Secondly, as if this were not enough, you have made these tropical laborers citizens,—Chinese, half-breeds, pagans, and all,—and have given them the unquestionable and inalienable right to follow their products across the ocean if they like, flood our labor market, and compete in person on our own soil with our own workmen.
Is that the feast to be set before the laboring men of this country? Is that the real inwardness of the Trojan horse pushed forward against our tariff wall, in the name of humanity, to suffering Porto Rico? What a programme for the wise humanitarians who have been bewitching the world with noble statesmanship at Washington to propose laying before the organized labor of this country as their chosen platform for the approaching Presidential campaign! They need have no fear the intelligent workingmen of America will fail to appreciate the sweet boon they offer.
The Patriotic Aspect of it.
But if the question thus raised at the bar of politics may seem to some only food for laughter, that at the bar of patriotism is matter for tears. If the islanders are already citizens, then they are entitled to the future of citizens. If the territory is already an integral part of the United States, then by all our practice and traditions it has the right to admission in States of suitable size and population. Is it said we could keep them out as we have kept out sparsely settled New Mexico? How long do you expect to keep New Mexico out, or Oklahoma, or Arizona? What luck did you have in keeping out others—even Utah, with its bar sinister of the twin relic of barbarism? How long would it take your politicians of the baser sort to combine for the admission of the islands whose electoral votes they had reason to think they could control?
But it is said that Porto Rico deserves admission anyway, because we are bound by the volunteered assurance of General Miles that they should have the rights of American citizens. Perhaps; though there is no evidence that he meant more, or that they thought he meant more, than such rights as American citizens everywhere enjoy, even in the District of Columbia—equal laws, security of life and property, freedom from arbitrary arrests, local self-government, in a word, the civil rights which the genius of our Government secures to all under our control who are capable of exercising them. If he did mean more, or if they thought he meant more, did that entitle him to anticipate his chief and override in casual military proclamation the Supreme Law of the land whose commission he bore? Or did it entitle them to suppose that he could?
But Porto Rico received the irresistible army of General Miles so handsomely, and is so unfortunate and so little! Reasons all for consideration, certainly, for care, for generosity—but not for starting the avalanche, on the theory that after it has got under only a little headway we can still stop it if we want to. Who thinks he can lay his hand on the rugged edge of the Muir Glacier and compel it to advance no farther? Who believes that we can admit this little island from the mid-Atlantic, a third of the way over to Africa, and then reject nearer and more valuable islands when they come? The famous law of political gravitation which John Quincy Adams prophetically announced three quarters of a century ago will then be acting with ever-increasing force. And, at any rate, beside Porto Rico, and with the same title, stand the Philippines!
Regard, I beg of you, in the calm white light that befits these cloistered retreats of sober thought, the degradation of the Republic thus coolly anticipated by the men that assure us we have no possessions whose people are not entitled under our Constitution to citizenship and ultimately to Statehood! Surely to an audience of scholars and patriots like this not one word need be added. Emboldened by the approval you have so generously expressed, I venture to close by assuming without hesitation that you will not dishonor your Government by evading its duty, nor betray it by forcing unfit partners upon it, nor rob it by blind and perverse neglect of its interests.
May I not go further, and vouch for you, as Californians, that the faith of the fathers has not forsaken the sons—that you still believe in the possibilities of the good land the Lord has given you, and mean to work them out; that you know what hour the national clock has struck, and are not mistaking this for the Eighteenth Century; that you will bid the men who have made that mistake, the men of little faith, the shirkers, the doubters, the carpers, the grumblers, begone, like Diogenes, to their tubs—aye, better his instruction and require these his followers to get out of your light? For, lo! yet another century is upon you, before which even the marvels of the Nineteenth are to grow pale. As of old, light breaks from the east, but now also, for you, from the farther East. It circles the world in both directions, like the flag it is newly gilding now with its tropic beams. The dawn of the Twentieth Century bursts upon you without needing to cross the Sierras, and bathes at once in its golden splendors, with simultaneous effulgence, the Narrows of Sandy Hook and the peerless portals of the Golden Gate.
XI