civilized peoples, and ruling the destinies of mankind. They were Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia. To-day there are five. The last has come into this concert of nations by the unprecedented successes and marvellous victories of its hundred days of war. Two of the five, the United States and Great Britain, with the ties of common language and common law and like liberties, will work together naturally in this international development. They will not be, and they cannot be, bound or limited by a hard and fast alliance, offensive and defensive, like that which marks the Dreibund or the unknown relations between Russia and France. But there are relations, there are ties which are stronger than parchment treaties based upon selfishness, greed, or fear. They are the ties of blood, of language, and of common aims for the loftiest purposes for which peoples work and governments exist.

JONATHAN P. DOLLIVER

[Extracts from a speech delivered in the House of Representatives,

April 27, 1898.]

I.

UPHOLD THE PRESIDENT

Ir cannot be said that the President of the United States has plunged this country into war. If he had done so, heedlessly putting in peril the welfare of a country like this, instead of being entitled as he is to the respect and confidence of the world, it would be better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea. He is guilty of no such offence against the welfare of his country. Instead of seeking to inflame public opinion, he has sought to moderate and direct it. Instead of throwing away the prospect of a peaceful settlement, he has put himself in alliance with every honorable influence in favor of such a solution of the perilous problem involved. He has been maligned by his enemies and misunderstood by his friends, because he has had the wisdom to inquire, the prudence to prepare, and the statesmanship to look before and after.

If the time should ever come when the American people, under the burdens laid upon them by our Cuban protectorate, should become resentful and complaining, there is at least one man in the public life of these

times who will be able to look his countrymen squarely in the face and say to them, "I did the best I could to save my fellow-citizens from these afflictions." And when I hear men, as I have heard them on my own side of this House, suggesting that the President has given his party in this crisis a timid and hesitating leadership, I cannot forbear to express my own satisfaction that he has been great enough in heart and brain and conscience, in the presence of a public danger, to think of his country rather than of his party, and instead of strutting before the world, has been willing to become in a real sense the servant of the American people whose will has been expressed in the Congress of the United States.

I do not pretend to be able to predict the size or the cost of the undertaking on which we have entered, but my conviction is that the prompt passage of this bill will shorten the war and that in the end we will gain all that we lose and infinitely more. We have already gained the outspoken sympathy of that great Englishspeaking world of which we are a part. And more important than that, we have gained a new sense of the unity of our own people and our own country; a unity which has already killed the spirit of sectionalism; a unity that has taken the poison out of partisan strife; a unity that has brought in the better era of American patriotism; an era which, I pray God, may not now be sullied by unseemly partisan debate and by the resurrection of obsolete controversies out of which no public good whatever can come.

Nor do I think that our people will ever regret the part they have assumed. There are times in the life of nations when they move upon impulses so pure that the approbation of the national conscience is a full reward for all sacrifices, however grievous. Such an hour has come to the people of the United States, putting to silence the passion of party politics and lifting the

whole nation above the care of stocks and bonds and lands and offices into the upper atmosphere, where the hidden secrets of liberty and civilization are revealed. After more than fifty years of patient toleration the time had come at last to make an end of the state of anarchy in Cuba. As the moment for action approached every motion was subordinated in the national purpose to the high and patriotic motives which mankind everywhere must approve.

We have not acted upon a sudden provocation, great or small. Again and again the nation has ignored its interests, conquered its sympathies, and restrained its wrath, that no just imputation might be made against us in the Supreme Court of the world's opinion. There is not a country of Europe which, if situated as we have been, would have endured what we have suffered in the succession of civil wars which for the last generation have desolated that helpless island of the sea. History will be our judge that in all these years, for the sake of the world's peace, we have chosen to wrong ourselves rather than give warrant to a suspicion of injustice against the government of Spain. We have not coveted her territory. We have not obstructed her administration. We have not withheld from her dynasty or from her people the offices of international courtesy and good-will. If in times of insurrection and disorder we have interposed to promote the tranquillity of the island, our mediation has never concealed a hostile spirit, nor have we ever laid the weight of a little finger on the sovereignty of Spain.

II.

NATIONAL SELF-RESTRAINT

In the crisis of the past three years we have not been careless and unimpassioned spectators. We could not be, without despising every instinct of the national life, without disowning every tradition of the national history. Yet, even under the pressure of popular feeling, we have scrupulously kept within the law of nations, not even sending a message of hope and courage to the struggling army of liberation in Cuba. We have citizens there whose property has been totally destroyed, their business ruined, and they themselves cast into the military prisons of Havana or left to beg among the miserable refugees about Matanzas. Yet, though we speak the English tongue, we have consented to negotiate for their relief and have feebly tried to do with diplomatic correspondence what other countries are accustomed to do with shot and shell.

I do not complain. It was a part of the national policy of peace, a continuous incident of our hereditary mode of living with the Spanish race. Up to this time neither the love of liberty, nor the claims of humanity, nor the interests of commerce, nor the wrongs of injured citizens, have interrupted our amicable intercourse with Spain. A forbearance like that, such an anxiety to keep peace, born of neither weakness nor fear, presents a record of national self-restraint that has not escaped the attention of the world at large. Even in the troubled time when rumor and hearsay successfully competed with the truth for a place in the headlines of the daily press, the President of the United States kept his course, refusing to be coerced or driven or turned aside, calm in the approbation of his own conscience, grateful for the confidence of men of sense,