Spain, awaiting the ratification of the treaty of peace by the senate, and which has since been in active, open rebellion against the United States. We are asked to transfer our sovereignty to a small minority in the islands without consulting the majority, and to abandon the largest portion of the population, which has been loyal to us, to the cruelties of the guerrilla insurgent bands. More than this, we are asked to protect this minority in establishing a government and to this end repress all opposition of the majority. We are required to set up a stable government in the interest of those who have assailed our sovereignty and fired upon our soldiers, and then maintain it at any cost or sacrifice against its enemies within and against those having ambitious designs from without.

This would require an army and navy far larger than is now maintained in the Philippines and still more in excess of what will be necessary with the full recognition of our sovereignty. A military support of authority not our own as thus proposed is the very essence of militarism, which our opponents in their platform oppose, but which by their policy would of necessity be established in its most offensive form.

NO SURRENDER OF RIGHTS.

The American people will not make the murderers of our soldiers the agents of the republic to convey the blessings of liberty and order to the Philippines. They will not make them the builders of the new commonwealth. Such a course would be a betrayal of our sacred obligations to the peaceful Filipinos, and would place at the mercy of dangerous adventurers the lives and property of the natives and foreigners. It would make possible and easy the commission of such atrocities as were secretly planned to be executed on the 22d of February, 1899, in the city of Manila, when only the vigilance of our army prevented the attempt to assassinate our soldiers and all foreigners and pillage and destroy the city and its surroundings. In short, the proposition of those opposed to us is to continue all the obligations in the Philippines which now rest upon the government, only changing the relation from principal, which now exists, to that of surety. Our responsibility is to be no less, but our title is to be surrendered to another power, which is without experience or training, or the ability to maintain a stable government at home and absolutely help. less to perform its international obligations with the rest of the world.

To this we are opposed. We should not yield our title while our obligations last. In the language of our platform, "Our authority should not be less than our responsibility," and our present responsibility is to establish our authority in every part of the islands.

No government can so certainly serve the peace, restore public order, establish law, justice and stable conditions as ours. Neither Congress nor the executive can establish a stable government in the islands except under our right of sovereignty, our authority and our flag. And this we are doing.

We could not do it as a protectorate power so completely or so successfully as we are doing it now. As the sovereign power we can

initiate action and shape means to ends, and guide the Filipinos to self-development and self-government. As a protectorate power we could not initiate action, but would be compelled to follow and uphold a people with no capacity yet to go alone. In the one case we can protect both ourselves and the Filipinos from being involved in dangerous complications; in the other we could not protect even the Filipinos until after their trouble had come. Besides, if we cannot establish any government of our own without the consent of the governed, as our opponents contend, then we could not establish a stable government for them or make ours a protectorate without the like consent, and neither the majority of the people nor a minority of the people have invited us to assume it. We could not maintain a protectorate even with the consent of the governed without giving provocation for conflicts and possibly costly wars. Our rights in the Philippines are now free from outside interference, and will continue so in our present relation. They would not be thus free in any other relation. We will not give up our own to guarantee another sovereignty.

Our title is good. Our peace commissioners believed they were receiving a good title when they concluded the treaty. The executive believed it was a good title when he submitted it to the Senate of the United States for its ratification. The Senate believed it was a good title when they gave it their constitutional assent, and the Congress seem not to have doubted its completeness when they appropriated $20,000,000 provided by the treaty. If any who favored its ratification believed it gave us a bad title they were not sincere. Our title is practically indentified with that under which we hold our territory acquired since the beginning of the government, and under which we have exercised full sovereignty and established a government for the inhabitants.

It is worthy of note that no one outside of the United States disputes the fullness and integrity of the cession.

THE REAL ISSUE.

What, then, is the real issue on this subject? Whether it is paramount to any other or not, it is whether we shall be responsible for the government of the Philippines, with the sovereignty and authority which enables us to guide them to regulated liberty, law, safety and progress, or whether we shall be responsible for the forcible and arbitrary government of a minority without sovereignty and authority on our part, and with only the embarrassment of a protectorate which draws us into their troubles without the power of preventing them.

There were those who two years ago were rushing us on to war with Spain who are unwilling now to accept its clear consequence, as there are those among us who advocated the ratification of the treaty of peace, but now protest against its obligations. Nations which go to war must be prepared to accept its resultant obligations, and when they make treaties must keep them.

Those who profess to distrust the liberal and honorable purposes of the administration in its treatment of the Philippines are not justified.

Imperialism has no place in its creed or conduct. Freedom is a rock upon which the Republican party was builded and now rests. Liberty is the great Republican doctrine for which the people went to war and for which a million lives were offered and billions of dollars expended to make it a lawful legacy of all without the consent of master or slave.

There is a strain of ill-concealed hypocrisy in the anxiety to extend the constitutional guarantees to the people of the Philippines while their nullification is openly advocated at home. Our opponents may distrust themselves, but they have no right to discredit the good faith and patriotism of the majority of the people who are opposing them; they may fear the worst form of imperialism with the helpless Filipinos in their hands, but if they do, it is because they have parted with the spirit and faith of the fathers and have lost the virility of the founders of the party which they profess to represent.

The Republican party doesn't have to assert its devotion to the Declaration of Independence. That immortal instrument of the founders remained unexecuted until the people, under the lead of the Republican party in the awful clash of battle, turned its promises into fulfillment.

It wrote into the Constitution the amendments guaranteeing political equality to American citizenship, and it has never broken them or counseled others in breaking them. It will not be guided in its conduct by one set of principles at home and another set in the new territory belonging to the United States.

If our opponents would only practice as well as preach the doctrines of Abraham Lincoln there would be no fear for the safety of our institutions at home or their frightful influence in any territory over which our flag floats.

Empire has been expelled from Porto Rico and the Philippines by American freemen. The flag of the republic now floats over these islands as an emblem of rightful sovereignty. Will the republic stay and dispense to their inhabitants the blessings of liberty, education and free institutions, or steal away, leaving them to anarchy or imperialism?

The American question is between duty and desertion-the American verdict will be for duty and against desertion, for the republic is against both anarchy and imperialism.

AS TO CHINA.

The country has been fully advised of the purposes of the United States in China, and they will be faithfully adhered to as already defined.

The nation is filled with gratitude that the little band, among them many of our own blood, who for months have been subjected to privations and perils by the attacks of pitiless hordes at the Chinese

capital, exhibiting supreme courage in the face of despair, have been enabled by God's favor to greet their rescuers and find shelter under their own flag.

The people not alone of this land, but of all lands, have watched and prayed through the terrible stress and protracted agony of the helpless sufferers in Pekin, and while at times the dark tidings seemed to make all hope vain the rescuers never faltered in the heroic fulfillment of their noble task.

We are grateful to our own soldiers and sailors and marines, and to all the brave men who, though assembled under many standards, representing peoples and races strangers in country and speech, were yet united in the sacred mission of carrying succor to the besieged, with a success that is now the cause of a world's rejoicing.

Not only have we reason for thanksgiving for our material blessings, but we should rejoice in the complete unification of the people of all sections of our country that has so happily developed in the last few years and made for us a more perfect union.

The obliteration of old differences, the common devotion to the flag and the common sacrifices for its honor, so conspicuously shown by the men of the North and South in the Spanish war, have so strengthened the ties of friendship and mutual respect that nothing can ever again divide us. The nation faces the new century gratefully and hopefully, with increasing love of country, with firm faith in its free institutions and with high resolves that they "shall not perish from the earth." Very respectfully yours,

WILLIAM MCKINLEY.

AT KANSAS CITY, MO., JULY 5, 1900.

We, the representatives of the Democratic party of the United States, assembled in national convention, on the anniversary of the adoption of the declaration of independence, do reaffirm our faith in that immortal proclamation of the inalienable rights of man, and our allegiance to the constitution framed in harmony therewith by the fathers of the republic. We hold with the United States Supreme Court that the declaration of independence is the spirit of our government, of which the constitution is the form and letter.

We declare again that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon the consent of the governed is a tyranny, and that to impose upon any people a government of force is to substitute the methods of imperialism for those of a republic. We hold that the constitution follows the flag, and denounce the doctrine that an executive or Congress, deriving their existence and their powers from the constitution, can exercise lawful authority beyond it, or in violation of it.

We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad wi" lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.

PORTO RICO LAW DENOUNCED.

Believing in these fundamental principles, we denounce the