We wish for * * * no territory except our own. We deem the independence and equal rights of the smallest and weakest member of the family of nations entitled to as much respect as those of the greatest empire, and we deem the observance of that respect the chief guaranty of the weak against the oppression of the strong.
That Rio Janeiro speech of Mr. Root’s is as noble a masterpiece of real eloquence, its setting and all considered, as any utterance of any statesman of modern times. Among other things, he said:
No student of our times can fail to see that not America alone but the whole civilized world is swinging away from its old governmental moorings and intrusting the fate of its civilization to the capacity of the popular mass to govern. By this pathway mankind is to travel, whithersoever it leads. Upon the success of this, our great undertaking, the hope of humanity depends.
As Secretary of War, “civilizing with a Krag,” Mr. Root reminds one of Cortez and Pizarro. As Secretary of State, he permits us to believe that all the great men are not dead yet.
If, in making that Rio Janeiro speech, Mr. Root laid to his soul the flattering unction that the minds of his hearers did not revert dubiously to his previous grim missionary work in the Philippines, where the percentage of literacy is superior to that of more than one Latin-American republic, he is very much mistaken. If he is laboring under any such delusion, let him read a book written since then by a distinguished South American publicist, called El Porvenir de La Americana Latina (“The Future of Latin America”). If he does not read Spanish, he can divine the contents of the book from the cartoon which adorns the title-page. The cartoon represents the American eagle, flag in claw, standing on the map of North America, looking toward South America as if ready for flight, its beak bent over Panama, the shadow of its wings already darkening the northern portions of the sister continent to the south of us. To get the trade of South America, in the mighty struggle for commercial supremacy which is to follow the opening of the Panama Canal, we must win the confidence of South America. We will never do it until we do the right thing by the Filipinos. Concerning the Philippines, South America reflects that we annexed the first supposedly rich non-contiguous Spanish country we ever had a chance to annex that we had not previously solemnly vowed we would not annex. We must choose between the Monroe Doctrine of mutually respectful Fraternal Relation, which contemplates some twenty-one mutually trustful republics in the Western Hemisphere, all a unit against alien colonization here, and the McKinley Doctrine of grossly patronizing Benevolent Assimilation, which contemplates some 8,000,000 of people in the Eastern Hemisphere, all a unit against alien colonization there—a people, moreover, whose friendship we have cultivated with the Gatling gun and the gallows, and watered with tariff and other legislation enacted without knowledge and used without shame.
We should stop running a kindergarten for adults in Asia, and get back to the Monroe Doctrine. There are only two hemispheres to a sphere, and our manifest destiny lies in the Western one. We do not want the earth. Our mission as a nation is to conserve the republican form of government, and the consent-of-the-governed principle, and to promote the general peace of mankind by insuring it in our half of the earth. The first thing to do to set this country right again is to get rid of the Philippines, and give them a square deal, pursuant to the spirit of the neutralization resolutions now pending before Congress. All these resolutions contain the one supreme need of the hour, an honest declaration of intention. The longer we fight shy of that, the less likely we are ever to give the Filipinos their independence, and the deeper we get into the mire of mistaken philanthropy and covert exploitation.
We should resume our original programme of blazing out the path and making clear the way up which any nation of the earth may follow when it will. That path lies along the line of actually attempting as a nation a practical demonstration of the Power of Righteousness, or, in other words, the existence of an Omnipotent Omniscient Benevolent Good (whether you spell it with one o or with two is not important) shaping, guiding, and directing human affairs, such demonstration to be made through the concerted action of a self-governing people under a written Constitution based on equality of opportunity and the Golden Rule.
As a people we are very young yet. It is not yet written in the Book of Time how long this nation will survive. So far, our government is only an experiment. But, as John Quincy Adams once said, it and its Constitution are “an experiment upon the human heart,” to see whether or not the Golden Rule will work in government among men.