What holds a nation together, unless it be community of interests, character, and language, and contiguous territory? What would more thoroughly insure its speedily flying to pieces than the lack of every one of these requisites? Over and over, the clearest-eyed students of history have predicted our own downfall even as a continental republic, in spite of our measurable enjoyment of all of them. How near we all believed we came to it once or twice! How manifestly, under the incongruous hodge-podge of additions to the Union thus proposed, we should be organizing with Satanic skill the exact conditions which have invariably led to such downfalls elsewhere!
Before the advent of the United States, the history of the world's efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure. Your very school-boys are taught the reason. It was because the average of intelligence and morality was too low; because they lacked the self-restrained, self-governing quality developed in the Anglo-Saxon bone and fiber through all the centuries since Runnymede; because they grew unwieldy and lost cohesion by reason of unrelated territory, alien races and languages, and inevitable territorial and climatic conflicts of interest.
On questions vitally affecting the welfare of this continent it is inconceivable, unthinkable, that even altruistic Massachusetts should tolerate having her two Senators and thirteen Representatives neutralized by as many from Mindanao. Yet Mindanao has a greater population than Massachusetts, and its Mohammedan Malays are as keen for the conduct of public affairs, can talk as much, and look as shrewdly for the profit of it.
There are cheerful, happy-go-lucky public men who assure us that the national digestion has been proved equal to anything. Has it? Are we content, for example, with the way we have dealt with the negro problem in the Southern States? Do we think the suffrage question there is now on a permanent basis which either we or our Southern friends can be proud of, while we lack the courage either honestly to enforce the rule of the majority, or honestly to sanction a limitation of suffrage within lines of intelligence and thrift? How well would our famous national digestion probably advance if we filled up our Senate with twelve or fourteen more Senators, representing conditions incomparably worse?
Is it said this danger is imaginary? At this moment some of the purest and most patriotic men in Massachusetts, along with a great many of the very worst in the whole country, are vehemently declaring that our new possessions are already a part of the United States; that in spite of the treaty which reserved the question of citizenship and political status for Congress, their people are already citizens of the United States; and that no part of the United States can be arbitrarily and permanently excluded from Statehood.
The immediate contention, to be sure, is only about Porto Rico, and it is only a very little island. But who believes he can stop the avalanche? What wise man, at least, will take the risk of starting it? Who imagines that we can take in Porto Rico and keep out nearer islands when they come? Powerful elements are already pushing Cuba. Practically everybody recognizes now that we must retain control of Cuba's foreign relations. But beyond that, the same influences that came so near hurrying us into a recognition of the Cuban Republic and the Cuban debt are now sure that Cuba will very shortly be so "Americanized" (that is, overrun with American speculators) that it cannot be denied admission—that, in fact, it will be as American as Florida! And, after Cuba, the deluge! Who fancies that we could then keep San Domingo and Haiti out, or any West India island that applied, or our friends the Kanakas? Or who fancies that after the baser sort have once tasted blood, in the form of such rotten-borough States, and have learned to form their larger combinations with them, we shall still be able to admit as a matter of right a part of the territory exacted from Spain, and yet deny admission as a matter of right to the rest?
The Nation has lately been renewing its affectionate memories of a man who died in his effort to hold on, with or without their consent, to the States we already have on this continent, but who never dreamed of casting a drag-net over the world's archipelagos for more. Do we remember his birthday and forget his words? "This Government"—meaning that under the Constitution ordained for the United States of America—"this Government cannot permanently endure, half slave, half free." Who disputes it now? Well, then, can it endure half civilized and enlightened, half barbarous and pagan; half white, half black, brown, yellow, and mixed; half Northern and Western, half tropical and Oriental; one half a homogeneous continent, the rest in myriads of islands scattered half-way around the globe, but all eager to participate in ruling this continent which our fathers with fire and sword redeemed from barbarism and subdued to the uses of the highest civilization?
Clamor that Need not Disturb.
I will not insult your intelligence or your patriotism by imagining it possible that in view of such considerations you could consent to the madman's policy of taking these islands we control into full partnership with the States of this Union. Nor need you be much disturbed by the interested outcries as to the injustice you do by refusing to admit them.
When it is said you are denying the natural rights Mr. Jefferson proclaimed, you can answer that you are giving these people, in their distant islands, the identical form of government Mr. Jefferson himself gave to the territories on this continent which he bought. When it is said you are denying our own cardinal doctrine of self-government, you can point to the arrangements for establishing every particle of self-government with which these widely different tribes can be safely trusted, consistently with your responsibility for the preservation of order and the protection of life and property in that archipelago, and the pledge of more the moment they are found capable of it. When you are asked, as a leading champion[15 ] asked the other night at Philadelphia, "Does your liberation of one people give you the right to subjugate another?" you can answer him, "No; nor to allow and aid Aguinaldo to subjugate them, either, as you proposed." When the idle quibble that after Dewey's victory Spain had no sovereignty to cede is repeated, it may be asked, "Why acknowledge, then, that she did cede it in Porto Rico and relinquish it in Cuba, yet deny that she could cede it in the Philippines?" Finally, when they tell you in mock heroics, appropriated from the great days of the anti-slavery struggle for the cause now of a pinchbeck Washington, that no results of the irrevocable past two years are settled, that not even the title to our new possessions is settled, and never will be until it is settled according to their notions, you can answer that then the title to Massachusetts is not settled, nor the title to a square mile of land in most of the States from ocean to ocean. Over practically none of it did we assume sovereignty by the consent of the inhabitants.