the first that the whole scheme was a renaissance of mercantile colonialism; and the Porto Rican bill proved it. And thus it was demonstrated that the American republic in an hour of test did not have the moral reserve to stand by its principles. It went to war to free an oppressed people and then turned oppressor and sunk to the level of other sovereign powers in a vulgar and wholly mistaken scheme of acquiring national wealth.

And now in what plight are the American people? They had nothing to do with the treaty. It was formulated secretly by commissioners in Paris; it was consented to by a body that they do not elect. The Porto Rican bill was enacted under the party lash. It was validated by a court that is as independent of their choice as an hereditary monarch. The question of the acquisition or retention of the islands has never been passed upon at the polls, and after the election the Spooner bill created executive imperialism. The supreme court has created congressional imperialism. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about these events that follow so swiftly one after another and that will continue to occur? When will the supreme court catch up with the administration even if it was opposed to imperialism? What has become of your republic in four years? The fact is the republican party never since the days of Lincoln has had any principle whatever on any subject. It never had any theory of government except what it borrowed from Jefferson. It rode into power on the declaration of independence and when it abandoned the declaration through the ascendancy of rapacious

federalism it went plumb into monarchy and has ever since hidden its designs from the people under the garb of holiness and patriotism. It temporized with the tariff question and met it on terms of expediency; it practiced expediency with the money question, and at all times it has followed the trail of toryism and monarchy. It has built up its leaders through special privilege and it has debauched its followers with the argument that the government exists to support the people. It has awakened anarchy and touched into life that very socialism which it pretends to abhor.

And so what does the paramount party care about such rights as freedom of speech and of the press so long as it can wring tribute from dependent people? They may rail and write as they please against this great vulgar government. They may have the habeas corpus, too. Individual judges in the far islands acting under central orders will whittle away that and every other right in individual cases as circumstances require; and they will do it under that unknown clause of the constitution which makes the United States as sovereign as any other nation. A party that taxes without representation will also deprive of life and property without due process of law. The negative prohibitions of the constitution are not so much as pack thread about the arms of a republican congress.

The plight of the American people consists in this, that no peculation of any official, no disregard of plain duty, no breach of expressed faith with Cuba, no act of despotism toward our insular possessions, no disregard of the constitution, finds any response of rebuke in the breast of the republican party. It is

so sunk in the depths of infamy that no imagined revolution, with all the accompaniments of monarchy, would arouse that party to protest. Things never feared but spoken of by the fathers as impossible to our system have come to pass. Colonialism is validated on the expressed ground of expediency and there is rejoicing. Retrogression is hailed as progress. All the vilest elements of human nature are sent whirling to the top of national life-cupidity, hypocrisy, dishonesty, tyranny and debauchery; we behold the destruction of ideals, the withering of character and morality and there is no protest, but rejoicing. The hideous specter of slavocracy has been tempted from the tomb to revisit the gimpses of this era and a portion of the work that this very republican party came into being to perform is being swept away amid shouts of the administration.

That corporations are corrupt, that they debauch every branch of the government has passed into the domain of jest and is tossed about in a spirit of humorous comment. Our officials are openly accused of dishonesty and corruption by the leading journals and it is accepted at large as a commonplace. The people are suspicious of their legislators and their courts. Everyone knows that the Filipinos were our allies and that we betrayed them; that we broke our word with Cuba and that the course of the president has been uncandid and inconsistent. One

great papers declared that the decision of the supreme court was smeared with tobacco and sugar. And against this resistless tide of evil who will remain true to the ideals of morality except the strongest swim

mers? Moreover, amidst all this there is a lamentable lack of good sense. Prosperity is measured by the ability of the seller to advance the price and not by the ability of the purchaser to buy. It is measured by the activity of monopolists, not by the normal activity of the people at large. It is measured by the extent to which capital consents to the employment of labor, not by the demand which the consumer calls upon the producer to produce.

But to hold society together there must be some enforcement of law. So that pinochle and larceny will be vigorously punished, while gambling in grain, monopolistic extortion, slaughter of inferior peoples and other things which extend civilization will proceed without interruption.

And what is the conclusion that is forced upon men? These degeneracies have been treated with ideals and the disease has steadily grown worse. Was not slavery destroyed by ideals? History answers this question in the negative and by so answering it declares that civilization has not yet reached the point where ideals are sufficient to work reforms. Slavery was destroyed by the power of money. Slavery was uneconomic. It crushed the south; it interfered with the rights of white labor. Yet at this the time of its overthrow, economically speaking, had not come in Lincoln's day. For slavery was still profitable to the mercantilists in the north and in England. Lincoln would not have been elected except for a split in the democratic party. In fact, he received the smallest per centum of the vote of any candidate ever elected by the American people. Colonialism does not pay; it

never paid any country. It is profitable only to the privileged few. But colonialism cannot be destroyed until the forces of plutocracy become divided or until its uneconomic features bear hard enough upon a sufficient number of people to win them back to the ways of a plain but virtuous republic. Ideals will not do. We have seen that ideals are as flax to the fire in a day when men are hungry for money.