary for our safety, for which we have paid twenty millions, for which American blood has been shed, and may be flowing to-day, shall, by a precipitate judgment, without any sufficient consideration of the future, be turned over to a body of men as to whom all authorities and observers agree, and who are demonstrating by their own acts, that they are not yet fit for self-government?

CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW

OUR NATIONAL GUARD

[A speech to the Forty-seventh New York Volunteers, at Fort Adams, Newport, R. I., August 7, 1898.]

WHEN a citizen has left behind him his home, his family and his business, and enlisted as a soldier, he has done his duty to his country. Whether he is ordered to Newport or Chickamauga, to Peekskill or Tampa, to Cuba or Porto Rico, his meed of praise, his performance of duty, is the same. He cheerfully obeys the command for the fort or the fight, but longs for the fight.

This war has demonstrated the inestimable value of the National Guard of the several States. Our country had been at peace for thirty-two years. Congress had annually thrown out the demands of the War Department as unnecessary and extravagant for a nation which could never be driven into war. The war itself came so suddenly and unexpectedly that, except for the navy, we were wholly unprepared. We had neither the guns, nor the uniforms, nor the camp-outfit to equip fifty thousand, much less two hundred thousand men. We had to prepare at once to meet the veteran army of Spain, numbering in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines two hundred and fifty thousand, armed with the latest and most perfect weapons. Our glorious, and always ready and reliable regular army mustered only twenty-seven thousand of all arms. In this emergency the citizen-regiments of the National Guard, with their discipline, their equipment and their

readiness to break every tie and drop every interest at the order to march, placed the Government in a stronger position for offensive and defensive operations in thirty days than the arduous processes of enlistment, drill, and education of the volunteers could have done in six months.

I have seen much of the armies of Europe and the results of the conscription which compels every citizen to serve several years as a soldier. Men resort to every device to escape the army. The most rigorous laws and severe punishments are devised for those who mutilate themselves so as to be unfit for military duty. Hundreds of thousands emigrate to foreign lands to escape the draft. During this war with Spain we have witnessed the fiercest rivalry among the National Guard regiments to be called into service. The Government has been overwhelmed with offers of volunteers. I venture to say that in no war and in no country until now have regiments and brigades petitioned to be sent to the front. This spirit makes the man behind the gun. These guns think as well as shoot. The Spanish soldier is brave. He fights and dies well. But he cannot take the initiative. When he sees men charging across open space and through thickets, unsupported by artillery, subject to the raking fire of his batteries, the deadly aim of his concealed sharp-shooters and the hail from his Mauser rifles, while he is protected by trenches; when, though great numbers fall and by all military rules the survivors ought to flee, they still rush on, shooting and shouting, he thinks the devil is loose, crosses himself, drops his gun and runs. But these American soldiers are not devils. They are the saints of liberty, the church militant of freedom. They are the product of institutions which will transform Cubans, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos into similar free agents of right and justice in another generation.

You, as volunteers in this war with Spain, are fighting in a cause which is either right or wrong. The overwhelming thought of the hour and place is that, by every manifestation by which His will can be known, God is on our side. Events might easily have so happened that we should win in the end, after many bloody battles and great losses in lives and ships, by the tremendous odds of our overmastering resources. But at Manila, Dewey, with seven ships, was pitted against a larger armament on thirteen ships, protected by forts and shore-batteries, and yet he sunk the enemy's fleet and silenced his forts without losing a man or suffering any injury to his cruisers. There were more Spanish soldiers under the protection of the barbed-wire fences, intrenchments, block-houses, and hills of Santiago than in our army which assailed them, and yet they surrendered. Cervera's fleet ran out to sea under conditions where all the chances of battle were the sinking of one or more of our fleet and the escape of one or more of his, but in thirteen minutes the pride of Spain was reduced to junk and had ceased to exist. It seems as if Providence has not so much opened up for us a destiny as imposed upon us a duty.

We did not want to possess Cuba, but to give liberty, law, and justice to her inhabitants. We did not covet Porto Rico, and we shrank from the grave responsibilities of the government of the Philippines and their population of ten millions of varied races, only semi-civilized. The fortunes of war have not only placed them in our hands, but destroyed the power of Spain to either hold or govern them. All the conditions upon which public opinion was forming have changed in six weeks, and we are facing a situation wholly different from the one on which multitudes of us formed a judgment. It seems as if to let go threatens the peace of the world and consigns large populations to anarchy, and that our capacity for dealing with