tically at our disposal. The greatest ocean on the globe has been put in our hands, the ocean that is to bear the commerce of the twentieth century. In the face of this prospect shall we prefer, with the teeming population that century is to bring to us, to remain a "hibernating nation, living off its own fat-a hermit nation?"

Are we to be discouraged by the cry that the new possessions are worthless? Not while we remember how often and under what circumstances we have heard that cry before. Half the public men of the period denounced Louisiana as worthless. Eminent statesmen made merry in Congress over the idea that Oregon or Washington could be of any use. Daniel Webster, in the most solemn and authoritative tones Massachusetts has ever employed, assured his fellow-Senators that in his judgment California was not worth à dollar. Nobody doubts the advantage our dealers have derived in the promotion of trade, from controlling political relations and frequent intercourse. There are those who deny that "trade follows the flag," but even they admit that it leaves, if the flag does. And independent of these advantages, and reckoning by mere distance, we still have the better of any European rivals in the Philippines. Now, assume that the Filipino would have far fewer wants than the Kanaka or his coolie laborer, and would do far less work for the means to gratify them. Admit, too, that, with "the open door," our political relations and frequent intercourse could have barely a fifth or a sixth of the effect there they have had in the Sandwich Islands. Roughly cast up even that result, and say whether it is a value which the United States should throw away as not worth considering!

And the greatest remains behind. For the trade in the Philippines will be but a drop in the bucket compared to that of China, for which they give us an unapproachable foothold. But let it never be forgotten

that the confidence of Orientals goes only to those whom they recognize as strong enough and determined enough always to hold their own and protect their rights! The worst possible introduction for the Asiatic trade would be an irresolute abandonment of our foothold because it was too much trouble to keep, or because some Malay and half-breed insurgents said they wanted us away.

Have you considered for whom we hold these advantages in trust? They belong not merely to the seventy-five millions now within our borders, but to all who are to extend the fortunes and preserve the virtues of the Republic in the coming century. Their number cannot increase in the startling ratio this century has shown-if they did the population of the United States a hundred years hence would be over twelve hundred millions. That ratio is impossible, but nobody gives reasons why we should not increase half as fast. Suppose we do actually increase only onefourth as fast in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth. To what height would not the three hundred millions of Americans, whom even that ratio foretells, bear up the seething industrial activities of the Continent! To what corner of the world would they not need to carry their commerce? What demands on tropical productions would they not make? What outlets for their adventurous youth would they not require?

With such a prospect before us, who thinks that we should shrink from an enlargement of our national sphere because of the limitations that bound, or the dangers that threatened, before railroads, before ocean steamers, before telegraphs and ocean cables, before the enormous development of our manufactures, and the training of executive and organizing faculties in our people on a constantly increasing scale for generations. Does the prospect alarm? Is it said that our nation is

already too great; that all its magnificent growth only adds to the conflicting interests that must eventually tear it asunder? What cement, then, like that of a great common interest beyond our borders, that touches not merely the conscience, but the pocket and the pride of all alike, and marshals us in the face of the world, standing for our own?

What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? Hold fast! Stand firm in the place where Providence has put you, and do the duty a just responsibility for your own past acts imposes. Support the army you sent there. Stop wasting valuable strength by showing how things might be different if something different had been done a year and a half ago. Use the educated thought of the country for shaping best its course now, instead of chiefly finding fault with its history. Bring the best hope of the future, the colleges and the generation they are training, to exert the greatest influence and accomplish the most good by working intelligently in line with the patriotic aspirations and the inevitable tendencies of the American people, rather than against them. Unite the efforts of all men of good-will to make the appointment of any person to these new and strange duties beyond seas impossible save for proved fitness, and his removal impossible save for cause. Rally the colleges and the churches, and all they influence, the brain and the conscience of the country, in a combined and irresistible demand for a genuine trained and pure civil service in our new possessions, that shall put to shame our detractors, and show to the world the Americans of this generation equal still to the work of civilization and colonization, and leading the development of the coming century as bravely as their fathers led it in the last.

CARL SCHURZ

[Extracts from a speech delivered at the University of Chicago, January 4, 1899.]

I.

"AMERICANIZING" OUR NEW POSSESSIONS

WHEN the question is asked whether we may hope to adapt new countries and populations to our system of government the advocates of annexation answer cheerily that when they belong to us we shall soon " Americanize" them. This may mean that Americans in sufficently large numbers will migrate there to determine the character of those populations so as to assimilate them to our own. This is a delusion of the first magnitude. We shall, indeed, be able, if we go honestly about it, to accomplish several salutary things in those countries. But one thing we cannot do. We cannot strip the tropical climate of those qualities which have at all times deterred men of the Northern races, to which we belong, from migrating to those countries in mass, to make their homes there, as they have migrated and are still migrating to countries in the temperate zone. This is not a mere theory, but a fact of universal experience.

The scheme of Americanizing our "new possessions" in that sense is, therefore, absolutely hopeless. The immediate forces of nature are against it. Whatever we may do for their improvement, the people of

the Spanish Antilles will remain in overwhelming numerical predominance, Spanish creoles and negroes, and the people of the Philippines, Filipinos, Malays, Tagals-some of them quite clever in their way, but the vast majority utterly alien to us, not only in origin and language, but in habits, traditions, ways of thinking, principles, ambitions-in short, in most things that are of the greatest importance in human intercourse, and especially in political co-operation. And under the influence of their tropical climate they would prove incapable of becoming assimilated to the Anglo-Saxon. They would, therefore, remain in the population of this Republic a hopelessly heterogeneous element-in some respects much more hopeless than the colored people now living among us.

If we do adopt such a system, then we shall, for the first time since the abolition of slavery, again have two kinds of Americans-Americans of the first class, who enjoy the privilege of taking part in the Government in accordance with our old constitutional principles, and Americans of the second class, who are to be ruled in a substantially arbitrary fashion by the Americans of the first class, through congressional legislation and the action of the national executivenot to speak of individual "masters," arrogating to themselves powers beyond the law.

This will be a difference no better-nay, rather somewhat worse-than that which a century and a quarter ago still existed between Englishmen of the first and Englishmen of the second class, the first represented by King George and the British Parliament, and the second by the American colonists. This difference called forth that great pæan of human liberty, the American Declaration of Independence—a document which, I regret to say, seems, owing to the intoxication of conquest, to have lost much of its charm among some of our fellow-citizens. Its fundamental