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thing in our national character or institutions that wholly unfits us for the work. Yet the most successful colonies in the whole world were the thirteen original colonies on our Atlantic coast; and the most successful colonists were our own grandfathers! Have the grandsons so degenerated that they are incapable of colonizing at all, or of managing colonies? Who says so? Is it anyone with the glorious history of this continental colonization bred in his bone and leaping in his blood? Or is it some refugee from a foreign country he was discontented with, who now finds pleasure in disparaging the capacity of the new country he came to, while he has neither caught its spirit nor grasped the meaning of its history?

Some bewail the alleged fact that our system gives us no fitness for managing colonies or dependencies. Has our system been found weaker, then, than other forms of government, less adaptable to emergencies, and with people less fit to cope with them? Is the diffi'culty inherent, or is it possible that the emergency may show, as emergencies have shown before, that whatever task intelligence, energy, and courage can surmount the American people and their Government can rise to?

It is said we cannot colonize the tropics, because our people cannot labor there. Perhaps not, especially if they refuse to obey the prudent precautions which centuries of experience have enjoined upon others. But what, then, are we going to do with Porto Rico? How soon are our people going to flee from Arizona? And why is life impossible to Americans in Manila and Cebu and Iloilo, but attractive to the throngs of Europeans who have built up those cities? Can we mine all over the world, from South Africa to the Klondike, but not in Palawan? Can we grow tobacco in Cuba, but not in Cebu; or rice in Louisiana, but not in Luzon?

It is said we are pursuing a fine method for restoring order, in prolonging the war we began for humanity by forcing liberty and justice on an unwilling people at the point of the bayonet. The sneer is cheap. How else have these blessings been generally diffused? How often in the history of the world has barbarism been replaced by civilization without bloodshed? How were our own liberty and justice established and diffused on this continent? Would the process have been less bloody if a part of our own people had noisily taken the side of the English, the Mexican, or the savage, and protested against "extreme measures?"

Some say a war to extend freedom in Cuba or elsewhere is right, and therefore, our duty; but the war in the Philippines now is purely selfish, and therefore, all wrong. The statement is inaccurate; it is a war we are in duty bound to wage, at any rate till order is restored. Suppose it to be merely a war in defence of our own just rights and interests. Since when did such a war become wrong? Is our national motto to be "Quixotic on the one hand; Chinese on the other?"

How much better it would have been, say others, to mind our own business. No doubt; but if we were to begin crying over spilt milk in that way, the place to begin was where the milk was spilled-in the Congress that resolved upon war with Spain. Since that congressional action we have been minding what it made our own business quite diligently, and an essential part of our business now is the responsibility for our own past acts, whether in Havana or Manila.

Some say we began the war for humanity, and are, therefore, disgraced by coming out of it with increased territory. Then a penalty must always be imposed upon a victorious nation for presuming to do a good act. The only nation to be exempt from such a penalty upon success is to be the nation that was in the wrong! It is

to have a premium; for it is thus relieved from the penalty which modern practice in the interest of civilization requires, the payment of an indemnity for the cost of an unjust war. Furthermore, the representatives of the nation that does a good act are thus bound to reject any opportunity for lightening the national load it entails. They must leave the full burden upon their country, to be dealt with in due time by the individual taxpayer!

Again, we have superfine discussions of what the United States "stands for." It does not stand, we are told, for foreign conquest, or for colonies, or dependencies, or other extensions of its power and influence. It stands for the development of the individual man. There is a germ of a great truth in this, but the development of the truth is lost sight of. Individual initiative is a good thing, and our institutions do develop it-and its consequences! There is a species of individualism, too, about a bull-dog. When he takes hold he holds on. It may as well be noticed by the objectors that that is a characteristic much appreciated by the American people. They, too, hold on. They remember besides a pregnant phrase of their fathers, who "ordained this Constitution," among other things, "to promote the general welfare." That is a thing for which "this Government stands," also; and woe to the public servant who rejects brilliant opportunities to promote it on the Pacific Ocean as well as the Atlantic-by commerce as well as by agriculture or manufactures.

Again, it is said our continent is more than enough for all our needs; and our extensions should stop at the Pacific. What is this but proposing such a policy of self-sufficient isolation as we are accustomed to reprobate in China-planning to develop only on the soil on which we stand, and expecting the rest of the world to protect our trade if we have any? Can a nation with

safety set Chinese limits to its growth? When a tree stops growing our foresters tell us it is ripe for the axe. When a man stops in his physical and intellectual growth he begins to decay. When a business stops growing it is in danger of decline. When a nation stops growing it has passed the meridian of its course, and its shadows fall eastward. Provincial isolation is gone, and provincial habits of thought will go. There is a larger interest in what other lands have to show and teach; a larger confidence in our own; a higher resolve that it shall do its whole duty to mankind, moral as well as material, international as well as national, in such fashion as becomes time's latest offspring and its greatest. We are grown more nearly citizens of the world.

This new knowledge, these new duties and interests must have two effects-they must extend our power, influence, and trade, and they must elevate the public service. Every returning soldier or traveller tells the same story that the very name American has taken a new significance throughout the Orient. The ntional prestige is enormously increased, and trade folows prestige. Not within a century, not during our whole history, has such a field opened for our reaping. Planted directly in front of the Chinese colossus, on a great territory of our own, we have the first and best chance to profit by his awakening. Commanding bota sides of the Pacific, and the available coal supplies on each, we command the ocean that, according to the old prediction, is to bear the bulk of the world's commerce in the twentieth century. Our glorious land between the Sierras and the sea may then become as busy a hive as New England itself, and the whole continent must take fresh life from the generous blood of this natural and necessary commerce between people of different climates and zones, who gladly buy from each other what they do not produce themselves.

Hand in hand with these benefits to ourselves, which it is the duty of public servants to secure, go benefits to our new wards and benefits to mankind. There, then, is what the United States is to "stand for " in all the resplendent future-the rights and interests of its own Government; the general welfare of its own people; the extension of ordered liberty in the dark places of the earth; the spread of civilization and religion, and a consequent increase in the sum of human happiness in the world.

THE GENERAL WELFARE

[From an address delivered at Princeton University, October 21, 1899.]

We are in the Philippines, as we are in the West Indies, because duty sent us; and we shall remain because we have no right to run away from our duty, even if it does involve far more trouble than we foresaw when we plunged into the war that entailed it. The call to duty, when once plainly understood, is a call Americans never fail to answer; while to calls of interest they have often shown themselves incredulous or contemptuous.

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The Constitution we revere was ordained mote the general welfare," and he is untrue to its purpose who squanders opportunities. Never before have they been showered upon us in such bewildering profusion. Are the American people to rise to the occasion; are they to be as great as their country? Or shall the historian record that at this unexampled crisis they were controlled by timid ideas and short-sighted views, and so proved unequal to the duty and the opportunity which unforeseen circumstances brought to their doors? The two richest archipelagoes in the world are prac

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