Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

He said at another time:

"Human rights and constitutional privileges must not be forgotten in the race for wealth and commercial supremacy. The Government of the people must be by the people and not by a few of the people. It must rest upon the free consent of the governed and all of the governed. Power, it must be remembered, which is secured by oppression or usurpation or by any form of injustice is soon dethroned. We have no right in law or morals to usurp that which belongs to another, whether it is property or power."

I suppose he was then speaking of our duty as to any people whom we might liberate from Spain, as the results of the Spanish War. He unquestionably meant that we had no right, in law or morals, to usurp the right of self-government which belonged to the Cubans, or to the Philippine people.

Yet I have no doubt whatever that in the attitude that he took later he was actuated by a serious and lofty purpose to do right. I think he was led on from one step to another by what he deemed the necessity of the present occasion. I dare say that he was influenced, as any other man who was not more than human would have been influenced, by the apparently earnest desire of the American people, as he understood it, as it was conveyed to him on his Western journey. But I believe every step he took he thought necessary at the time. I further believe, although I may not be able to convince other men, and no man will know until the secret history of that time shall be made known, that if he had lived, before his Administration was over, he would have placed the Republic again on the principles from which it seems to me we departed—the great doctrine of Jefferson, the great doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that there can be no just Government by one people over another without its consent, and that the International law declared by the Republic is that all Governments must depend for their just powers upon the consent of the governed. This was insisted on by our Fathers as the doctrine of International law, to be acted upon by the infant Republic for itself. In this I am confirmed by the testimony of Mr. Secretary Long, who was in President McKinley's most intimate counsels.

The Treaty negotiated by President McKinley with Hawaii was not acted upon. It was concluded to substitute a joint resolution, for which there was a precedent in the case of the acquisition of Texas. I voted for the joint resolution, as did Senator Hale of Maine, and several Democratic Senators, who were earnestly opposed to what is known as the policy of Imperialism.

I left the President, after the conversation above related, without giving him any assurance as to my action. But I determined on full reflection, to support the acquisition of Hawaii, in accordance with my long-settled purpose, and at the same time to make a clear and emphatic statement of my unalterable opposition to acquiring dependencies in the East, if we did not expect, when the proper time came, to admit them to the Union as States. This I did to the best of my power. I was invited to give an address before a college in Pennsylvania, where I took occasion to make an emphatic declaration of the doctrine on which I meant to act.

Afterward, July 5, 1898, I made a speech in the Senate, on the joint resolution for the acquisition of Hawaii, in which I said that I had entertained grave doubts in regard to that measure; that I had approached the subject with greater hesitation and anxiety than I had ever felt in regard to any other matter during the whole of my public life.

I went on to say:

"The trouble I have found with the Hawaiian business is this: Not in the character of the population of the Sandwich Island, not in their distance from our shores, not in the doubt that we have an honest right to deal with the existing government there in such a matter. I have found my trouble in the nature and character of the argument by which, in the beginning and ever since, a great many friends of annexation have sought to support it . . . .

"If this be the first step in the acquisition of dominion over barbarous archipelagoes in distant seas; if we are to enter into competition with the great powers of Europe in the plundering of China, in the division of Africa; if we are to quit our own to stand on foreign lands; if our commerce is hereafter to be forced upon unwilling peoples at the cannon's mouth; if we are ourselves to be governed in part by peoples to whom the Declaration of Independence is a stranger; or, worse still, if we are to govern subjects and vassal States, trampling as we do it on our own great Charter which recognizes alike the liberty and the dignity of individual manhood, then let us resist this thing in the beginning, and let us resist it to the death.