giving the friendly nation an opportunity for consideration.

We made that restriction and destroyed our trade with China. They submitted to it as no other nation on the earth would have submitted to it. Our trade, however, melted away until it has run down to almost nothing as compared with that of Great Britain, France and Germany. And now ten years after that act we propose to take islands that are in front of the China Sea. No nation on earth can guard them. No power is strong enough to prevent the Chinese from going over and obtaining a lodgment; and then it is a stepping-stone by which they will come to the United States, because when the islands are annexed the inhabitants become American citizens. You can not keep the Chinese out to-day with all the police power of the Government. You can not prevent their entry from Canada and from Mexico. It will not, in my judgment, be four years, if this treaty is ratified, before the American people will act as they did in 1888. I am not an alarmist, nor have I a desire to throw out a suggestion of disorder, but, judging from the past, our people will resent it.

I assume it is believed by the authors of this measure that the people will resent it; and hence you propose to provide for it by increasing the Army to be. kept at home a hundred thousand men, at a cost of $100,000,000 a year, not alone to take care of our affairs in those distant islands, but as a police force to help to control the American people.

This is possibly the last time I may address the Senate upon this subject, and I now enter my solemn protest against it. I want to see this great Government march on for all time, as it has in the past, relying upon the good will and good sense of the American

people to support and protect their Government without the aid of armies.

I fear armies at home. I witnessed the great struggle of the war between the States which closed in 1865. Since its close I have seen a great army used in part to control the sovereign States of the Union. I also witnessed the patriotic and manly efforts of the great captain of our armies, General Grant, and of that fearless volunteer soldier, Gen. John A. Logan, of Illinois, and of Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, both members of the House, who raised their voices, as all statesmen had done in the past, and favored the reduction of the Army to 30,000 men, when their own country, one-third of it, was in a state of unrest. I want to follow in their lead—a lead which makes it impossible to govern the American people by bayonets.

The spectacle has just been presented of the President of the United States, kindly, manly, partisan as he has always been, in his tour through the Southern country, preaching good will and kindness to all who inhabit that section of our common land, giving them full credit for their patriotism in this war, as he ought to have done, and making the kindly suggestion that the time had passed when there should be any distinction between the care of the graves of the Confederate dead and those of the Union soldiers. His sentiments are noble and magnanimous. But when you couple with them his other insistence, both public and private, that we must have 100,000 soldiers and a navy as large as France or Germany, how can his suggestion-honestly made, I admit-to the Southern people that the Government take care of the graves of their ancestors be otherwise interpreted than also meaning, "You must give me 100,000 men to keep in order their descendants who are living?"

From the whole transaction I shrink; from the whole transaction, in the interest of the people of the American Union, as I see their interests, I protest; for, I repeat, I believe the absorption of the inhabitants of these islands would be more disastrous than the war from 1861 to 1865 so far as the material interests. of the country are concerned. I think it would be more disastrous than the picture drawn by the Senator from Virginia of the great misfortune which came to us by the injection into our body politic of the slave, against the protest of Virginia, and because of which the whole land was deluged in blood and brother turned against brother.

To Virginia this country owes a debt of gratitude. From the days of Patrick Henry until the speech of the Senator from Virginia on my left, Virginia has always voiced the true American sentiment, which, if adhered to, will bring prosperity and glory to our common country.

CHAPTER XIII.

A NATION'S POWER.

BY HON. HENRY M. TELLER,

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM COLORADO.

The power of acquisition of territory, as I said in June last when addressing the Senate, is a prerogative of nationality, and there is no provision of the Constitution that authorizes the Government of the United States to acquire either Cuba or Porto Rico except as it may be found in the power to declare and carry on war, and through the great prerogative of national sovereignty, a power that has never been denied to any nation in the history of the world, the power of acquisition.

I shall not attempt to go into a discussion of this question. I suppose the Senator from Missouri would say we are a nation, but that we are a nation with limited powers. The Supreme Court of the United States said, and it is an elementary principle, that a sovereign power can be limited only by its own act. If there is any limitation upon our power as a sovereign it must be found in the Constitution of the United States. We might have limited our power; we might have declared that we possessed not the power that other nations did. But we did not. The founders of the Republic did not mean to say that this great nation, then perhaps small, but in their expectation to be great, could not do as a nation what other nations did, or what other nations claimed the right to

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