the Pacific could no longer remain indifferent to the fate of the other side. But how or in what way we were to assert or maintain our rights the wisest man was not prepared to say. Suddenly came the Spanish War. Dewey's fleet was at Manila, and we were the masters of the Philippines. We were an Eastern power. We held the cross-roads of the Pacific at Hawaii, and we had our foothold on the Island of Luzon.

II.

AN EASTERN POWER

A VERY distinguished French writer and economist sees in our appearance in the Philippines not merely the direct value of the islands to us, but the fact that our coming there makes us an Eastern power, and that we may be able to save the East, not solely for ourselves, but for France, and for all the nations of Western Europe. He sees that by throwing our weight into the scales we may be able to keep those vast regions and those teeming millions, not only open to our trade and commerce, but open to the light of Western civilization, and thus save them from sinking down into the darkness of the Russian winter. The master of Manila can make terms with every power in the East, and those vast markets must be held open in the interests of our industry and our commerce, of our farmers and our working-men, to the free competition of mankind, a contest in which the genius of American enterprise need fear no rival.

I know it will be said that these are remote questions. It certainly is not a question of to-day, or of next year, or of, perhaps, the next twenty years, but it is coming, and we must be prepared. Now is the ac

cepted time. I do not want this generation to fail in the task which has been imposed upon it; I do not want our children and our children's children, reaping a bitter harvest which has grown from our mistakes or our cowardice, to look back to us and say, " O, ye of little faith, what have ye done?" I want them to look back to us as we look back to the men who made the Constitution, not for thirteen little States, but with a far look into the future, for the government of a nation one day to be master of a continent. I want them to be able to say of us that we saw that the United States could not be turned into a gigantic Switzerland or Holland, that it could not be a hermit-nation hiding a defenceless, feeble body within a huge shell; that it could not be shut up and kept from its share of the world's commerce until it was smothered by a power hostile to it in every conception of justice and liberty, when it might have prevented such a fate.

One word more. There is another side to this question, the side of duty and honor. We were brought to the Philippines by the fortune of war. I can conceive of differences of opinion as to the wisdom of our keeping them. I can understand differences of opinion as to our methods of governing and administering them, but I cannot understand when our soldiers are in the field, face to face with an enemy, that there should be any party, or any organization of men in this country, ready to cry out, "Surrender!"

The soldiers of the United States in the Philippines, where they have the right to be by the laws of nations, by the laws of this country, and by the laws of sound morals, are fighting with the public enemies of the United States. Under those circumstances I see but one course. I do not know how others may vote, but I vote with the army that wears the uniform and carries the flag of my country. When the enemy has yielded and the war is over, we can discuss other matters of

government and administration. We took from Spain the sovereignty of those islands; we alone stand between those islands and utter anarchy, or their conquest by Russia or Germany. I am opposed to turning those islands over to anarchy.

The proposition that we should allow the first selfchosen dictator who comes along to establish a government, and that we should agree to stand outside and do nothing but protect him and fight any other nation that he chooses to pick a quarrel with, is too absurd and too monstrous to require refutation. If we are to have responsibility we will have the power that goes with it. I am opposed to turning those islands over to any other nation. I believe that we can give to those people a larger measure of peace and happiness, of freedom and prosperity than any other nation in the world, for I believe in the capacity, in the honesty, and the good faith of the American people. I think, therefore, that it is our duty to stay there; and a nation, like a man, must not fail in its duty. We are the youth among the nations. I do not believe that the word "fail" is yet printed in the American dictionary.

The world has been largely governed, and always will be largely governed, not by cool reasoning or by philosophy, but by sentiment. Mankind is moved by faiths and by beliefs. It was belief in Rome that made Rome great; it was a profound religious faith which swept all Europe into the Crusades. It was faith in democracy, in man and in his destiny, which enabled France, one hundred years ago, to face banded Europe and carry its armies from Madrid to Moscow. It was faith in the Union, faith in the future of the United States, faith in democracy, which made this people fight four years of civil war to a victorious conclusion. Faith and belief in our country in this time, when too many of the old faiths and the old creeds have faded and grown dim, are the most precious possessions that

we have. Anything which tends to lower or weaken that faith is a deadly injury.

If we fail in a national duty, if we retreat before an armed enemy, we weaken and we injure the national glory and the faith that goes with it. We can subdue this insurrection, we can bring peace and order to these islands, we can give liberty and prosperity to their inhabitants. It is our duty to stay there and to do these things. Shall we hesitate in the presence of such a duty and such vast and vital interests of our own? Shall we make what Dante calls the "great refusal," shall we call home Dewey's ships, shall we bid our soldiers retreat, shall we haul down the flag, and as we fold it up write upon it, in black letters, "Failure"a word which has never been there yet? There is but one answer that I can make to these questions; but one answer that the American people, brave and highspirited as they are, will make, and that answer is, Never, never, never! "

66

JOHN D. LONG

OUR NEW PROBLEMS

[From a speech at the Home Market Club's reception to President McKinley, Boston, February 16, 1899.]

As an outside observer, I have been struck with the various methods in which this subject of the Philippines has been discussed. One of these methods may be styled as the oratorical-declamatory. On the one hand this method has found expression in saying that the duty of the American eagle is to hold on to everything on which he puts his claws, reminding one of Abraham Lincoln's story of the modest farmer, who said that all the land he wanted to own was only what adjoined his farm. Under this head, also, comes the stirring cry, which never fails to captivate the popular ear, that wherever the flag has once been let loose, there it must always float. All this sounds well, but needs a second thought.

On the other hand, is the equally extravagant talk about the greed of conquest and the reduction of the Filipino to the wretched condition of vassalage and slavery. Those who indulge in this exuberance of rhetoric forget that our war was with Spain, and that we have simply transferred to the United States, as the result of our victory in that war, the sovereignty which Spain had over the Philippines; that this transfer was incidentally very much in the interest of the islanders-more, many think, than in our own; and that it relieved them from a yoke under which they groaned, giving them the fairest promise on which