WHITELAW REID

PURPORT OF THE TREATY

[From a speech delivered at the Lincoln dinner of the Marquette Club, Chicago, February 13, 1899.]

BEYOND the Alleghenies the American voice rings clear and true. It does not sound, here in Chicago, as if you favored the pursuit of partisan aims in great questions of foreign policy; or division among our own people in the face of insurgent guns turned upon our soldiers on distant fields to which we sent them. We are all here, it would seem, to stand by the peace that has been secured, even if we have to fight for it.

Neither has any reproach come from Chicago to the Peace Commissioners, because when intrusted with your interests in a great negotiation in a foreign capital, they made a settlement on terms too favorable to their own country-because in bringing home peace with honor they also brought home more property than some of our people wanted! When that reproach has been urged elsewhere, it has recalled the familiar defence against a similar complaint in an old political contest. There might, it was said, be some serious disadvantages about a surplus in the national treasury; but at any rate it was easier to deal with a surplus than with a deficit! If we have brought back too much, that is only a question for Congress and our own people. If we had brought back too little, it might have been again a question for the army and the navy.

Would you have had your agents in Paris, the guar

dians of your material interests, throw away all chance for indemnity for a war that began with the treacherous murder of two hundred and sixty-six American sailors on the Maine, and had cost your treasury during the year over $240,000,000? Would you have had them throw away a magnificent foothold for the trade of the farther East, which the fortune of war had placed in your hand; throw away a whole archipelago of boundless possibilities, economic and strategic; throw away this opportunity of centuries for your country? Would you have had them, on their own responsibility, then and there decide this question for all time, and absolutely refuse to reserve it for the decision of Congress, and of the American people, to whom that decision belongs, and who have the right to an opportunity first for its deliberate consideration?

They protected what was gained in the war from adroit efforts to put it all at risk again, through an untimely appeal to the noble principle of arbitration. They held—and I am sure the best friends of the principle will thank them for holding that an honest resort to arbitration must come before war, to avert its horrors, not after war, to escape its consequences. They neither neglected nor feared the duty of caring for the material interests of their own country-the duty of grasping the enormous possibilities upon which we had stumbled, for sharing in the awakening and development of the farther East. That way lies now the best hope of American commerce. There you may command a natural rather than an artificial trade—a trade which pushes itself instead of needing to be pushed; a trade with people who can send you things you want and cannot produce, and take from you in return things they want and cannot produce.

Are we to lose all this through a mushy sentimentality, characteristic neither of practical nor of responsible people-alike un-American and un-Christian, since it

would humiliate us by showing lack of nerve to hold what we are entitled to, and incriminate us by entailing endless bloodshed and anarchy on a people whom we have already stripped of the only government they have known for three hundred years, and whom we should thus abandon to civil war and foreign spoliation? What are the obvious duties of the hour?

First, hold what you are entitled to. If you are ever to part with it, wait at least till you have examined it and found out that you have no use for it. Before yielding to temporary difficulties at the outset, take time to be quite sure you are ready now to abandon your chance for a commanding position in the trade of China, in the commercial control of the Pacific Ocean, and in the richest commercial development of the approaching century.

Resist the crazy extension of the doctrine that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed to an extreme never imagined by the men who framed it, and never for one moment acted upon in their own practice. Why should we force Jefferson's language to a meaning Jefferson himself never gave it in dealing with the people of Louisiana, or Andrew Jackson in dealing with those of South Carolina, or Abraham Lincoln with the seceding States, or any responsible statesman of the country at any period in its history in dealing with Indians or New Mexicans or Californians or Russians? What have the Tagalos done for us that we should treat them better and put them on a plane higher than any of these?

Next, resist admission of any of our new possessions as States, or their organization on a plan designed to prepare them for admission. Stand firm for the present American Union of sister States, undiluted by anybody's archipelagoes. If there is real reason to fear that the American people cannot restrain themselves from throwing open the doors of our Senate and House

of Representatives to such sister states as Luzon or the Visayas, or the Sandwich Islands, or Porto Rico, or even Cuba, then the sooner we beg some civilized nation, with more common-sense and less sentimentality and gush, to take them off our hands, the better.

If we are unequal to a manly and intelligent discharge of the responsibilities the war has entailed, then let us confess our unworthiness, and beg Japan to assume the duties of a civilized Christian state toward the Philippines, while England can extend the same relief to us in Cuba and Porto Rico. But having thus ignominiously shirked the position demanded by our belligerency and our success, let us never again presume to take a place among the self-respecting and responsible nations of the earth that can ever lay us liable to another such task. If called to it, let us at the outset admit our unfitness, withdraw within our own borders and leave these larger duties of the world to less incapable races or less craven rulers.

Far other and brighter are the hopes I have ventured to cherish concerning the course of the American people in this emergency. I have thought there was encouragement for nations as well as for individuals in remembering the sobering and steadying influence of great responsibilities suddenly devolved. When Prince Hal comes to the crown he is apt to abjure Falstaff. When we come to the critical and dangerous work of controlling turbulent, semi-tropical dependencies, the agents we choose cannot be the ward-heelers of the local bosses. Now, if ever, is the time to rally the brain and conscience of the American people to a real elevation and purification of their civil service, to the most exalted standards of public duty, to the most strenuous and united effort of all men of good-will, to make our Government worthy of the new and great responsibilities which the Providence of God, rather than any purpose of man has imposed upon it.

THE PATH OF DUTY

[From an address delivered at Miami University, June 15, 1899.]

If we did not want responsibilities we ought not to have gone to war, and I, for one, would have been content. But, having chosen to go to war, and having been speedily and overwhelmingly successful, we should be ashamed even to think of running away from what inexorably followed. Dewey went to Manila and sunk the Spanish fleet. We thus broke down Spanish means for controlling the Philippines, and were left with the Spanish responsibility for maintaining order there responsibility to all the world, German, English, Japanese, Russian and the rest, in one of the great centres and highways of the world's commerce.

But why not turn over that commercial centre and the island on which it is situated to the Tagalogs? To be sure, under three hundred years of Spanish rule barbarism on Luzon had so far disappeared that this commercial metropolis, as large as San Francisco or Cincinnati, had sprung up, and come to be thronged by traders and travellers of all nations. Now it is calmly suggested that we might have turned it over to one semi-civilized tribe, absolutely without experience in governing even itself, much less a great community of foreigners-probably in a minority on the island, and at war with its other inhabitants-a tribe which has given the measure of its fitness for being charged with the rights of foreigners and the care of a commercial metropolis by the violation of flags of truce, treachery to the living and mutilation of the dead, which have marked its recent wanton rising against the power that was trying to help it!

Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of colonizing or of managing colonies; that there is some