that principle, and that, therefore, in our new policy we may cast it aside altogether. But I say to you that, if we are true believers in democratic government, it is our duty to move in the direction toward the full realization of that principle, and not in the direction away from it. If you tell me that we cannot govern the people of those new possessions in accordance with that principle, then I answer that this is a good reason why this democracy should not attempt to govern them at all. If we do, we shall transform the government of the people, for the people, and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a permanent policy may at first seem to bear only upon more or less distant dependencies, but it can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home. And I warn the American people that a democracy cannot so deny its faith as to the vital conditions of its being, it cannot long play the king over subject populations, without creating within itself ways of thinking and habits of action most dangerous to its own vitality, most dangerous especially to those classes of society which are the least powerful in the assertion, and the most helpless in the defence of their rights. Let the poor and the men who earn their bread by the labor of their hands pause and consider well before they give their assent to a policy so deliberately forgetful of the equality of rights. -- CARL SCHURZ, American Imperialism. (Address before the University of Chicago, January 4, 1899.) 9-11. HOAR (1899) The question is this: Have we the right, as doubtless we have the physical power, to enter upon the government of ten or twelve million subject people without constitutional restraint? Of that question the Senator from Connecticut takes the affirmative. And upon that question I desire to join issue. Mr. President, I am no strict constructionist. I am no alarmist. I believe this country to be a nation, a sovereign nation. I believe Congress to possess all the powers which are necessary to accomplish under the most generous and liberal construction the great objects which the men who framed the Constitution and the people who adopted it desired to accomplish by its instrumentality. I was bred, I might almost say I was born, in the faith, which I inherited from the men whose blood is in my veins, of the party of Hamilton and Washington and Webster and Sumner, and not in that of Madison or Calhoun or the strict constructionists. The men by whose hands Connecticut signed the Declaration of Independence, who in her behalf helped frame the Constitution, who represented her in either House of Congress in the great Administrations of Washington and John Adams, were of that way of thinking. But the man of them most thoroughgoing and extreme, Hamilton himself, Ellsworth himself, Adams himself, would have looked with amazement if not with horror upon the doctrines asserted by the honorable Senator from Connecticut to-day. I am not speaking only of his denial of the great doctrine of constitutional liberty and of political morality that government derives its just power from the consent of the governed, and that any people has the right, when it thinks its existing government is destructive of the great ends of life, liberty, and happiness, to throw off the old government and make a new one for itself, and certainly if it have that right no other man has the right to impose one on it against its consent. But I am not speaking of that. I am speaking of his astonishing and most extravagant construction of the powers of Congress under the Constitution. . . . Now, let us trace for a moment the history of this beautiful, august, pure, invincible sovereign of ours. The idea that our fathers intended to clothe it with such a sovereignty is as repugnant to me as the idea that because God created a seraph, or an archangel, or even a man in his own image, he intended that he should be at liberty commit murder or robbery or any form of bestiality because he had clothed him with the physical power to accomplish it. Expositio contemporanea maxime valet. The great contemporaneous exposition of the Constitution is to be found in the Declaration of Independence. Over every clause, syllable, and letter of the Constitution the Declaration of Independence pours its blazing torchlight. The same men framed it. The same States confirmed it. The same people pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to support it. The great characters in the constitutional convention were the great characters of the Continental Congress. There are undoubtedly, among its burning and shining truths, one or two which the convention that adopted it were not prepared themselves at once to put into practice. But they placed them before their countrymen as an ideal moral law to which the liberty of the people was to aspire and to ascend as soon as the nature of existing conditions would admit. Doubtless slavery was inconsistent with it, as Jefferson, its great author, has in more than one place left on record. But at last in the strife of a great civil war the truth of the Declaration prevailed and the falsehood of slavery went down, and at last the Constitution of the United States conformed to the Declaration and it has become the law of the land, and its great doctrines of liberty are written upon the American flag wherever the American flag floats. Who shall haul them down? . . . When the delegates of the Old Thirteen set their hands to that Declaration, the people of the United States stepped forth armed in its invincible panoply, like Minerva from the head of Jove, the greatest world power the world had ever seen. The seed they planted on that July morning grew up into crowns and sceptres. Whenever we depart from it the world power of the Great Republic is at an end. . . . At the close of the nineteenth century the American Republic, after its example in abolishing slavery has spread through the world, is asked by the Senator from Connecticut to adopt a doctrine of constitutional expansion on the principle that it is right to conquer, buy, and subject a whole nation if we happen to deem it for their good, - for their good as we conceive it, and not as they conceive it. Mr. President, Abraham Lincoln said, "No man was ever created good enough to own another." No nation was ever created good enough to own another. No single American workman, no humble American home, will ever be better or happier for the constitutional doctrine which the Senator from Connecticut proclaims. If it be adopted here not only the workman's wages will be diminished, not only will the burden of taxation be increased, not only, like the peasant of Europe, will he be born with a heavy debt about his neck and will stagger with an armed soldier upon his back, but his dignity will be dishonored and his manhood discrowned by the act of his own Government. GEORGE F. HOAR, No Constitutional Power to conquer Foreign Nations and hold their People in Subjection against their Will. (Speech in the Senate, January 9, 1899.) 11-40. BURGESS (1899) I cannot but regard as sophistical the argument for taking the Philippine Islands that is drawn from the fact of our having taken Louisiana, Florida, Texas, California, New Mexico, Oregon and even Alaska. All of these districts, except perhaps Alaska, are geographically natural parts of the United States. They were necessary to the national development of the United States. Their continued possession by other pow ers would have been a direct danger to the interests, if not to existence, of the United States. This latter proposition applies also, in some degree, to Alaska. The argument drawn from our past expansion would be more sound if it were used in reference to Cuba. Cuba commands the entrances to the Gulf of Mexico and the approaches from the sea to the southern boundary of the United States. The possession of this island by the United States may become is even likely to a national necessity. But the Philippine Islands stand in no such relation to us. The principle of expansion which we have heretofore followed is national expansion. The expansion involved in the occupation of the Philippines is world-empire expansion. These are not the same thing; and while successful world-empire expansion may require a preceding national expansion, a successful national expansion does not require world-empire expansion. In a word, the steps in national expansion are not precedents for world-empire expansion. become JOHN W. BURGESS, How may the United States govern its Extra-Continental Territory? in Political Science Quarterly, XIV. 2–3 (March, 1899). ᎻᎪᎡᎢ (1900) At the end of the Revolution the United States had a most excellent opportunity to remain within the former limits of the thirteen colonies, for in the peace negotiations of 1782 and 1783 it was the distinct purpose of France and Spain, and at times of England, to make the water-shed of the Appalachian chain practically the western boundary. . . . Three different areas, adjacent to the original English colonies, were to be disposed of in the negotiations. First, some of the Americans doubted whether "we could ever have a real peace, with Canada or Nova Scotia in the hands of the English." The second region was the northwest territory, in which the Americans had the right of occupation by conquest in a considerable part of the posts. The third area was the territory south of the Ohio River, most of which had not been under the jurisdiction of any English colony prior to the Revolution. The three arch-expansionists of that period, Franklin, Jay, and Adams, without much difficulty secured English consent to making the Mississippi the western boundary, as required by the instruction of Congress of 1779. . . Having thus inaugurated the policy of territorial expansion, our forefathers next set themselves to the great task of furnishing a colonial government, and during the ten years from 1780 to 1790 this was one of the chief concerns of Congress. ... The framers of the Constitution perfectly understood that the power which they gave Congress to make war included the power to conquer territory, and that the power to make treaties included the authority to annex by peaceful concession. . . . During the first decade under the Federal Constitution the nation did not yet know its own strength, or venture to predict its own future. The geographical and political conditions of the time speedily revived the spirit of political extension. Americans could put up with the exclusion from the lower Mississippi and the Gulf so long as that territory was in the hands of weak and declining Spain. European wars and treaties now began, however, |