we are led. No doubt these first glimpses of the task that lies before
us, as well as the warfare with distant tribes into which we have been
unexpectedly plunged, will provoke for the time a certain discontent
with our new possessions. But on a far-reaching question of national
policy the wise public man is not so greatly disturbed by what people
say in momentary discouragement under the first temporary check. That
which really concerns him is what people at a later day, or even in a
later generation, might say of men trusted with great duties for their
country, who proved unequal to their opportunities, and through some
short-sighted timidity of the moment lost the chance of centuries.
It is quite true, as was recently reported in what seemed an
authoritative way from Washington, that the Peace Commissioners were
not entirely of one mind at the outset, and equally true that the final
conclusion at Washington was apparently reached on the Commission's
recommendation from Paris. As the cold fit, in the language of one of
our censors, has followed the hot fit in the popular temper, I readily
take the time which hostile critics consider unfavorable, for accepting
my own share of responsibility, and for avowing for myself that I
declared my belief in the duty and policy of holding the whole
Philippine Archipelago in the very first conference of the
Commissioners in the President's room at the White House, in advance of
any instructions of any sort. If vindication for it be needed, I
confidently await the future.
What _is_ the duty of a public servant as to profiting by opportunities
to secure for his country what all the rest of the world considers
material advantages? Even if he could persuade himself that rejecting
them is morally and internationally admissible, is he at liberty to
commit his country irrevocably to their rejection, because they do not
wholly please his individual fancy? At a former negotiation of our own
in Paris, the great desire of the United States representative, as well
as of his Government, had been mainly to secure the settled or partly
settled country adjoining us on the south, stretching from the Floridas
to the city of New Orleans. The possession of the vast unsettled and
unknown Louisiana Territory, west of the Mississippi, was neither
sought nor thought of. Suddenly, on an eventful morning in April, 1803,
Talleyrand astonished Livingston by offering, on behalf of Napoleon, to
sell to the United States, not the Floridas at all, but merely
Louisiana, "a raw little semi-tropical frontier town and an unexplored
wilderness."
Suppose Livingston had rejected the offer? Or suppose Gadsden had not
exceeded his instructions in Mexico and boldly grasped the opportunity
that offered to rectify and make secure our Southwestern frontier?
Would this generation judge that they had been equal to their
opportunities or their duties?
The difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own
creation. It is not for any of us to think of attempting to apportion
the blame. The only thing we are sure of is that it was for no lack of
authority that we hesitated and drifted till the Tagals were convinced
we were afraid of them, and could be driven out before reinforcements
arrived. That was the very thing our officers had warned us
against,--the least sign of hesitation or uncertainty,--the very danger
every European with knowledge of the situation had dinned in our ears.
Everybody declared that difficulties were sure to grow on our hands in
geometrical proportion to our delays; and it was perfectly known to the
respective branches of our Government primarily concerned that while
the delay went on it was in neglect of a duty we had voluntarily
assumed.
For the American Commissioners, with due authority, distinctly offered
to assume responsibility, pending the ratification of the treaty, for
the protection of life and property and the preservation of order
throughout the whole archipelago. The Spanish Commissioners, after
consultation with their Government, refused this, but agreed that each
Power should be charged, pending the ratification, with the maintenance
of order in the places where it was established. The American assent to
that left absolutely no question as to the diminished but still grave
responsibility thus devolved.[8] That responsibility was avoided from
the hour the treaty was signed till the hour when the Tagal chieftain,
at the head of an army he had been deliberately gathering and
organizing, took things in his own hand and made the attack he had so
long threatened. Disorder, forced loans, impressment, confiscation,
seizure of waterworks, contemptuous violations of our guard-lines, and
even the practical siege of the city of Manila, had meantime been going
on within gunshot of troops held there inactive by the Nation which had
volunteered responsibility for order throughout the archipelago, and
had been distinctly left with responsibility for order in the island on
which it was established. If the bitterest enemy of the United States
had sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest trouble in the
shortest time, he could have devised for that end no policy more
successful than the one we actually pursued. There may have been
controlling reasons for it. An opposite course might perhaps have cost
more elsewhere than it saved in Luzon. On that point the public cannot
now form even an opinion. But as to the effect in Luzon there is no
doubt; and because of it we have the right to ask a delay in judgment
about results there until the present evil can be undone.
[8] Protocol No. 19 of the Paris Commission, Conference of
December 5, 1898: "The President of the Spanish Commission having
agreed, at the last session, to consult his Government regarding
the proposal of the American Commissioners that the United States
should maintain public order over the whole Philippine
Archipelago pending the exchange of ratifications of the treaty
of peace, stated that the answer of his Government was that the
authorities of each of the two nations shall be charged with the
maintenance of order in the places where they may be established,
those authorities agreeing among themselves to this end whenever
they may deem it necessary."
[Sidenote: The Carnival of Captious Objection.]
Meantime, in accordance with a well-known and probably unchangeable law
of human nature, this is the carnival and very heyday of the objectors.
The air is filled with their discouragement.
Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of colonizing or of managing
colonies; that there is something in our national character or
institutions that wholly disqualifies 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 any one 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, at any rate, our system has little
adaptability to the control of 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
difficulty 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 the conditions in our new possessions are wholly different
from any we have previously encountered. This is true; and there is
little doubt the new circumstances will bring great modifications in
methods. That is an excellent reason, among others, for some doubt at
the outset as to whether we know all about it, but not for despairing
of our capacity to learn. It might be remembered that we have
encountered some varieties of conditions already. The work in Florida
was different from that at Plymouth Rock; Louisiana and Texas showed
again new sets of conditions; California others; Puget Sound and Alaska
still others; and we did not always have unbroken success and plain
sailing from the outset in any of them.
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?
An alarm is raised that our laboring classes are endangered by
competition with cheap tropical labor or its products. How? The
interpretation of the Constitution which would permit that is the
interpretation which has been repudiated in an unbroken line of
decisions for over half a century. Only one possibility of danger to
American labor exists in our new possessions--the lunacy, or worse, of
the dreamers who want to prepare for the admission of some of them as
States in the American Union. Till then we can make any law we like to
prevent the immigration of their laborers, and any tariff we like to
regulate the admission of their products.
It is said we are pursuing a fine method for restoring order, by
prolonging the war we began for humanity in order to force 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 a duty; but the war in the Philippines now is purely selfish,
and therefore a crime. The premise is inaccurate; it is a war we are in
duty bound to wage at any rate till order is restored--but let that
pass. Suppose it to be merely a war in defense 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 that since we began the war for humanity, we are 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, whether
successful or not; for it is thus relieved, even in defeat, 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 solely 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 bulldog. When he takes hold he holds on. It
may as well be noticed by the objectors that that is a characteristic
much appreciated by 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 no less than the Atlantic, by commerce no less than
by agriculture or manufactures.
It is said the Philippines are worthless--have, in fact, already cost
us more than the value of their entire trade for many years to come. So
much the more, then, are we bound to do our duty by them. But we have
also heard in turn, and from the same quarters, that every one of our
previous acquisitions was worthless.
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 now 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 such limits to
its development? When a tree stops growing, our foresters tell us, it
is ripe for the ax. 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.
Is China to be our model, or Great Britain? Or, better still, are we to
follow the instincts of our own people? The policy of isolating
ourselves is a policy for the refusal of both duties and
opportunities--duties to foreign nations and to civilization, which
cannot be respectably evaded; opportunities for the development of our
power on the Pacific in the Twentieth Century, which it would be craven
to abandon. There has been a curious "about face," an absolute reversal
of attitude toward England, on the part of our Little Americans,
especially at the East and among the more educated classes. But
yesterday nearly all of them were pointing to England as a model. There
young men of education and position felt it a duty to go into politics.
There they had built up a model civil service. There their cities were
better governed, their streets cleaner, their mails more promptly
delivered. There the responsibilities of their colonial system had
enforced the purification of domestic politics, the relentless
punishment of corrupt practices, and the abolition of bribery in
elections, either by money or by office. There they had foreign trade,
and a commercial marine, and a trained and efficient foreign service,
and to be an English citizen was to have a safeguard the whole world
round. Our young men were commended to their example; our legislators
were exhorted to study their practice and its results. Suddenly these
same teachers turn around. They warn us against the infection of
England's example. They tell us her colonial system is a failure; that
she would be stronger without her colonies than with them; that she is
eaten up with "militarism"; that to keep Cuba or the Philippines is
what a selfish, conquering, land-grabbing, aristocratic government like
England would do, and that her policy and methods are utterly
incompatible with our institutions. When a court thus reverses itself
without obvious reason (except a temporary partizan purpose), our
people are apt to put their trust in other tribunals.
[Sidenote: The Future.]
"I had thought," said Wendell Phillips, in his noted apology for
standing for the first time in his antislavery life under the flag of
his country, and welcoming the tread of Massachusetts men marshaled for
war--"I had thought Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton-dust and
cankered with gold." If Little Americans have thought so of their
country in these stirring days, and have fancied that initial reverses
would induce it to abandon its duty, its rights, and its great
permanent interests, they will live to see their mistake. They will
find it giving a deaf ear to these unworthy complaints of temporary
trouble or present loss, and turning gladly from all this incoherent
and resultless clamor to the new world opening around us. Already it
draws us out of ourselves. The 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 traveler
tells the same story--that the very name "American" has taken a new
significance throughout the Orient. The shrewd Oriental no longer
regards us as a second- or third-class Power. He has just seen the only
signs he recognizes of a nation that knows its rights and dare maintain
them--a nation that has come to stay, with an empire of its own in the
China Sea, and a Navy which, from what he has seen, he believes will be
able to defend it against the world. He straightway concludes, after
the Oriental fashion, that it is a nation whose citizens must
henceforth be secure in all their rights, whose missionaries must be
endured with patience and even protected, and whose friendship must be
sedulously cultivated. The national prestige is enormously increased,
and trade follows prestige--especially in the farther East. 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 both 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 remote but 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.
But these developments of power and trade are the least of the
advantages we may hopefully expect. The faults in American character
and life which the Little Americans tell us prove the people unfit for
these duties are the very faults that will be cured by them. The
recklessness and heedless self-sufficiency of youth must disappear.
Great responsibilities, suddenly devolved, must sober and elevate now,
as they have always done in natures not originally bad, throughout the
whole history of the world.
The new interests abroad must compel an improved foreign service. It
has heretofore been worse than we ever knew, and also better. On great
occasions and in great fields our diplomatic record ranks with the best
in the world. No nation stands higher in those new contributions to
International Law which form the high-water mark of civilization from
one generation to another. At the same time, in fields less under the
public eye, our foreign service has been haphazard at the best, and
often bad beyond belief--ludicrous and humiliating. The harm thus
wrought to our national good name and the positive injury to our trade
have been more than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them now,
and when the American people wake up to a wrong they are apt to right
it.
More important still should be the improvement in the general public
service at home and in our new possessions. New duties must bring new
methods. Ward politics were banished from India and Egypt as the price
of successful administration, and they must be excluded from Porto Rico
and Luzon. The practical common sense of the American people will soon
see that any other course is disastrous. Gigantic business interests
must come to reinforce the theorists in favor of a reform that shall
really elevate and purify the Civil Service.
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.
VIII
LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES
This address was delivered on the invitation of the Board of Trustees,
at Princeton University, in Alexander Hall, on October 21, 1899.
LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES
The invitation for to-day with which Princeton honored me was
accompanied with the hint that a discussion of some phase of current
public affairs would not be unwelcome. That phase which has for the
past year or two most absorbed public attention is now more absorbing
than ever. Elsewhere I have already spoken upon it, more, perhaps, than
enough. But I cannot better obey the summons of this honored and
historic University, or better deserve the attention of this company of
scholars, gentlemen, and patriots, than by saying with absolute candor
what its present aspects prompt.
[Sidenote: Questions that have been Disposed of.]
And first, the chaos of opinion into which the country was thrown by
the outbreak of the Spanish-American War ceases to be wholly without
form and void. The discussions of a year have clarified ideas; and on
some points we may consider that the American people have substantially
reached definite conclusions.
There is no need, therefore, to debate laboriously before you whether
Dewey was right in going to Manila. Everybody now realizes that, once
war was begun, absolutely the most efficient means of making it
speedily and overwhelmingly victorious, as well as of defending the
most exposed half of our own coast, was to go to Manila. "Find the
Spanish fleet and destroy it" was as wise an order as the President
ever issued, and he was equally wise in choosing the man to carry it
out.
So, also, there is no need to debate whether Dewey was right in staying
there. From that come his most enduring laurels. The American people
admire him for the battle which sank the Spanish navy; but they trust
and love him for the months of trial and triumph that followed. The
Administration that should have ordered him to abandon the Eastern
foothold he had conquered for his country--to sail away like a sated
pirate from the port where his victory broke down all civilized
authority but our own, and his presence alone prevented domestic
anarchy and foreign spoliation--would have deserved to be hooted out of
the capital.