we do make—we have here a religion whose essence is mercy. We have had an experience in free government, government based on the will of the governed-for government by majority is government with the consent of the governed-and we have been taught by that government what so few people of this world have learned, both the firmness to rule and the power of obedience to that rule. We are a Christian people, and our missionaries, or these imbued with the missionary spirit, clamor for the annexation of these islands for the purpose of shedding over them the light of the gospel. We are asked to do as Mahomet did with his creed-carry the Christian religion to these people upon the point of a bayonet, as he spread Islamism over Western Asia and Eastern Europe and Northern Africa on his scimiter.

There are two forces struggling for mastery here, and the better instincts of every Senator within the hearing of my voice lead him to side with me in the proposition that we do not want to shoot people into a civilized condition if we know how to get around it. The two forces to which I have referred as struggling for mastery are liberty, light, and morality-in a word, Christianity-contending against ignorance, greed, and tyranny, against the empires of Mammon and Belial. In the summer seas of the Tropics in both hemispheres two flags are afloat to-day upon two ancient cities. They both bear the emblem of this great Republic, the Stars and Stripes. One goes there and is floating in the free air as a harbinger of peace, order, prosperity, happiness, liberty. The other floats in Manila as an emblem of power, cold-blooded, determined to do what? To subjugate those people at whatever cost and force on them such a government as we think is best for them, and then, according to

the language of the resolution, determine afterwards as it may be to "our" advantage whether we will sell them or whether we will rule them in our "own" way, without regard to their rights.

Why not tell these people now before further blood is shed? We do not intend to do with you differently from what we do with the Cubans. We went into the war for the purposes of freeing a nation oppressed beyond all historical precedent almost. By accident or without premeditation you have fallen in our grasp. We bought you from Spain and have title. We only want enough of your territory to give us a harbor of refuge, a naval station, the right to protect you from outside interlopers, and to get such commercial advantages as you of right ought to give us. Pass a resolution of that kind, and then if those people will not listen to reason and continue to fire on the flag, I for one will say the blood will be on their own heads. Let slip the dogs of war and teach them to respect the Stars and Stripes. But we are there now upon a false pretense. We are there wrongfully. We are there without any justification to ourselves or to the civilized world.

I yield to no man in loyalty to the sentiments, my country, may it ever be right, but right or wrong, my country. But, oh, my God, when I think how dishonorable the prosecution of the war promises to be to us as a people, how little justification for it we have, even to ourselves, I would that you, my fellows on this floor, would pass a resolution which could bring about immediately a cessation of hostilities and a condition which might give the Philippine people the same right to bless us as Cuba will possess, and which command for us the admiration and respect of the civilized and pagan world.

[Extract of speech February 7, 1899.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

ANNEXATION FROM A LEGAL POINT

OF VIEW.

BY GEORGE G. VEST,

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MISSOURI,

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That under the Constitution of the United States no power is given to the Federal Government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies.

The colonial system of European nations can not be established under our present Constitution, but all territory acquired by the Government, except such small amount as may be necessary for coaling stations, correction of boundaries, and similar governmental purposes, must be acquired and governed with the purpose of ultimately organizing such territory into States suitable for admission into the Union.

I do not propose in my brief discussion of this resolution to say anything which will necessitate an executive session. It is not my purpose to discuss any treaty now pending or which may be hereafter submitted to the Senate.

It seems to me peculiarly appropriate at this time to examine what are the powers of Congress in regard to the acquisition and government of new territory. When the Attorney-General, the great law officer of the Government, declares publicly and deliberately that the Constitution made for thirteen half-rescued colonies, glad to be permitted to live at all, has grown too small for the greatest nation upon the face of the earth, it appears to me time to inquire what is that Constitution and the powers conferred upon Congress.

Every school-boy knows, or ought to know, that the Revolutionary war, which gave us existence as a people, was fought for four years exclusively against

the colonial system of Europe. Our fathers did not in the commencement of that struggle contemplate independence from the mother country. When the people of Rhode Island burned the British war sloop Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, and the people of Massachusetts threw overboard the cargo of tea in Boston Harbor, they acted as British subjects, proclaiming their loyalty to the Crown of England. When Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Light-Horse Harry Lee met at the old Raleigh tavern in Williamsburg, Va., and indorsed the action of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, they proclaimed themselves English subjects, loyal to the King, and only demanded the rights that were given to them as Englishmen by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights.

What is the colonial system against which our fathers protested? It is based upon the fundamental idea. that the people of immense areas of territory can be held as subjects, never to become citizens; that they must pay taxes and be impoverished by governmental exaction without having anything to do with the legislation under which they live.

Against taxation without representation our fathers fought for the first four years of the Revolution, struggling against the system which England then attempted to impose upon them, and which was graphically described by Thomas Jefferson as the belief that nine-tenths of mankind were born bridled and saddled and the other tenth booted and spurred to ride them.

When war became flagrant and battles had been fought and blood had been shed, the patriots of the Revolution came to the conclusion that there must be final separation from the British throne. Thomas Jefferson then penned the immortal Declaration upon the basic idea that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It is incredible that the men who fought for seven long years without money, without men almost, and without arms, against the proudest and strongest nation in the world, resisting the doctrine upon which the colonial system of Europe is based, should, after being rescued by Providence from its thraldom, deliberately put this doctrine in the written Constitution framed to govern them and their children. How can it be true that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed when millions of human beings are held without their consent as mere chattels, to be disposed of as the sovereign. power of the mother country may choose?

But, passing from this historic argument, which seems to me unanswerable, the highest tribunal in the United States, the Supreme Court, has settled this question by a unanimous opinion, when the ablest lawyers in the country were upon the bench. I am now about to refer to a decision which I know will revive bitter memories unless those memories be happily eliminated by recent events. In the case of Dred Scott against Sandford, Chief Justice Taney, delivering the opinion of the court, which constituted the opinion of seven of the justices out of nine, effectually disposed of the question as to whether the United States could hold colonies without the intention or prospect of forming them into States and admitting them into the Union.

I am perfectly willing to eliminate that portion of this opinion which referred to the introduction of slavery into the Territories, notwithstanding an act of Congress that prohibited it, and also declaring that the Missouri compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. These questions were settled by shot and shell and saber stroke for all time to come. But the portion of the opinion that I shall now ask the Secretary to