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can reaping machines rattle across the pampas of South America, American rails traverse the steppes of Asia, American trolley cars whiz beneath the shadows of the Parthenon, American hardware fills the markets of Germany, American bridges span the swamps of Burmah, American-built cruisers fly the blue saltire of Russia in the very face of the Tsar's window, American telephones convey the bargains, the hopes, the aspirations of humanity to the uttermost ends of the earth.

The first President of the Republic in his second message to Congress congratulated our well-nigh creditless nation that a loan of three million florins had been secured in Holland. Europe now floats her securities in the Western Republic which, in spite of a pension list enormously exceeding the cost of the war establishments of Europe, has a national debt smaller than that of any great Power and a per capita debt smaller than that of any nation in the world except Mexico, Japan, and India.

In the last generation, the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the Latin-American nations have increased their indebtedness fifty per cent, the continental nations of Europe one hundred per cent, those of Asia two hundred per cent, the British colonies, except India, four hundred per cent. Two great nations only reduced their indebtedness in that period. The United Kingdom reduced its national debt twenty-five per cent. The United States reduced its national

debt fifty per cent.

Not without reason does American credit head the list. Not without reason does London wait upon New York. Not without reason can we claim, at last, by the test of finance as well as by that of industry and commerce, the leadership of the world.

Alexander, sighing for more worlds to conquer, had his antithesis in the blessed Michael, sometime Seigneur de Montaigne, who, in his essay on vanity, quotes with approval the lines of a worthy gossip:

" 'Ayme l'estat tel que tu le vois estre.

S'il est royal ayme la royauté,

S'il est de peu, ou bien communauté

Ayme l'aussi, car Dieu t'y a facit naistre."

Unhappily the world will not stand still. We cannot return to the isolated little nation that our fathers left us or to the political conditions of our infancy, and much as we may love the exact governmental setting and usage to which we were born we must either develop or die.

We may cordially agree with Macaulay that " mere extent of empire is not necessarily an advantage." We may even say of the alien peoples whom the new century has placed upon the lap of the United States, as Macaulay said of the people of India, "It were far better that these people were well governed and independent of us than ill governed and subject to us."

Yet with India in his day, as with the Philippines, as with Porto Rico in ours, that alternative is not possible. India loosed from English leading-strings, would have lapsed again into the perpetual condition of pestilence, warfare, unrelieved famine, infant sacrifice, and private murder that existed before the English came. Porto Rico, without the restraining hand of an American governor, would have already bankrupted its credit to pay the private debts of its coffee planters. Cuba would have followed Lacret into a slough of corruption with

1 "Love the state such as thou seest it.

If it is royal love royalty,

If it is of small account or well inhabited

Still love it for God made it your birthplace."

his plans for a Cuban navy of sixty vessels and a huge staff of highly salaried admirals. Luzon ere this would have been well on the way to the present condition of Hayti with Aguinaldo in the rôle of Dessalines.

Recognizing the dangers, recognizing the perils, recogniz ing the risks and the burdens that would follow, the greatest of English essayists in the great speech from which I have quoted, predicted upon the floor of the House of Commons that England would not shirk her duty in India.

We shall not shirk our duty in the Philippines.

We are asked to abandon them because the task of lifting them up from ignorance and slavery does not pay. We are asked to follow the easy path of leaving them to their own. devices. That course was once adopted in the West Indies in regard to a people nominally as Christian as the Tagalogs, and to the awful horrors of outrage and massacre of all whites, regardless of age or sex, there has succeeded a century's carnival of robbery, lust, and murder.

Leaders with a superficial education, a superficial acceptance of the Christian religion, but untrained in restraint or self-government and suddenly left to themselves, have brought the richest district of the Antilles back to the conditions of the jungle. Martial law, oligarchy, republic, empire, kingdom, and dictatorship have succeeded each other in a whirling round of delirium until almost within sight of the coast of Florida there exists to-day not merely the pathless wilderness, but the snake worship and cannibal sacrifices of West Africa.

Our withdrawal from the Philippines would not mean the establishing of a second United States. It would be criminal to permit the existence of a second Hayti.

The lions in our path are many. The supreme court has

disposed of one. We have the constitutional power to govern Porto Rico or the Philippines as we have for years governed Alaska.

We have not been particularly successful in handling the Indian race within our borders. The Indian has passed through a process not so much of assimilation as of deglutition. We have as yet failed in our attempt to establish equal social and political rights for the negro, and we have frankly run away from the Chinaman as a domestic problem.

To say that a problem is difficult, however, is not to say it is impossible. We have failed to induce most Indians and Eskimoes to become other than wild men. We have not failed in governing Alaska. We have failed to set the negro by the side of the white man, but we have raised him immeasurably above the level of the slave.

American rule in the tropics has not meant their translation to the seventh heaven, but at least it has meant that the world for the first time is free from yellow fever. It has meant law and order. It has meant, too, the only measure of self-government those lands have ever known.

Two years ago we inherited two island dominions and entered temporarily upon the occupation of another. Neither Cuba, Porto Rico, nor the Plilippines were completely civilized. A band of organzed bandits roamed in Porto Rico, Cuba had never known what it was to be free of roving guerillas, and every traveller's letter on the Philippines expressly stated that the Spaniards were masters only of the towns, and not of the lawless savages of the interior.

Corruption masqueraded as government, the great mass of the people were hopelessly ignorant, yellow fever and leprosy grinned from century-old deposits of filth, and the grossest immorality was the commonplace of life. To such

Q-Orations.

Vol. 25

conditions has the United States applied not experience, but good will and common sense. Six years after Yorktown we managed to organize a United States. It is but three years since Santiago. They have not been without results.

The population of the American colonies was well educated, accustomed to local self-government, and, if not rich, at least in comfortable circumstances. A Swedish traveller in the British colonies in America, in the middle of the eighteenth century, notes with surprise that he has journeyed twelve hundred miles without meeting a beggar.

The population of our new possessions is almost wholly illiterate, and in large part to be compared not to the men who planned the American Revolution, but to the slaves of the South, to whom July 4th brought no message of freedom, and to the "Indians not taxed" of the West, who were expressly excluded from the rights of citizenship in Washington's Constitution as they are to-day in ours.

Yet we in this latter day have extended, and, with God's help, propose still further to extend even to such as our fathers excluded from freedom, a steadily increasing measure of those blessings for which our fathers fought, but which they themselves denied even to men of the race of Crispus Attucks and Peter Salem.

Porto Rico has an organized government, accepted with enthusiasm by a vast majority of her voters in the first election ever held on the island. Cuba is forming her own government in an island already freed from ignorance, filth, pestilence, and famine.

Local self-government has been set up in the Philippines and law and order established in districts where for centuries the bolo kept what the bolo won. The moving robber has for the first time in three hundred years been stamped out

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