CONTEMPORARY EXPOSITION

PRESIDENT MCKINLEY (1899)

We have now ended the war with Spain. The treaty has been ratified by the votes of more than two-thirds of the Senate of the United States and by the judgment of nine-tenths of its people. No nation was ever more fortunate in war or more honourable in its negotiations in peace. Spain is now eliminated from the problem. It remains to ask what we shall now do. I do not intrude upon the duties of Congress or seek to anticipate or forestall its action. I only say that the treaty of peace, honourably secured, having been ratified by the United States, and, as we confidently expect, shortly to be ratified in Spain, Congress will have the power, and I am sure the purpose, to do what in good morals is right and just and humane for these peoples in distant seas.

It is sometimes hard to determine what is best to do, and the best thing to do is oftentimes the hardest. The prophet of evil would do nothing because he flinches at sacrifice and effort, and to do nothing is easiest and involves the least cost. On those who have things to do there rests a responsibility which is not on those who have no obligations as doers. If the doubters were in a majority, there would, it is true, be no labour, no sacrifice, no anxiety and no burden raised or carried; no contribution from our ease and purse and comfort to the welfare of others, or even to the extension of our resources to the welfare of ourselves. There would be ease, but alas! there would be nothing done.

But grave problems come in the life of a nation, however much men may seek to avoid them. They come without our seeking; why, we do not know, and it is not always given us to know; but the generation on which they are forced cannot avoid the responsibility of honestly striving for their solution. We may not know precisely how to solve them, but we can make an honest effort to that end, and if made in conscience, justice and honor it will not be in vain.

The future of the Philippine Islands is now in the hands of the American people. Until the treaty was ratified or rejected

the Executive Department of this government could only preserve the peace and protect life and property. . .

I have no light or knowledge not common to my countrymen. I do not prophesy. The present is all absorbing to me, but I cannot bound my vision by the blood-stained trenches around Manila, where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided Filipino, is anguish to my heart; but by the broad range of future years, when that group of islands, under the impulse of the year just passed, shall have become the gems and glories of those tropical seas; a land of plenty and of increasing possibilities; a people redeemed from savage indolence and habits, devoted to the arts of peace, in touch with the commerce and trade of all nations, enjoying the blessings of freedom, of civil and religious liberty, of education and of homes, and whose children and children's children shall for ages hence bless the American Republic because it emancipated and redeemed their fatherland and set them in the pathway of the world's best civilization.

WILLIAM MCKINLEY, Speech delivered at the Home Market Club, in Boston Herald, February 17, 1899.

SECRETARY LONG (1899)

But, on the other hand, is the view held, I think, by the great majority of our people that we cannot thus easily, having once put our hands to the plough, look back, and that events not within our control have brought us to responsibilities which we cannot disregard and let alone, but which we must face and meet. The matter is one of great moment. I most heartily wish it had never confronted us. I wish the world would kindly let up for a while and not move so fast. I wish, also, that youth would stay. I would rather be a boy again than to be Secretary of the Navy, as I am, or President of the United States, as of course I could be if I would yield to the solicitations of my friends and accept the office. But I think it is a mistake to say that it is beyond the ability of the American people to deal with a problem with which other nations have successfully dealt, or that it is a harder problem than many problems which are upon us already.

The problem of the immense accumulations of wealth; the

municipal problem of our great cities, soon gathering within their limits more than half the population of the country; the problems of capital and labor; the problems of social crimes, intemperance and political integrities, are even harder and fraught with graver dangers. Indeed, I am not sure that this new friction in the far-off tropics may not be, when applied to these older maladies in the body politic, a sort of what the physicians call a counter-irritant - an outlet for the pent-up fevers now in the national blood.

There are those who regard every new crisis as what they call "the beginning of the end." But this phrase is like the foolish nurse's cry of "ghost" to a child. The beginning of the end was long ago—at the very birth of the Republic. God has so ordered the laws of growth that no life, of plant, or man, or nation, works out its destiny and bears its fruit except by ripening to its completion. First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. The glory of Greece and of Rome is in the culmination of their civilization, art, literature and political power; and therein is their contribution to the higher civilizations which have succeeded.

So it must needs be with the great powers of to-day, Great Britain and Germany and America. . .

Why doubt and repine, when the time of doubting and repining is inexorably past, and when doubting and repining can now do no good? Why shall not the United States, now that these lands and tribes have been intrusted to its disposition, enter upon the trust thus imposed upon it, with the determination that, as it began by freeing them from the yoke of oppression, it will go on and insure them still larger blessings of liberty and civilization, and will so bear itself toward them that in securing their welfare it shall also promote its own, and, as always happens when men or nations co-operate in the spirit of justice and good will, the reward shall come to both in their mutual increase? . . .

Meantime, our duty is to meet the responsibility that is upon us. Undoubtedly it would be easier if we could shift it from our shoulders and lay it down. It is with a wrench that any man, especially any son of New England familiar with its traditions and recalling its charms of provincial life, becomes aware

that these must, betimes, give way to larger demands and more trying exigencies.

And yet, the fields that are before us are not altogether untrodden. It is not a new thing in the history of the world for an enlightened and civilized nation to deal with the less fortunate islands of remote seas.

A Christian nation should not lose heart at the opportunity of carrying its education, its industries, its institutions and its untold blessings to other and less fortunate people. For one, I trust with all my heart that the result of our new relations with the Philippines may be to aid them to the acquirement of the comforts, happiness and benefactions of our civilization; to educate them to their political elevation and to help them to the establishment of their own self-government and their own free existence.

JOHN D. LONG, Address before the Home Market Club, in Boston Herald, February 17, 1899.

R. OLNEY (1900)

Hereafter as heretofore, our general policy must be and will be non-interference in the internal affairs of European states hereafter as heretofore we shall claim paramountcy in things purely American — and hereafter as heretofore we shall antagonize any attempt by an European Power to forcibly plant its flag on the American continents. It cannot be doubted, however, that our new departure not merely unties our hands but fairly binds us to use them in a manner we have thus far not been accustomed to. We cannot assert ourselves as a Power whose interests and sympathies are as wide as civilization without assuming obligations corresponding to the claim - obligations to be all the more scrupulously recognized and performed that they lack the sanction of physical force. The first duty of every nation, as already observed, is to itself is the promo

tion and conservation of its own interests. Its position as an active member of the international family does not require it ever to lose sight of that principle. But, just weight being given to that principle, and its abilities and resources and opportunities permitting, there is no reason why the United States should not act for the relief of suffering humanity and for the

advancement of civilization wherever and whenever such action would be timely and effective. Should there, for example, be a recurrence of the Turkish massacres of Armenian Christians, not to stop them alone or in concert with others, could we do so without imperilling our own substantial interests, would be unworthy of us and inconsistent with our claims and aspirations as a great Power. We certainly could no longer shelter ourselves behind the time-honored excuse that we are an American Power exclusively, without concern with the affairs of the world at large.

RICHARD OLNEY, Growth of our Foreign Policy, in The Atlantic Monthly, LXXXV. 289-301 (March, 1900).

CRITICAL COMMENT

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS (1898)

Next as regards our fundamental principles of equality of human rights, and the consent of the governed as the only just basis of all government. The presence of the inferior races on our own soil, and our new problems connected with them in our dependencies, have led to much questioning of the correctness of those principles, which, for its outspoken frankness, at least, is greatly to be commended. It is argued that these, as principles, in the light of modern knowledge and conditions, are of doubtful general truth and limited application. True, when confined and carefully applied to citizens of the same blood and nationality; questionable, when applied to human beings of different race in one nationality; manifestly false, in the case of races less developed, and in other, especially tropical, countries. As fundamental principles, it is admitted, they were excellent for a young people struggling into recognition and limiting its attention narrowly to what only concerned itself; but have we not manifestly outgrown them, now that we ourselves have developed into a great World Power? For such there was and necessarily always will be, as between the superior and the inferior races, a manifest common sense foundation in caste, and in the rule of might when it presents itself in the form of what we are pleased to call Manifest Destiny. As to government being conditioned on the consent of the governed,