Page images
PDF
EPUB

ment, and through the intimidation caused by the presence of an armed naval force of the United States, which was landed for the purpose at the instance of our minister. His conclusion is:

"Upon the facts developed it seemed to me the only honorable course for our government to pursue was to undo the wrong that had been done by those representing us, and to restore as far as practicable the status existing at the time of our forcible intervention. With a view of accomplishing this result within the constitutional limits of executive power, and recognizing all our obligations and responsibilities growing out of any changed conditions brought about by our unjustifiable interference, our present minister at Honolulu has received appropriate instructions to that end. Thus far no information of the accomplishment of any definite results has been received from him."

Now, Mr. President, I desire to ascertain and to discuss for a moment from what source the President of the United States derived his authority to arbitrate this great question. Who made him and by what processes did he become the judge of the case between an overthrown monarchy and a republic which took its place? Much has been said about the terms of Queen Liliuokalani's abdication, but when did any falling monarch ever fail to file a caveat with contemporaries and posterity to that effect? It is addressed to no person. It was never formally accepted by anybody, and no convention has ever been made between the Hawaiian government, which Mr. Cleveland, following the example of President Harrison, has recognized, or the former government of the queen and ourselves, that such an arbitration shall take place. But there is a consideration back of all this, and back of anything I have said upon this subject, which to me is decisive. What the queen of the Hawaiian kingdom meant and understood to be meant in the letter of abdication was that a question of recognition was to be submitted to the United States; and I assert it as a sound legal proposition, in view and in the light of all the circumstances of this transaction, that the very question which the President of the United States has reopened here was settled when President Harrison recognized the provisional government. The act of recognition is all-comprehending, so far as bringing a nation into existence. It is a deliberate

judgment by the recognizing nation that the recognized government has a valid right to be, has come into being rightfully, and has the right to continue. It is in its very nature an irrevocable act. Who ever heard of any civilized country retracting any recognition which it had given to a foreign country? Like an executed grant, it is incapable of revocation, because the right has vested and cannot be taken away.

Queen Liliuokalani's protest was received at the State Department on the third day of February 1893, and the treaty, I think, was not concluded until the thirteenth day of that month. Her representative was here at the time. The case was heard and determined, and wisely determined, by President Harrison, and it does not lie in the capacity of any succeeding administration to open it for readjudication. And the queen passively acquiesced in that construction of her act of abdication, and in the conclusive effect of President Harrison's recognition of the provisional government, until she was enticed to renew her claim by the action of the present administration.

Mr. President, it has seemed to become a propensity to restore royalty-ignorant, savage, alien royalty over American people. But in these days of restoring monarchies, suppose the President of the United States shall conceive that President Harrison has been imposed upon, misled, by the recognition of President Peixoto, who succeeded to the fallen empire of Dom Pedro in Brazil. The recognition in this case was prompt. Suppose the President should determine to reopen the question and to send a minister there to stand before President Peixoto and say: "I have become satisfied that my predecessor was misled, that your government was not established with the consent of the Brazilian people, and therefore you are required to relinquish your power to the lineal descendant and heir of Dom Pedro, whoever he may be."

If this power exists in the President of the United States, it exists in the successive Presidents to undo the act of the President who has recognized another government. The same thing might be done to President Carnot; it might have been done to President Thiers, who was the first president of the now-existing French republic. Sup

pose the President of the United States should take it into his head that the French republic was wrongfully established, and not with the consent of the French people, and a paramount emissary, emissary at once and ambassador, should be sent to France, accredited to "his great and good friend," President Carnot, with authority over our army and navy, and that France were in distress, and that as an emissary he should consort with Bourbons, with Orleanists, with Bonapartists, with anarchists, with every political element of which French political complexion is composed. Suppose that when, having so consorted as an emissary, without giving those to whom he was accredited a chance to be heard, he should stand forth as an ambassador before the French President, and say: "The President of the United States is convinced that the French republic was not established with the consent of the French people; a great wrong has been done. Therefore you are required to relinquish the republican power which you now hold to the emperor of the Bonaparte family, or the king of the French, whoever he may be, of the other royal houses in the line of lineal descent."

Mr. President, many questions and illustrations of this kind press upon the mind while one is speaking, but the limitations of time do not warrant more extended remarks. They suggest themselves. It is said we do not want colonies, and that we do not need the Hawaiian Islands. I am not in favor of a colonial system such as Great Britain has, and such as France is striving for; but I want to see my country well defended, and her hold upon the enormous commerce of the future in the Pacific Ocean assured. That the Sandwich Islands were in time to be an indispensable element of the prosperity, protection, and defense of our country has been a cardinal theory with every statesman who ever sat in the chair of the secretary of state from the beginning of the question down to the present time, the present occupant excepted.

Humboldt predicted seventy years ago that the greatest maritime commerce of the planet would be carried on on the Pacific. If you take the globe and look north of the equator, and then to the south of it, you will see that the islands of the Pacific Ocean, except the Sandwich Islands

and the Alaskan group, are south of the equator. Germany, France, and England have partitioned that archipelago south of the equator. They have hitherto kept their hands off the Hawaiian Islands. Those are the only islands of any importance north of the equator until we almost touch the coast of Asia, except the Alaskan group. They stand where commerce from the Nicaragua Canal, if it should ever be constructed, must touch. They stand where ships from Callao and Valparaiso must touch. They stand where the ship that goes from San Francisco or Victoria to New Zealand or Australia must touch. They are 2,100 miles from the city of San Francisco. They are 2, 100 miles from the midway island of the Alaskan group, an island with capacious harbors fit for a naval station. The Russian Government, our ancient and immemorial friend, is building a railway across the continent of Asia destined for a port near by; and her relations and ours have always been such that, under these circumstances, from the Hawaiian Islands, from the Alaskan Islands, from San Francisco, we can make our commerce safe and dominate the waste of waters. That is the kind of acquisition and the kind of protection I want for my country, its future, and its com

merce.

Mr. President, this is a great question—great in its facts, great in its constitutional aspect. The American people will be the judges in this controversy. They are adjudicating it now. In the midst of distress, of financial disorder, which the panacea of legislative action has not cured; with the mine sterile, the shuttle motionless, the wheel still, the factory sending up neither pillar of cloud by day nor pillar of fire by night; with hunger and cold in thousands of homes; with the fear of a relentless party policy respecting financial and economic legislation which threatens to intensify all this distress into a deeper agony, the American people have paused to consider this subject, and they will settle it in the sublime tribunal of the nation's judgment. [Applause.]

JEFFERSON DAVIS

ON WITHDRAWAL FROM THE UNION

[Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, was born in Kentucky in 1808. He entered Transylvania College in Kentucky, but left in his senior year to accept an appointment in 1824 to West Point. From here he graduated in 1828, and with the rank of lieutenant served on the northwestern frontier until 1833. From 1833 to 1835 he was engaged in campaigns against the Indians. He entered political life in 1843, advocating the principles of the Democratic party, was made presidential elector the next year, and a member of Congress in 1845. He sat in the Senate from 1847 to 1851; became Secretary of War in the cabinet of Franklin Pierce in 1853, and returned to the Senate at the close of the administration, retaining his seat therein until the twenty-first of January, when Mississippi declared her intention to separate from the United States. Being the exponent of the extreme doctrines of states' rights and secession, he was turned to as the guiding spirit in the new government to be formed by the six seceding states. At the convention meeting at Montgomery, Ala., February 9, 1861, he was elected president, having the year previous been chosen provisional president. After the surrender of Lee's army he was apprehended at Irvingsville, Ga., May 10, 1865, and imprisoned at Fortress Monroe for two years. He was released on bail furnished by Horace Greeley, then editor of the New York Tribune, but was not tried for treason, being included in the general amnesty proclamation of 1868. After his release he wrote a " History of the Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," but never again accepted a political office. He died in New Orleans, December 6, 1889. The following speech, announcing the resolution of Mississippi to withdraw from the Union, was made in the Senate in 1861, shortly before the Civil War began.]

I

RISE, Mr. President, for the purpose of announcing to the Senate that I have satisfactory evidence that the State of Mississippi, by a solemn ordinance of her people in convention assembled, has declared her separation from the United States. Under these circumstances, of course

« PreviousContinue »