Our soldiers conquer; and what is the object for which they conquer? To establish a military government? No. The laws we are now endeavoring to enact for the government of the Philippines are to increase the power and domain of the civil at the expense of the military authorities, and to render even more difficult than in the past the chance of oppression. The military power is used to secure peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power. The progress of the American arms means the abolition of cruelty, the bringing of peace, and the rule of law and order under the civil government. Other nations have conquered to create irresponsible military rule. We conquer to bring just and responsible civil government to the conquered.
But our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order. They bring freedom. Remember always that the independence of a tribe or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to do with the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community. There are now in Asia and Africa scores of despotic monarchies, each of which is independent, and in no one of which is there the slightest vestige of freedom for the individual man. Scant indeed is the gain to mankind from the “independence” of a blood-stained tyrant who rules over abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to humanity which follows the steady though slow introduction of the orderly liberty, the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is the only sure foundation upon which national independence can be built. Wherever in the Philippines the insurrection has been definitely and finally put down, there the individual Filipino already enjoys such freedom, such personal liberty under our rule, as he could never even have dreamed of under the rule of an “independent” Aguinaldian oligarchy.
The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which our people have taught themselves by the labor of a thousand years, can not be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years before history dawned. We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands not only how to enjoy but how to make good use of their freedom; and with their growing knowledge their growth in self-government shall keep steady pace. When they have thus shown their capacity for real freedom by their power of self-government, then, and not till then, will it be possible to decide whether they are to exist independently of us or be knit to us by ties of common friendship and interest. When that day will come it is not in human wisdom now to foretell. All that we can say with certainty is that it would be put back an immeasurable distance if we should yield to the counsels of unmanly weakness and turn loose the islands, to see our victorious foes butcher with revolting cruelty our betrayed friends, and shed the blood of the most humane, the most enlightened, the most peaceful, the wisest and the best of their own number—for these are the classes who have already learned to welcome our rule.
Nor, while fully acknowledging our duties to others, need we wholly forget our duty to ourselves. The Pacific seaboard is as much to us as the Atlantic; as we grow in power and prosperity so our interests will grow in that furthest west which is the immemorial east. The shadow of our destiny has already reached to the shores of Asia. The might of our people already looms large against the world-horizon; and it will loom ever larger as the years go by. No statesman has a right to neglect the interests of our people in the Pacific; interests which are important to all our people, but of most importance to those of our people who have built populous and thriving States to the west of the great watershed of this continent.
This should no more be a party question than the war for the Union should have been a party question. At this moment the man in highest office in the Philippine Islands is the Vice-Governor, General Luke Wright, of Tennessee, who gallantly wore the gray in the Civil War and who is now working hand in hand with the head of our army in the Philippines, Adna Chaffee, who in the Civil War gallantly wore the blue. Those two, and the men under them, from the North and from the South, in civil life and in military life, as teachers, as administrators, as soldiers, are laboring mightily for us who live at home. Here and there black sheep are to be found among them; but taken as a whole they represent as high a standard of public service as this country has ever seen. They are doing a great work for civilization, a great work for the honor and the interest of this nation, and above all for the welfare of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. All honor to them; and shame, thrice shame, to us if we fail to uphold their hands!
AT THE OPENING SESSION OF THE MILITARY SURGEONS’ ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 5, 1902
Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am glad to have the opportunity to bid welcome to the members of this Association and their friends to-day. The men of your Association combine two professions each of which is rightfully held in high honor by all capable of appreciating the real work of men—the profession of the soldier and the profession of the doctor. Conditions in modern civilization tend more and more to make the average life of the community one of great ease, compared to what has been the case in the past. Together with what advantages have come from this softening of life and rendering it more easy there are certain attendant disadvantages. It is a very necessary thing that there should be some professions, some trades, where the same demands are made now as ever in the past upon the heroic qualities. Those demands are made alike upon the soldier and upon the doctor; and more upon those who are both soldiers and doctors, upon the men who have continually to face all the responsibility, all the risk, faced by their brothers in the civilian branch of the profession, and who also, in time of war, must face much the same risks, often exactly the same risks, that are faced by their brothers in arms whose trade is to kill and not to cure! It has been my good fortune, gentlemen, to see some of your body at work in the field, to see them carrying the wounded and the dying from the firing-line, themselves as much exposed to danger as those they were rescuing, and to see them working day and night in the field hospital afterward when even the intensity of the strain could hardly keep them awake, so fagged out were they by having each to do the work of ten.
I welcome you here, and I am glad to have the chance of seeing you, and I wish to say a word of congratulation to you upon this Association. In all our modern life we have found it absolutely indispensable to supplement the work of the individual by the work of the individuals gathered into an association. Without this work of the association you can not give the highest expression to individual endeavor, and it would be a great misfortune if the military members of the surgical and medical profession did not take every advantage of their opportunities in the same way that is taken by the members of the medical and the surgical professions who are not in the army or the navy or the marine hospital service—who are in civilian life outside. I am glad to see you gathered in this association. Just one word of warning: Pay all possible heed to the scientific side of your work; perfect yourselves as scientific men able to work with the best and most delicate apparatus; and never for one moment forget—especially the higher officers among you—that in time of need you will have to do your work with the scantiest possible apparatus! and that then your usefulness will be conditioned not upon the adequacy of the complaint that you did not have apparatus enough, but upon what you have done with the insufficient apparatus you had. Remember that and remember also—and this especially applies to the higher officers—that you must supplement in your calling the work of the surgeon with the work of the administrator. You must be doctors and military men and able administrators.