"They will report to the State Department according to the forms customary or hereafter prescribed for transmitting and preserving such communications, the results of their observations and reflections, and will recommend such Executive action as may from time to time seem to them wise and useful....
"It is my desire that in all their relations with the inhabitants of the Islands the Commissioners exercise due respect for all the ideals, customs, and institutions of the tribes and races which compose the population, emphasizing upon all occasions the just and beneficent intentions of the Government of the United States.'
"It is also my wish and expectation that the Commissioners may be received in a manner due to the honored and authorized representatives of the American Republic, duly commissioned, on account of their knowledge, skill and integrity, as bearers of the good will the protection, and the richest blessings of a liberating rather than a conquering nation."
President McKinley—Instructions to the Secretary of State regarding the First Philippine Commission, January 20, 1899.
The Definition of the American System as Applied Both to the Internal and External Relations of the American Union—by President Roosevelt.
"When all is said and done, the rule of brotherhood remains as the indispensable prerequisite to success in the kind of national life for which we strive. Each man must work for himself, and unless he so works no outside help can avail him, but each man must remember also that he is indeed his brother's keeper, and that while no man who refuses to walk can be carried with advantage to himself or any one else yet that each at times stumbles or halts, that each at times needs to have the helping hand outstretched to him. To be permanently effective, aid must always take the form of helping a man to help himself, and we can all best help ourselves by joining together in the work that is of common interest to all....
"It is no light task for a nation to achieve the temperamental qualities without which the institutions of free government are but an empty mockery. Our people are now successfully governing themselves, because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, toward this end. What has taken us thirty generations to achieve, we cannot expect to see another race accomplish out of hand, especially when large portions of that race start very far behind the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of the really free nations."
President Roosevelt. First Message, December 3, 1901.