perhaps not better than those existing in most parts of the United States. First of all capital was required; then these tropical lands were not the place for white labor, though a limited number of young Americans might find employment and advancement as clerks and managers. The islands of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, the Ladrones, and the Philippines will be no inconsiderable factor in supplying the United States with the $250,000,000 worth of tropical products annually consumed. Tropical lands have acquired a more pronounced value since the war, for the fact is now better understood that the land is limited which will successfully grow those great requirements of civilization, coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane.

The problems of Cuba, the Hawaiian islands, and the Nicaragua canal, which for a half century had been discussed, were solved by the war on the instant and without friction. The canal became a palpable necessity; Cuban freedom was the primary issue; possession of the Hawaiian islands was deemed essential to the peace and security of our Pacific seaboard. An impetus was given to interoceanic canal projects, though their advance was hampered by politics in legislation. Porto Rico, Nicaragua, Hawaii, and the Philippines are nearly on a latitudinal line, which fact carries its own commercial significance. The British admiralty authorities at once conceived the plan of converting Kingston harbor into a naval station. and dockyard of the first grade, making of Jamaica a second Gibraltar.

There are always to be found in every legislative body men who will oppose any measure, no matter how essential it may be or how palpably advantageous to the commonwealth. They oppose upon either instinct or interest. Enough of such men would stifle to destruction all prosperity, and kill any country. Though always favored with some such in congress, let us be thankful they are not many. Opinions are so easily influenced by self-interests. It is not to be expected that a railroad man should ever be brought to see any benefit to accrue from the Nicaragua canal. One senator stoutly opposed expansion, "because of its conflict with the sugar-beet interests of our state, and the damage to American labor." That is to say, the whole United States must forever forego progress for fear of injuring an insignificant industry

or of giving work to Chinamen. An order of statesmanship new to Americans is now demanded, a statesmanship able to adjust colonial interests and govern colonial dependencies; a statesmanship broad and enlightened enough to deliver from anarchy strange peoples, and teach them the blessings of liberty, humanity, and self-government; above all a less selfish statesmanship, one less given to place-seeking and demagogism.

Under the present dispensation it is ordained that progress shall be ever a struggle between the better and the worse, and that to the strong it is given to determine the issue. The late conflict with Spain is but one in a series of many conflicts for the self-emancipation of mankind, which may be followed along the highways of history from the time of King John to the time of Washington and Lincoln. In the early ages a vast despotism overwhelmed and blinded the human race, and from that day to this man has had to fight for his freedom. In this war we were fighting for freedom, if not for ourselves then for our neighbor. While we were securing our own independence, Cuba should have been securing hers, as others of her race were doing shortly afterward, and so continued until America for the most part became an America of republics.

We find in the American people, to a greater extent than was ever before realized, and as is equally found in no other people, inherent forces evolving the highest good. Our altruism is of the homely practical kind, and of whose strength and capabilities we are scarcely conscious until occasion brings them out. Interested as we are in so much that is selfish, the mind dwells little on disinterested duty, so that we scarcely recognize it as such when it comes, but rather regard it as the old selfishness in some new guise. And so perhaps it is; but better that than the low brutal selfishness of egoism.

As the fifteenth century was the transition period from the middle ages to modern times, with the removal of the seat of civilization from eastern to western Europe, so may the twentieth century become the period of a new transition from the present to a yet higher culture, with the removal of the seats of empire and progress from Europe to America, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The better to realize the broad significance of this conquest of the Spaniards, this uplifting

of international ideals, the advance of humane thought and action, nobler perceptions of liberty and human rights, imagine the result in case of our defeat; imagine the arrest of progress, retrogression, national paralysis, the iniquities of Spain established as the proper ideal of Christian civilization, and liberty humanity and the principles of republicanism hurled into the dust. What greater calamity could have come upon the world than the defeat of the United States by the Spaniards in the year of Ninety-eight? Think of it! Mediavalism triumphant; the baser parts of Christian civilization as represented in the Latin race, triumphant; tyranny, cruelty, wrong, injustice, barbarity, all triumphant!

CHAPTER VIII

IMPERIALISM; THE POLICY OF EXPANSION

PERHAPS no questions affecting the interests of any people were ever more fully discussed than those relating to the disposition of the conquered islands. Were we caught in the meshes of an enforced imperialism, or were we still free agents to exercise our judgment in the matter, and if so what should be our determination? Paramount over all was the question, What shall we do with the Philippines? Shall we give them back to Spain; shall we turn them over to be partitioned among the European powers, the United States government retaining its share; shall we sell them to some European government, or to Japan; turn them over to the natives and give them autonomy, with or without a protectorate; or keep them, and if so under what form of government, military rule, or civil colonial or territorial, or full statehood? As to Cuba, we were pledged to autonomy; Porto Rico we would take as a relic of the war or partial indemnity; but the Philippines?

Shall we expand and assume dictatorship over distant tropical territory which we will never colonize, or rest content over home affairs? If we keep these islands, we adjoin European possessions in Asia at a point where war is most likely to break out, in which case our dignity would require their defence.

Do we want expansion? Do we want empire in the East? Do we want to mingle in the quarrels of the Europeans over their lootings of the Asiatics?

Do we want these far away tropical isles with their hybrid inhabitants? Have we not already absorbed in the veins of our republicanism, in the stolid African and the low European, enough of the scum of humanity? Were it not better to prune and cultivate than to grow more weeds?

Do we desire eternal isolation? Do we wish forever to confine our energies, our intelligence, our influence within their

present limits? Do we wish to restrict the benefits of our free and ennobling institutions to ourselves alone?

Can we do better in these respects in the future than in the past? Have we not prospered in the pursuance of our present policy? Why plunge into the intricacies of the unknown when we have a happy experience for a guide? Did not Washington and Jefferson, the founders of this republic, know the best course for a republic to pursue? Can we improve upon the wisdom of those whose teachings have made us what we are?

All the world was curious as to what America would do, and free with advice as to what she should do. But more especially in our own country rose the talk higher than the west wind, where every newspaper, every college undergraduate, every educated or uneducated person held his own opinion, and was by no means backward in expressing it; and where too the subject assumed an endless variety of phases, as we shall see.

Some genius for statistics, out of 500 leading newspapers of the United States, counted up those for and those against imperialism, or expansion, with this result: In the south there were 55 for expansion and 64 against it; in the west, for expansion 126, against expansion 51; in New England, for expansion 61, against it 42; in the middle states, for expansion 63, against it 36; summary, for expansion 305, against expansion 193.

The word imperialism is used in this connection in a modern, American sense, as applicable to the empire of industry as well as to domain, rather than in its ancient old-world significance of monarchal supremacy. It does not necessarily imply warlike aggression or despotism, but rather the extension of political and commercial influence, particularly in the Pacific.

On the one side it was held that our present prosperity and power are due primarily to the traditional policy under which they have developed. To leave this happy path, whose way is safe and whose end is certain, for another however flowery in appearance but still untried, and whose outcome is problematical, is not wise. So acted not our fathers, who left us this nation as a legacy. It is true that the republic carries with it obligations. But what are they? Is it our duty or mission to right all wrongs and succor the oppressed of every land?