Ag.—I understand this: We Filipinos rebelled against Spain to liberate our country from oppression. We wrested island after island, city after city, from her until Manila was virtually all that she had left. As we were about to deprive her of that and regain the independence which, through four hundred years of misrule, she had denied us we experienced a dire mischance. You quarreled with her because she denied independence to Cuba. Spanish dominion, which we had stabbed, was already dead, but you arrived just in time to kick the corpse while it was yet warm, and for this service you propose to administer upon the estate, keeping the most valuable part for your honesty. You will then revive the dead, buried and damned and reinstate him in possession of the remainder!
McK. (aside)—O, will I?
Sag.—Apparently, Señor Presidente, this worthy person is afflicted with a flow of language. (Aside) The Porco Americano has the habit of blushing.
McK. (to Sagasta)—Yes, the Filipino always has his tongue in his ear. (To Aguinaldo) Proceed with the address.
Ag.—It is as if the French, having assisted your forefathers to independence, had kept Boston and all New England for themselves and restored the other colonies to Great Britain. If the Good Samaritan, arriving while the man fallen among thieves was still struggling with them, had assisted him to beat them off, had then taken his purse and delivered him to the thieves again you would have had a Scriptural precedent.
Sag. (writing in a notebook)—“At a certain temperature the Porco Americano can sweat.”
McK.—My great and good friend, you seem to have your climate with you, as well as your chin. I must beg you to abridge your oration against manifest destiny.
Ag.—Destiny was a long time manifesting herself, but she has not been idle since. In the last four months you have torn up the three American political Holy Scriptures: Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine and the Declaration of Independence. You now stand upon the fragments of the last and declare it an error that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In Hawaii you are founding a government on the consent of less than three per centum of the governed. In my country you propose to found one government and restore another against the unanimous dissent of eight millions of people whom you cheated into an alliance to that end. You cajoled them into assisting at the cutting of their own throats. Your only justification in making this war at all was Spain’s denial in Havana of the political principle which you now repudiate in Honolulu and Manila. Señores, we shall resist both the American and the Spanish occupation. You will be allies—embrace!
[Exit Sagasta.]
McK.—My dear boy, you are unduly alarmed: the notion of letting Spain keep those other islands is merely a Proposal Retractable—in undiplomatic language, an offer with a string to it.