Where is your Real Interest?
Quite possibly these controversies may embarrass the Government and threaten the security of the party in power. New and perplexing responsibilities often do that. But is it to the interest of the sincere and patriotic among the discontented to produce either result? The one thing sure is that no party in power in this country will dare abandon these new possessions. That being so, do those of you who regret it prefer to lose all influence over the outcome? While you are repining over what is beyond recall, events are moving on. If you do not help shape them, others, without your high principle and purity of motive, may. Can you wonder if, while you are harassing the Administration with impracticable demands for an abandonment of territory which the American people will not let go, less unselfish influences are busy presenting candidates for all the offices in its organization? If the friends of a proper civil service persist in chasing the ignis fatuus of persuading Americans to throw away territory, while the politicians are busy crowding their favorites into the territorial offices, who will feel free from self-reproach at the results? Grant that the situation is bad. Can there be a doubt of the duty to make the best of it? Do you ask how? By being an active patriot, not a passive one. By exerting, and exerting now when it is needed, every form of influence, personal, social, political, moral,—the influence of the clubs, the Chambers of Commerce, the manufactories, the colleges, and the churches,—in favor of the purest, the ablest, the most scientific, the most disinterested—in a word, the best possible civil service for the new possessions that the conscience and the capacity of America can produce, with the most liberal use of all the material available from native sources.
I have done. I have no wish to argue, to defend, or to attack. I have sought only to point out what I conceive to be the present danger and the present duty. It is not to be doubted that all such considerations will summon you to the high resolve that you will neither shame the Republic by shirking the task its own victory entails, nor despoil the Republic by abandoning its rightful possessions, nor degrade the Republic by admissions of unfit elements to its Union; but that you will honor it, enrich it, ennoble it, by doing your utmost to make the administration of these possessions worthy of the Nation that Washington founded and Lincoln preserved. My last word is an appeal to stand firm and stand all together for the Continental Union and for a pure civil service for the Islands.
X
OUR NEW INTERESTS
This address was delivered on Charter Day at the University of California, on March 23, 1900.
OUR NEW INTERESTS
My subject has been variously stated in your different newspapers as "Current National Questions," or "The Present National Question," or "General Expositions; Not on Anything in Particular." When your President honored me with his invitation to a duty so high and so sudden that it might almost be dignified by the name of a draft, he gave me nearly equal license. I was to speak "on anything growing out of the late war with Spain."
How that war resembles the grippe! You remember the medical definition by an authority no less high than our present distinguished Secretary of State. "The grippe," said Colonel Hay, "is that disease in which, after you have been cured, you get steadily worse every day of your convalescence"! There are people of so little faith as to say that this exactly describes the late war with Spain.