an inferior Government, incapable of any duty Providence (through the
acts of a wicked Administration, if you choose) may send its
way--duties which other nations could discharge, but we cannot. They do
not and will not believe that it was any such maimed, imperfect,
misshapen cripple from birth for which our forefathers made a place in
the family of nations. Nor are they misled by the cry that, in a
populous region, thronged by the ships and traders of all countries,
where their own prosecution of a just war broke down whatever
guaranties for order had previously existed, they are violating the
natural rights of man by enforcing order. Just as little are they
misled by the other cry that they are violating the right of
self-government, and the Declaration of Independence, and the
Constitution of the United States by preparing for the distracted,
warring tribes of that region such local government as they may be
found capable of conducting, in their various stages of development
from pure barbarism toward civilization. The American people know they
are thus proceeding to do just what Jefferson did in the vast region he
bought from France--without the consent, by the way, either of its
sovereign or its inhabitants. They know they are following in the exact
path of all the constructive statesmen of the Republic, from the days
of the man who wrote the Declaration, and of those who made the
Constitution, down to the days of the men who conquered California,
bought Alaska, and denied the right of self-government to Jefferson
Davis. They simply do not believe that a new light has been given to
Mr. Bryan, or to the better men who are aiding him, greater and purer
than was given to Washington, or to Jefferson, or to Lincoln.
And so I venture to repeat, without qualification or reserve, that what
is past cannot be changed. Candid and dispassionate minds, knowing the
American people of all political shades and in all sections of the
country, can see no possibility that any party in power, whether the
present one or its opponent, would or could, now or soon, if ever,
abandon or give back one foot of the territory gained in the late war,
and ours now by the supreme law of the land and with the assent of the
civilized world. As well may you look to see California, which your own
Daniel Webster, quite in a certain modern Massachusetts style, once
declared in the Senate to be not worth a dollar, now abandoned to
Mexico.
[Sidenote: No Abstractions or Apologies or Attacks.]
It seems to me, then, idle to thresh over old straw when the grain is
not only winnowed, but gone to the mill. And so I am not here to
discuss abstract questions: as, for example, whether in the year 1898
the United States was wise in going to war with Spain, though on that I
might not greatly disagree with the malcontents; or as to the wisdom of
expansion; or as to the possibility of a republic's maintaining its
authority over a people without their consent. Nor am I here to
apologize for my part in making the nation that was in the wrong and
beaten in the late war pay for it in territory. I have never thought of
denying or evading my own full share of responsibility in that matter.
Conscious of a duty done, I am happily independent enough to be
measurably indifferent as to a mere present and temporary effect.
Whatever the verdict of the men of Massachusetts to-day, I contentedly
await the verdict of their sons.
But, on the other hand, I am not here either to launch charges of
treason against any opponent of these policies, who nevertheless loves
the institutions founded on these shores by your ancestors, and wishes
to perpetuate what they created. Least of all would it occur to me to
utter a word in disparagement of your senior Senator, of whom it may be
said with respectful and almost affectionate regard that he bears a
warrant as authentic as that of the most distinguished of his
predecessors to speak for the conscience and the culture of
Massachusetts. Nor shall any reproach be uttered by me against another
eminent son of the commonwealth and servant of the Republic, who was
expected, as one of the officers of your club told me, to make this
occasion distinguished by his presence. He has been represented as
resenting the unchangeable past so sternly that he now hopes to aid in
defeating the party he has helped to lead through former trials to
present glory. If so, and if from the young and unremembering reproach
should come, be it ours, silent and walking backward, merely to cast
over him the mantle of his own honored service.
[Sidenote: Common Duty and a Common Danger.]
No, no! Let us have a truce to profitless disputes about what cannot be
reversed. Censure us if you must. Even strike at your old associates
and your own party if you will and when you can, without harming causes
you hold dear. But for the duty of this hour, consider if there is not
a common meeting-ground and instant necessity for union in a rational
effort to avert present perils. This, then, is my appeal. Disagree as
we may about the past, let us to-day at least see straight--see things
as they are. Let us suspend disputes about what is done and cannot be
undone, long enough to rally all the forces of good will, all the
undoubted courage and zeal and patriotism that are now at odds, in a
devoted effort to meet the greater dangers that are upon us.
For the enemy is at the gates. More than that, there is some reason to
fear that, through dissensions from within, he may gain the citadel. In
their eagerness to embarrass the advocates of what has been done, and
with the vain hope of in some way undoing it, and so lifting this
Nation of seventy-five millions bodily backward two years on its path,
there are many who are still putting forth all their energies in
straining our Constitution and defying our history, to show that we
have no possessions whose people are not entitled to citizenship and
ultimately to Statehood. Grant that, and instead of reversing engines
safely in mid-career, as they vainly hope, they must simply plunge us
over the precipice. The movement began in the demand that our Dingley
tariff--as a matter of right, not of policy, for most of these people
denounce the tariff itself as barbarous--that our Dingley tariff should
of necessity be extended over Porto Rico as an integral part of the
United States. Following an assent to this must have come inevitably
all the other rights and privileges belonging to citizenship, and then
no power could prevent the admission of the State of Porto Rico.
Some may think that in itself would be no great thing, though it is for
you to say how Massachusetts would relish having this mixed population,
a little more than half colonial Spanish, the rest negro and
half-breed, illiterate, alien in language, alien in ideas of right,
interests, and government, send in from the mid-Atlantic, nearly a
third of the way over to Africa, two Senators to balance the votes of
Mr. Hoar and Mr. Lodge; for you to say how Massachusetts would regard
the spectacle of her senatorial vote nullified, and one third of her
representation in the House offset on questions, for instance, of
sectional and purely Northern interest, in the government of this
continent, and in the administration of this precious heritage of our
fathers.
Or, suppose Massachusetts to be so little Yankee (in the best sense
still) that she could bear all this without murmur or objection--is it
to be imagined that she can lift other States in this generation to her
altruistic level? How would Kansas, for example, enjoy being balanced
in the Senate, and nearly balanced in the House, on questions relating
to the irrigation of her arid plains, or the protection of her
beet-root industry, or on any others affecting the great central
regions of this continent, by these voices from the watery waste of the
ocean? Or how would West Virginia or Oregon or Connecticut, or half a
dozen others of similar population, regard it to be actually outvoted
in their own home, on their own continent, by this Spanish and negro
waif from the mid-Atlantic?
All this, in itself, may seem to some unimportant, negligible, even
trivial. At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild
enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or
bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it. But make
its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a
State. Then behind Porto Rico stands Cuba, and behind Cuba, in time,
stand the whole of the West Indies, on whom that law of political
gravitation which John Quincy Adams described will be perpetually
acting with redoubled force. And behind them--no, far ahead of them,
abreast of Porto Rico itself--stand the Philippines! The Constitution
which our fathers reverently ordained for the United States of
_America_ is thus tortured by its professed friends into a crazy-quilt,
under whose dirty folds must huddle the United States of America, of
the West Indies, of the East Indies, and of Polynesia; and Pandemonium
is upon us.
[Sidenote: The Degradation of the Republic.]
I implore you, as thinking men, pause long enough to realize the
degradation of the Republic thus calmly contemplated by those who
proclaim this to be our constitutional duty toward our possessions. The
republican institutions I have been trained to believe in were
institutions founded, like those of New England, on the Church and the
school-house. They constitute a system only likely to endure among a
people of high virtue and high intelligence. The republican government
built up on this continent, while the most successful in the history of
the world, is also the most complicated, the most expensive, and often
the slowest. Such are its complications and checks and balances and
interdependencies, which tax the intelligence, the patience, and the
virtue of the highest Caucasian development, that it is a system
absolutely unworkable by a group of Oriental and tropical races, more
or less hostile to each other, whose highest type is a Chinese and
Malay half-breed, and among whom millions, a majority possibly, are far
below the level of the pure Malay.
What holds a nation together, unless it be community of interests,
character, and language, and contiguous territory? What would more
thoroughly insure its speedily flying to pieces than the lack of every
one of these requisites? Over and over, the clearest-eyed students of
history have predicted our own downfall even as a continental republic,
in spite of our measurable enjoyment of all of them. How near we all
believed we came to it once or twice! How manifestly, under the
incongruous hodge-podge of additions to the Union thus proposed, we
should be organizing with Satanic skill the exact conditions which have
invariably led to such downfalls elsewhere!
Before the advent of the United States, the history of the world's
efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure. Your very
school-boys are taught the reason. It was because the average of
intelligence and morality was too low; because they lacked the
self-restrained, self-governing quality developed in the Anglo-Saxon
bone and fiber through all the centuries since Runnymede; because they
grew unwieldy and lost cohesion by reason of unrelated territory, alien
races and languages, and inevitable territorial and climatic conflicts
of interest.
On questions vitally affecting the welfare of this continent it is
inconceivable, unthinkable, that even altruistic Massachusetts should
tolerate having her two Senators and thirteen Representatives
neutralized by as many from Mindanao. Yet Mindanao has a greater
population than Massachusetts, and its Mohammedan Malays are as keen
for the conduct of public affairs, can talk as much, and look as
shrewdly for the profit of it.
There are cheerful, happy-go-lucky public men who assure us that the
national digestion has been proved equal to anything. Has it? Are we
content, for example, with the way we have dealt with the negro problem
in the Southern States? Do we think the suffrage question there is now
on a permanent basis which either we or our Southern friends can be
proud of, while we lack the courage either honestly to enforce the rule
of the majority, or honestly to sanction a limitation of suffrage
within lines of intelligence and thrift? How well would our famous
national digestion probably advance if we filled up our Senate with
twelve or fourteen more Senators, representing conditions incomparably
worse?
Is it said this danger is imaginary? At this moment some of the purest
and most patriotic men in Massachusetts, along with a great many of the
very worst in the whole country, are vehemently declaring that our new
possessions are already a part of the United States; that in spite of
the treaty which reserved the question of citizenship and political
status for Congress, their people are already citizens of the United
States; and that no part of the United States can be arbitrarily and
permanently excluded from Statehood.
The immediate contention, to be sure, is only about Porto Rico, and it
is only a very little island. But who believes he can stop the
avalanche? What wise man, at least, will take the risk of starting it?
Who imagines that we can take in Porto Rico and keep out nearer islands
when they come? Powerful elements are already pushing Cuba. Practically
everybody recognizes now that we must retain control of Cuba's foreign
relations. But beyond that, the same influences that came so near
hurrying us into a recognition of the Cuban Republic and the Cuban debt
are now sure that Cuba will very shortly be so "Americanized" (that is,
overrun with American speculators) that it cannot be denied
admission--that, in fact, it will be as American as Florida! And, after
Cuba, the deluge! Who fancies that we could then keep San Domingo and
Haiti out, or any West India island that applied, or our friends the
Kanakas? Or who fancies that after the baser sort have once tasted
blood, in the form of such rotten-borough States, and have learned to
form their larger combinations with them, we shall still be able to
admit as a matter of right a part of the territory exacted from Spain,
and yet deny admission as a matter of right to the rest?
The Nation has lately been renewing its affectionate memories of a man
who died in his effort to hold on, with or without their consent, to
the States we already have on this continent, but who never dreamed of
casting a drag-net over the world's archipelagos for more. Do we
remember his birthday and forget his words? "This Government"--meaning
that under the Constitution ordained for the United States of
_America_--"this Government cannot permanently endure, half slave, half
free." Who disputes it now? Well, then, can it endure half civilized
and enlightened, half barbarous and pagan; half white, half black,
brown, yellow, and mixed; half Northern and Western, half tropical and
Oriental; one half a homogeneous continent, the rest in myriads of
islands scattered half-way around the globe, but all eager to
participate in ruling this continent which our fathers with fire and
sword redeemed from barbarism and subdued to the uses of the highest
civilization?
[Sidenote: Clamor that Need not Disturb.]
I will not insult your intelligence or your patriotism by imagining it
possible that in view of such considerations you could consent to the
madman's policy of taking these islands we control into full
partnership with the States of this Union. Nor need you be much
disturbed by the interested outcries as to the injustice you do by
refusing to admit them.
When it is said you are denying the natural rights Mr. Jefferson
proclaimed, you can answer that you are giving these people, in their
distant islands, the identical form of government Mr. Jefferson himself
gave to the territories on this continent which he bought. When it is
said you are denying our own cardinal doctrine of self-government, you
can point to the arrangements for establishing every particle of
self-government with which these widely different tribes can be safely
trusted, consistently with your responsibility for the preservation of
order and the protection of life and property in that archipelago, and
the pledge of more the moment they are found capable of it. When you
are asked, as a leading champion[15] asked the other night at
Philadelphia, "Does your liberation of one people give you the right to
subjugate another?" you can answer him, "No; nor to allow and aid
Aguinaldo to subjugate them, either, as you proposed." When the idle
quibble that after Dewey's victory Spain had no sovereignty to cede is
repeated, it may be asked, "Why acknowledge, then, that she did cede it
in Porto Rico and relinquish it in Cuba, yet deny that she could cede
it in the Philippines?" Finally, when they tell you in mock heroics,
appropriated from the great days of the anti-slavery struggle for the
cause now of a pinchbeck Washington, that no results of the irrevocable
past two years are settled, that not even the title to our new
possessions is settled, and never will be until it is settled according
to their notions, you can answer that then the title to Massachusetts
is not settled, nor the title to a square mile of land in most of the
States from ocean to ocean. Over practically none of it did we assume
sovereignty by the consent of the inhabitants.
[15] General Carl Schurz, at the Philadelphia Anti-Imperialist
Convention, February 22, 1900.
[Sidenote: Where is your Real Interest?]
Quite possibly these controversies may embarrass the Government and
threaten the security of the party in power. New and perplexing
responsibilities often do that. But is it to the interest of the
sincere and patriotic among the discontented to produce either result?
The one thing sure is that no party in power in this country will dare
abandon these new possessions. That being so, do those of you who
regret it prefer to lose all influence over the outcome? While you are
repining over what is beyond recall, events are moving on. If you do
not help shape them, others, without your high principle and purity of
motive, may. Can you wonder if, while you are harassing the
Administration with impracticable demands for an abandonment of
territory which the American people will not let go, less unselfish
influences are busy presenting candidates for all the offices in its
organization? If the friends of a proper civil service persist in
chasing the ignis fatuus of persuading Americans to throw away
territory, while the politicians are busy crowding their favorites into
the territorial offices, who will feel free from self-reproach at the
results? Grant that the situation is bad. Can there be a doubt of the
duty to make the best of it? Do you ask how? By being an active
patriot, not a passive one. By exerting, and exerting now when it is
needed, every form of influence, personal, social, political,
moral,--the influence of the clubs, the Chambers of Commerce, the
manufactories, the colleges, and the churches,--in favor of the purest,
the ablest, the most scientific, the most disinterested--in a word, the
best possible civil service for the new possessions that the conscience
and the capacity of America can produce, with the most liberal use of
all the material available from native sources.
I have done. I have no wish to argue, to defend, or to attack. I have
sought only to point out what I conceive to be the present danger and
the present duty. It is not to be doubted that all such considerations
will summon you to the high resolve that you will neither shame the
Republic by shirking the task its own victory entails, nor despoil the
Republic by abandoning its rightful possessions, nor degrade the
Republic by admissions of unfit elements to its Union; but that you
will honor it, enrich it, ennoble it, by doing your utmost to make the
administration of these possessions worthy of the Nation that
Washington founded and Lincoln preserved. My last word is an appeal to
stand firm and stand all together for the Continental Union and for a
pure civil service for the Islands.
X
OUR NEW INTERESTS
This address was delivered on Charter Day at the University of
California, on March 23, 1900.
OUR NEW INTERESTS
My subject has been variously stated in your different newspapers as
"Current National Questions," or "The Present National Question," or
"General Expositions; Not on Anything in Particular." When your
President honored me with his invitation to a duty so high and so
sudden that it might almost be dignified by the name of a draft, he
gave me nearly equal license. I was to speak "on anything growing out
of the late war with Spain."
How that war resembles the grippe! You remember the medical definition
by an authority no less high than our present distinguished Secretary
of State. "The grippe," said Colonel Hay, "is that disease in which,
after you have been cured, you get steadily worse every day of your
convalescence"! There are people of so little faith as to say that this
exactly describes the late war with Spain.
If one is to speak at all of its present aspects, on this high-day of
your University year, he should do so only as a patriot, not as a
partizan. But he cannot avoid treading on ground where the ashes are
yet warm, and discussing questions which, in spite of the present
intermingling of party lines and confusion of party ideas, will
presently be found the very battle-ground of campaign oratory and
hostile hosts. You will credit me, I hope, with sufficient respect for
the proprieties of this platform to avoid partizan arguments, under the
warrant of your distinguished President to discuss national questions
from any point of view that a patriot can take. It is profoundly to be
regretted that on these questions, which pure patriotism alone should
weigh and decide, mere partizanship is already grasping the scales. One
thing at least I may venture to promise before this audience of
scholars and gentlemen on this Charter Day of your great University: I
shall ask the Democrat of the present day to agree with me no farther
than Thomas Jefferson went, and the Republican of the day no farther
than Abraham Lincoln went. To adapt from a kindred situation a phrase
by the greatest popular orator of my native State, and, I still like to
think, one of the greatest of the country in this century,--a phrase
applied by him to the compromise measures of 1848, but equally fitting
to-day,--"If we are forced to part company with some here whom it has
been our pleasure and pride to follow in the past, let us console
ourselves by the reflection that we are following in the footsteps of
the fathers and saviors of the Republic, their garments dyed with the
blood of the Red Sea, through which they led us out of the land of
bondage, their locks still moist with the mists of the Jordan, across
which they brought us to this land of liberty."[16]
[16] Thomas Corwin of Ohio, in United States Senate, 1848.
[Sidenote: To be Taken for Granted now.]
Yet, even with those from whom we must thus part company there are
elemental truths of the situation on which we must still agree. Some
things reasonable men may take for granted--some that surely have been
settled in the conflict of arms, of diplomacy, and of debate since the
spring of 1898. Regret them if you choose, but do not, like children,
seek to make them as though they were not, by shutting your eyes to
them.
The new territories in the West Indies and the East are ours, to have
and to hold, by the supreme law of the land, and by a title which the
whole civilized world recognizes and respects. We shall not speedily
get rid of them--whoever may desire it. The American people are in no
mood to give them back to Spain, or to sell them, or to abandon them.
We have all the power we need to acquire and to govern them. Whatever
theories men may quote from Mr. Calhoun or from Mr. Chief Justice
Taney, the uniform conduct of the National Administration throughout a
century, under whatever party, justifies the triumphant declaration of
Daniel Webster to Mr. Calhoun, over half a century ago, and the
consenting opinions of the courts for a long term since, down to the
very latest in the line, by your own Judge Morrow, to the effect, in a
word, that this Government, like every other one in the world, has
power to acquire "territory and other property" anywhere, and govern it
as it pleases.[17]