safety. They have grown through the long processes of time from various motives and incidents, but our birth was signalized by a peculiar thing, and that germ which we planted in the beginning of our institutions has grown and waxed and is to-day strong and mighty.

We founded a government upon the recognition of human rights-that is our distinction-the right of men to be free, the right of men to govern themselves; and no man in this Government to-day but feels that he has an immediate, an intimate, a close and undy ing tie between the highest of its officers, between the most solemn ordinances of its constitutions, between its judges, its legislators, and himself. It is his legislature; it is his Senate; it is his House of Representatives; it is his Constitution; it is his Declaration of Independence; it is his country, and he has his rights in that country, and that country gets back in return his allegiance and his love.

Let us ask ourselves why we should annex the Philippine Islands. I spoke of the debt of equity and honor which we owed the Filipinos. It was a debt of friendship. Is the annexation of them against their will friendship? La Fontaine has a fable of which I am reminded by the proposition. There was a master once, he says, who had a favorite dog, and the dog was accustomed to bring the master his dinner in a basket. One day upon the street with the basket in his mouth going to his master's workshop he was beset by hungry curs. The basket was knocked out of his mouth and the victuals were spilled upon the ground, whereupon the dog, before he addressed himself to the hungry curs who were after him, commenced to gulp down the dinner. Just then the master appeared upon the scene and reproached the dog.

He gave a most excellent excuse. "Why, my dear master," he says, "I was taking the dinner faithfully to you when these hungry curs jumped upon me, and as the dinner was spilled, I knew you would rather have your faithful dog to consume it than to fill up the mouths of these hungry curs."

Having been once friendly to the Filipinos, and seeing that, according to the way the world wags, some vulture is after them, we have concluded that since they have to be eaten up, they would rather have their good old American friend undertake the benevolent assimilation than to have any other persons undertake it. That dog of the fable was an exceedingly smart. and philosophical dog. For dog logic, I do not think he has ever been excelled; but upon my word, sir, I do not feel that, as smart as he was, I can yet agree to put him up instead of the American eagle, and accept the moral of his tale in place of the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, and all the great men who have guided the American people in their hours of emergency.

What do we want to go to the Philippines for, and what are we after, and wherein will we be any better or stronger or nobler or richer after we have gone there? What is the temptation to us? Having told one fable I find myself tempted to tell another. In the old times when there was transmigration of souls between the different types of animated nature, it is said that a cat found herself suddenly transformed into a beautiful lady. Nothing could have exceeded the charms of her person and nothing the propriety of her behavior. But one day, as she sat the picture of demure and enchanted beauty, a mouse chanced to run across the floor. She did not shriek, as perhaps some of her prototypes would have done, but she instantly jumped

upon and devoured the mouse. The feline instinct was still there.

The American Republic set itself upon a different plan from the anterior nations. It said that all men are equal. There was the one word set like a diamond in the Declaration of Independence. It said, furthermore, all just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. It made a Constitution in which it put up bars of defense for the rights of man and for the rights of the community. It robed itself in the robes of liberty. It set the Goddess of Liberty over its Capitol. Nothing could exceed the beauty of its nobility or the wisdom of its design, and everything has gone well with us until this Philippine mouse has happened to run across the floor, and the old native instinct of taking something has broken loose in us again.

I think I heard a Senator say one day that all of our ancestors were pirates. I take no issue with him. The great prepotent family that has molded American institutions and has hewed out this massive and eternal stone of human liberty were descendants of the great northern races that put freedom in Great Britain, as far as it went, but it once rode the northern seas under the raven flag. But when they got here in this beautiful land, when they felt, the pinch of ancient and distant tyranny controlling their affairs, they turned over a new leaf and adopted a set of good resolutions, and Providence aided them in the fulfillment of them as it had blessed no other people since time began.

But there is a chance to take somebody, there is a chance to get some more land, there is a chance to expand in mere material and numerical strength, to seem to be mightier, and the old instinct has jumped