I was consigning him to almost certain destruction did I permit him to take up residence in the Orient, when necessity did not compel his passing beyond our shores."

With individual deterioration goes social decay. Man becomes less careful of his dress, his social observances, his duties to others. Woman loses her regard for conventionalities, for her reputation, and for her character. The little efforts that hold society together are abandoned one by one. The spread of the "Mother Hubbard," crowding out more elaborate forms of dress, indicates a general failure of social conventionalities. The decay of society reacts on the individual. Where it is too warm or too malarial to be conventional, it is too much trouble to be decent. Without going into causes, it is sufficient to say that Anglo-Saxon colonies of self-respecting, self-governing men and women are practically confined to the temperate regions.

The annexation of the Philippines is, therefore, not a movement of expansion. We cannot expand into space aiready full. Our nation cannot expand where freedom cannot go. Neither the people nor the institutions of the United States can ever occupy the Philippines. The American home cannot endure there, the town-meeting cannot exist. There is no room for free laborers, no welcome for them, and no pay. The sole opening for Americans in any event will be as corporations or agents of corporations, as Government officials or as members of some profession requiring higher than native fitness. There is no chance for the American workman, but for syndicates they offer great opportunities. Yes, for the syndicates who handle politics as an incident in business. But the fewer of such syndicates we shelter under our flag,

the better for our people. Let them take their chances without our help.

If it were possible to exterminate the Filipinos as we have destroyed the Indians, replacing their institutions and their people by ours, the political objections to annexation would, in the main, disappear, whatever might be said of the moral ones.

For our extermination of the Indian, there is, in general, no moral justification. There is a good political excuse in it-that we could and did use their land in a better way than was possible to them. We have no such excuse in Luzon; we cannot use the land except as we use the lives of the people.

We cannot plant free institutions in the Orient because once planted they will not grow; if they grow they will not be free. We cannot exterminate these people, and if we did we could not use their land for our own people; we could only fill it with Asiatic colonists, Malay, Chinese, or Japanese, more of the same kind, not of our kind.

"Any attempt to govern the tropical possessions of the United States on democratic principles, says Professor W. Alleyne Ireland, one of our wisest authorities, "is doomed to certain failure. It has been already shown that without forced labor, or at least some form of indentured labor, large industries cannot be developed in tropical colonies." Such forced labor can be controlled only by the compulsion of the government as in Java, or by the activity of great corporations as in Hawaii and Trinidad.

"It is thought by many," says Mr. Ireland, "that though it may be unadvisable to grant the (tropical)

colonies representative government at present, the time will soon come when the people will show themselves capable of self-government. Judging from past experience there would seem to be little hope that these pleasant anticipations will ever be realized. We look in vain for a single instance within the tropics of a really well-governed country."

The notion that in these fertile islands our surplus working men shall find homes is the height of absurdity. Our labor leaders understand this well enough, and for once they stand together on the side of common sense. Scarcely any part of the United States is so crowded with people as Luzon or Porto Rico; in no part is the demand for labor less or its rewards so meager. Ten cents a day is not a free man's scale of wages; and no change of government can materially alter this relation. In the tropics the conditions of subsistence are so easy and the incentives to industry so slight that all races exposed to relaxing influences become pauperized. It is the free-lunch system on a boundless scale, the environment of Nature too generous to be just, too kind to be exacting.

For the control of dependent nations and slave races the fair sounding name of Imperialism has lately come into use. It has been hailed with joy on the one hand, for it is associated with armorial bearings and more than royal pomp and splendor. It has been made a term of reproach on the other, and our newspaper politicians now hasten to declare that they favor expansion only when it has no taint of Imperialism. But to our British friends nothing could be more ridiculous. You must have an iron hand or you get no profits. To cast aside Imperialism is to cast away the sole method by which

tropical colonies have ever been made profitable to commerce or tolerable in politics. On the other hand these same people tell us that they have not the slightest thought of making states of Cuba or the Philippines, or of admitting the Filipinos to citizenship. But if the Filipino is not a citizen of his own land, who is?

We are advised on good patrician authority that all is well, whatever we do, if we avoid the fatal mistake of admitting the brown races to political equality-of letting them govern us. We must rule them for their own good -never for our advantage. In other words, lead or drive the inferior man along, but never recognize his will, his manhood, his equality; never let him count one when he is measured against you.

Our

These maxims should be familiar; they are the philosophy of slavery, and they only lack the claim of the right to buy and sell the bodies and souls of men. purchase of the Filipinos from Spain, and our subsequent treatment of the resultant slave insurrection supplies the missing element.

"Benevolent Despotism," is Mr. Kidd's expression for the sole method of control possible in the tropics, leading to industrial success. "Slavery" is an older term of similar meaning. "I am for the black man, as against the alligator," Douglas is reported to have said, "but as between black man and white man, I am for the white man every time." This is inequality before the law, the essence of slavery, the essence of Imperialism which is slavery as applied to nations. Every argument used in defense of it, applies as well to the defense of slavery and has been worn out in that cause.

One plan or the other we must adopt; either self

rule or Imperialism; there is no middle course, and both under present conditions are virtually impossible. Let the friends of annexation develop some plan of government, any plan whatever, and its folly and ineffectiveness will speedily appear. To go ahead without a plan means certain disaster, and that very soon; whatever we do or do not do, there is no time to lose.

Conquest of the Orient is not expansion, for there is no room for free manhood to grow there. It is useless to disclaim Imperialism when we are red-handed in the very act. Annexation without Imperialism is sheer anarchy. Annexation with Imperialism may be much worse, for so far as it goes it means the abandonment of democracy. The Union cannot endure "half slave, half free," half republic, half empire. We may make vassal tribes of the Filipinos, but never free states in the sense in which the name "state" applies to Maine, Iowa, or California. The Philippines can have no part in the Federal Union. Their self-government must be of a wholly different kind, the outgrowth of their own needs and dispositions. What they need is not our freedom, but some form of paternal despotism or monarchy of their own choosing which shall command their loyalty and yet keep them in peace.

"It is no man's duty to govern any other man." Still less is it a nation's duty to govern another nation. All that the weak nations ask of the strong is : "Stand out of my sunlight and let me alone."

We have never adopted the theory that each small nation must be tributary to some other, and that each nation of the lazy tropics must have slave drivers from Europe to make its people work.