merely of Spain, but of well-nigh all Europe, a principle vital to
oppressed people struggling for freedom--a principle without which our
own freedom could not have been established, and without which any
successful revolt against any unjust rule could be made practically
impossible. That principle is that, contrary to the prevailing rule and
practice in large transfers of sovereignty, debts do not necessarily
follow the territory if incurred by the mother country distinctly in
efforts to enslave it. Where so incurred, your representatives
persistently and successfully maintained that no attempt by the mother
country to mortgage to bondholders the revenues of custom-houses or in
any way to pledge the future income of the territory could be
recognized as a valid or binding security--that the moment the hand of
the oppressor relaxed its grasp, his claim on the future revenues of
the oppressed territory was gone. It is a doctrine that raised an
outcry in every Continental bourse, and struck terror to every gambling
European investor in national loans, floated at usurious profits, to
raise funds for unjust wars. But it is right, and one may be proud that
the United States stood like a rock, barring any road to peace which
led to loading either on the liberated territory or on the people that
had freed it the debts incurred in the wars against it. If this is not
International Law now, it will be; and the United States will have made
it.
But your representatives in Paris placed your country in no tricky
attitude of endeavoring either to evade or repudiate just obligations.
They recognized the duty of reimbursement for debts legitimately
incurred for pacific improvements or otherwise, for the real benefit of
the transferred territory. Not till it began to appear that, of the
Philippine debt of forty millions Mexican, or a little under twenty
millions of our money, a fourth had been transferred direct to aid the
war in Cuba, and the rest had probably been spent mainly in the war in
Luzon, did your representatives hesitate at its payment; and even then
they decided to give a lump sum equal to it, which could serve as a
recognition of whatever debts Spain might have incurred in the past for
expenditures in that archipelago for the benefit of the people.
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 were enabled to pledge the most Protectionist country in the world
to the liberal and wise policy of the Open Door in the East.
And finally they secured that diplomatic novelty, a treaty in which the
acutest senatorial critics have not found a peg on which inadmissible
claims against the country may be hung.
[Sidenote: The Material Side of the Business.]
At the same time 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; in other words, a trade largely between different
zones, and largely with less advanced peoples, comprising nearly one
fourth the population of the globe, whose wants promise to be speedily
and enormously developed.
The Atlantic Ocean carries mainly a different trade, with people as
advanced as ourselves, who could produce or procure elsewhere much of
what they buy from us, while we could produce, if driven to it, most of
what we need to buy from them. It is more or less, therefore, an
artificial trade, as well as a trade in which we have lost the first
place and will find it difficult to regain. The ocean carriage for the
Atlantic is in the hands of our rivals.
The Pacific Ocean, on the contrary, is in our hands now. Practically we
own more than half the coast on this side, dominate the rest, and have
midway stations in the Sandwich and Aleutian Islands. To extend now the
authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is
to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding
position on the other side of the Pacific--doubling our control of it
and of the fabulous trade the Twentieth Century will see it bear.
Rightly used, it enables the United States to convert the Pacific Ocean
almost into an American lake.
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?
[Sidenote: Bugbears.]
Let us free our minds of some bugbears. One of them is this notion that
with the retention of the Philippines our manufacturers will be crushed
by the products of cheap Eastern labor. But it does not abolish our
custom-houses, and we can still enforce whatever protection we desire.
Another is that our American workmen will be swamped under the
immigration of cheap Eastern labor. But tropical laborers rarely
emigrate to colder climates. Few have ever come. If we need a law to
keep them out, we can make it.
It is a bugbear that the Filipinos would be citizens of the United
States, and would therefore have the same rights of free travel and
free entry of their own manufactures with other citizens. The treaty
did not make them citizens of the United States at all; and they never
will be, unless you neglect your Congress.
It is a bugbear that anybody living on territory or other property
belonging to the United States must be a citizen. The Constitution says
that "persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of
the United States"; while it adds in the same sentence, "and of the
State wherein they reside," showing plainly that the provision was not
then meant to include territories.
It is equally a bugbear that the tariff must necessarily be the same
over any of the territory or other property of the United States as it
is in the Nation itself. The Constitution requires that "all duties,
imposts, and excises shall be the same throughout the United States,"
and while there was an incidental expression from the Supreme Bench in
1820 to the effect that the name United States as here used should
include the District of Columbia and other territory, it was no part
even then of the decision actually rendered, and it would be absurd to
stretch this mere dictum of three quarters of a century ago, relating
then, at any rate, to this continent alone, to carry the Dingley tariff
now across to the antipodes.
[Sidenote: Duties of the Hour.]
Brushing aside, then, these bugbears, gentlemen, 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.
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 archipelagos.
Make this fight easiest by making it at the beginning. Resist the first
insidious effort to change the character of this Union by leaving the
continent. The danger commences with the first extra-continental State.
We want no Porto Ricans or Cubans to be sending Senators and
Representatives to Washington to help govern the American Continent,
any more than we want Kanakas or Tagals or Visayans or Mohammedan
Malays. We will do them good and not harm, if we may, all the days of
our life; but, please God, we will not divide this Republic, the
heritage of our fathers, among them.
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
Tagals done for us that we should treat them better and put them on a
plane higher than any of these?
And next, resist alike either schemes for purely military governments,
or schemes for territorial civil governments, with offices to be filled
up, according to the old custom, by "carpet-baggers" from the United
States, on an allotment of increased patronage, fairly divided among
the "bosses" of the different States. Egypt under Lord Cromer is an
object-lesson of what may be done in a more excellent way by men of our
race in dealing with such a problem. Better still, and right under our
eyes, is the successful solution of the identical problem that
confronts us, in the English organization and administration of the
federated Malay States on the Malacca Peninsula.
[Sidenote: The Opposition as Old as Webster.]
I wish to speak with respect of the sincere and conscientious
opposition to all these conclusions, manifest chiefly in the East and
in the Senate; and with especial respect of the eminent statesman who
has headed that opposition. No man will question his ability, his moral
elevation, or the courage with which he follows his intellectual and
moral convictions. But I may be permitted to remind you that the noble
State he worthily represents is not now counted for the first time
against the interest and the development of the country. In February,
1848, Daniel Webster, speaking for the same great State and in the same
high forum, conjured up precisely the same visions of the destruction
of the Constitution, and proclaimed the same hostility to new
territory. Pardon me while I read you half a dozen sentences, and note
how curiously they sound like an echo--or a prophecy--of what we have
lately been hearing from the Senate:
Will you take peace without territory and preserve the integrity of
the Constitution of the country?... I think I see a course adopted
which is likely to turn the Constitution of this land into a
deformed monster--into a curse rather than a blessing.... There
would not be two hundred families of persons who would emigrate
from the United States to New Mexico for agricultural purposes in
fifty years.... I have never heard of anything, and I cannot
conceive of anything, more absurd and more affrontive of all sober
judgment than the cry that we are getting indemnity by the
acquisition of New Mexico and California. I hold that they are not
worth a dollar!
It was merely that splendid empire in itself, stretching from Los
Angeles and San Francisco eastward to Denver, that was thus despised
and rejected of Massachusetts. And it was only fifty years ago! With
all due respect, a great spokesman of Massachusetts is as liable to
mistake in this generation as in the last.
[Sidenote: Lack of Faith in the People.]
It is fair, I think, to say that this whole hesitation over the treaty
of peace is absolutely due to lack of faith in our own people, distrust
of the methods of administration they may employ in the government of
distant possessions, and distrust of their ability to resist the
schemes of demagogues for promoting the ultimate admission of Kanaka
and Malay and half-breed commonwealths to help govern the continental
Republic of our pride, this homogeneous American Union of sovereign
States. If there is real reason to fear that the American people cannot
restrain themselves from throwing open the doors of their 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.
IV
THE DUTIES OF PEACE
A speech made at the dinner given by the Ohio Society in honor of the
Peace Commissioners, in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, February
25, 1899.
THE DUTIES OF PEACE
You call and I obey. Any call from Ohio, wherever it finds me, is at
once a distinction and a duty. But it would be easier to-night and more
natural for me to remain silent. I am one of yourselves, the givers of
the feast, and the occasion belongs peculiarly to my colleagues on the
Peace Commission. I regret that more of them are not here to tell you
in person how profoundly we all appreciate the compliment you pay us.
Judge Day, after an experience and strain the like of which few
Americans of this generation have so suddenly and so successfully met,
is seeking to regain his strength at the South; Senator Frye, at the
close of an anxious session, finds his responsible duties in Washington
too exacting to permit even a day's absence; and Senator Davis, who
could not leave the care of the treaty to visit his State even when his
own reëlection was pending, has at last snatched the first moment of
relief since he was sent to Paris last summer, to go out to St. Paul
and meet the constituents who have in his absence renewed to him the
crown of a good and faithful servant.
It is all the more fortunate, therefore, that you are honored by the
presence of the patriotic member of the opposition who formed the
regulator and balance-wheel of the Commission. When Senator Gray
objected, we all reëxamined the processes of our reasoning. When he
assented, we knew at once we must be on solid ground and went ahead. It
was an expected gratification to have with you also the accomplished
secretary and counsel to the Commission, a man as modest and
unobtrusive as its president, and, like him, equal to any summons. In
his regretted absence, we rejoice to find here the most distinguished
military aid ordered to report to the Commission, and the most
important witness before it--the Conqueror of Manila.
So much you will permit me to say in my capacity as one of the hosts,
rather than as a member of the body to which you pay this gracious
compliment.
It is not for me to speak of another figure necessarily missing
to-night, though often with you heretofore at these meetings--the
member of the Ohio Society who sent us to Paris! A great and shining
record already speaks for him. He will be known in our history as the
President who freed America from the last trace of Spanish blight; who
realized the aspiration of our earlier statesmen, cherished by the
leaders of either party through three quarters of a century, for
planting the flag both on Cuba and on the Sandwich Islands; more than
this, as the President who has carried that flag half-way round the
world and opened the road for the trade of the Nation to follow it.
All this came from simply doing his duty from day to day, as that duty
was forced upon him. No other man in the United States held back from
war as he did, risking loss of popularity, risking the hostility of
Congress, risking the harsh judgment of friends in agonizing for peace.
It was no doubt in the spirit of the Prince of Peace, but it was also
with the wisdom of Polonius: "Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but,
being in, bear it, that the opposer may beware of thee!" Never again
will any nation imagine that it can trespass indefinitely against the
United States with impunity. Never again will an American war-ship run
greater risks in a peaceful harbor than in battle. The world will never
again be in doubt whether, when driven to war, we will end it in a gush
of sentimentality or a shiver of unmanly apprehension over untried
responsibilities, by fleeing from our plain duty, and hastening to give
up what we are entitled to, before we have even taken an opportunity to
look at it.
[Sidenote: Does Peace Pacify?]
But it must be confessed that "looking at it" during the past week has
not been an altogether cheerful occupation. While the aspect of some of
these new possessions remains so frowning there are faint hearts ready
enough to say that the Peace Commission is in no position to be
receiving compliments. Does protection protect? is an old question that
used to be thrown in our faces--though I believe even the questioners
finally made up their minds that it did. Does peace pacify? is the
question of the hour. Well, as to our original antagonist, historic,
courageous Spain, there seems ground to hope and believe and be glad
that it does--not merely toward us, but within her own borders. When
she jettisoned cargo that had already shifted ruinously, there is
reason to think that she averted disaster and saved the ship. Then, as
to Porto Rico there is no doubt of peace; and as to Cuba very
little--although it would be too much to hope that her twelve years of
civil war could be followed by an absolute calm, without disorders.
As to other possessions in the farther East, we may as well recognize
at once that we are dealing now with the same sort of clever barbarians
as in the earlier days of the Republic, when, on another ocean not then
less distant, we were compelled to encounter the Algerine pirates. But
there is this difference. Then we merely chastised the Algerines into
letting us and our commerce alone. The permanent policing of that coast
of the Mediterranean was not imposed upon us by surrounding
circumstances, or by any act of ours; it belonged to nearer nations.
Now a war we made has broken down the only authority that existed to
protect the commerce of the world in one of its greatest Eastern
thoroughfares, and to preserve the lives and property of people of all
nations resorting to those marts. We broke it down, and we cannot, dare
not, display the cowardice and selfishness of failing to replace it.
However men may differ as to our future policy in those regions, there
can be no difference as to our present duty. It is as plain as that of
putting down a riot in Chicago or New York--all the plainer because,
until recently, we have ourselves been taking the very course and doing
the very things to encourage the rioters.
[Sidenote: Why Take Sovereignty?]
A distinguished and patriotic citizen said to me the other day, in a
Western city: "You might have avoided this trouble in the Senate by
refusing title in the Philippines exactly as in Cuba, and simply
enforcing renunciation of Spanish sovereignty. Why didn't you do it?"
The question is important, and the reason ought to be understood. But
at the outset it should be clearly realized that the circumstances
which made it possible to take that course as to Cuba were altogether
exceptional. For three quarters of a century we had asserted a special
interest and right of interference there as against any other nation.
The island is directly on our coast, and no one doubted that at least
as much order as in the past would be preserved there, even if we had
to do it ourselves. There was also the positive action of Congress,
which, on the one hand, gave us excuse for refusing a sovereignty our
highest legislative authority had disclaimed, and, on the other,
formally cast the shield of our responsibility over Cuba when left
without a government or a sovereignty. Besides, there was a people
there, advanced enough, sufficiently compact and homogeneous in
religion, race, and language, sufficiently used already to the methods
of government, to warrant our republican claim that the sovereignty was
not being left in the air--that it was only left where, in the last
analysis, in a civilized community, it must always reside, in the
people themselves.
And yet, under all these conditions, the most difficult task your Peace
Commissioners had at Paris was to maintain and defend the demand for a
renunciation of sovereignty without anybody's acceptance of the
sovereignty thus renounced. International Law has not been so
understood abroad; and it may be frankly confessed that the Spanish
arguments were learned, acute, sustained by the general judgment of
Europe, and not easy to refute.
A similar demand concerning the Philippines neither could nor ought to
have been acquiesced in by the civilized world. Here were ten millions
of people on a great highway of commerce, of numerous different races,
different languages, different religions, some semi-civilized, some
barbarous, others mere pagan savages, but without a majority or even a
respectable minority of them accustomed to self-government or believed
to be capable of it. Sovereignty over such a conglomeration and in such
a place could not be left in the air. The civilized world would not
recognize its transfer, unless transferred to somebody. Renunciation
under such circumstances would have been equivalent in International
Law to abandonment, and that would have been equivalent to anarchy and
a race for seizure among the nations that could get there quickest.
We could, of course, have refused to accept the obligations of a
civilized, responsible nation. After breaking down government in those
commercial centers, we could have refused to set up anything in its
stead, and simply washed our hands of the whole business; but to do
that would have been to show ourselves more insensible to moral
obligations than if we had restored them outright to Spain.
[Sidenote: How to Deal with the Philippines.]
Well, if the elephant must be on our hands, what are we going to do
with it? I venture to answer that first we must put down the riot. The
lives and property of German and British merchants must be at least as
safe in Manila as they were under Spanish rule before we are ready for
any other step whatever.
Next, ought we not to try to diagnose our case before we turn every
quack doctor among us loose on it--understand what the problem is
before beginning heated partizan discussions as to the easiest way of
solving it? And next, shall we not probably fare best in the end if we
try to profit somewhat by the experience others have had in like cases?