if we do not have it by our will, then we will have wars against our will.

I feel as if I have but touched the subject, but as I close, the thought which impresses my mind is the importance to us that we should preserve our institutions and the principles of our Government, and that at the same time we should preserve the peace of this people; and these things are worth more to us than all the treasures gathered from subject peoples, and more than the dominion of all the islands of the seas.

CHAPTER XXVII.

OUR SHIP OF STATE.

BY HON. GEORGE W. TURNER,

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM WASHINGTON.

Our gallant ship of state has encountered many storms, and weathered them all, during the one hundred and twenty-three years it has been afloat. It looked at one time as if it would be submerged beneath the turbulent waters which beat against it and washed over it as a result of that elemental and titanic conflict of passions and interests which shook the entire Western Hemisphere from center to circumference; but happily the noble craft rode the storm and came safely into port, battered, bruised, and disfigured to some extent, but bearing unharmed its freight of liberty and nationality so precious to the American people. The builders of that vessel were wise beyond their day and generation, wise beyond any day or generation before or since.

Having launched a beautiful, symmetrical, and noble craft, they, out of their wisdom and experience and great knowledge, charted the seas in which it was to sail with unusual care and vigilance, marking the direction from which adverse winds were likely to come and pointing out with certainty and precision the hidden rocks and unfriendly shores on which many similar craft had laid their bones. Our ship has never encountered serious storms or found herself in dangerous waters except when her pilots have

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disregarded these warning admonitions laid down for their guidance.

Yesterday that chart was the cherished heritage of American statesmanship. All professed respect for it and obedience to it. To-day it would appear, if one may judge from utterances in this chamber, that the chart has been torn into tatters and that our noble craft is drifting whither she will on a wild and unknown sea. Where she will finally bring up a century hence, which is but as a day in the life of a nation, if she enters upon the course which some would have her pursue-whether she will then be freighted with the hopes and aspirations of a free and homogeneous people or weighted down with the fortunes of a mixed and mongrel race, cut loose from fixed principles and dominated by lust of dominion and the mercenary instinct which dares all and braves all for commercial gain, no man now living is wise enough to foresee or foretell.

so

We are being forced into these strange courses on the pretense that Providence has cast on us new responsibilities which we may not shirk. But to my mind there is nothing in the events which have made these resolutions pertinent that forces on the American people the dangerous responsibility against which they are directed.

We are at entire liberty to keep such foreign territory as we have conquered if we want to; and such of it as is suitable for our purposes by reason of its situation, its soil, its climate, and its people and their favoring disposition we may want to keep.

We can give back to our conquered enemy such as we do not want, but that is not our only resource in the premises. It is idle and vain, it seems to me, after we have gone to war for the sole purpose of

requiring a foreign nation to relinquish sovereignty over a people suffering from misgovernment, to say that we have only two alternatives with reference to the territory invaded and overrun by us during the war, namely, to give it back to our enemy, or to keep it ourselves. If we may keep it ourselves, we may require it to be given to the people who inhabit it, for the purpose of independence and liberty. And that would seem to be a most appropriate, generous and just exercise of our power, if the people who inhabit it have been warring for liberty and independence for years, if they became our allies during our own war, and gave us zealous and loyal support, and if they now tell us, since our common enemy has been vanquished, that, much as they respect and admire us and our institutions, they desire from us nothing but the opportunity to establish for themselves, on the basis of independence, the rights and liberties of their own people.

We are all free citizens of this Republic, and may eat and drink whatever we please; but experience has demonstrated that it is detrimental to health to eat and drink too much. Are not those of us who may have formed temperate resolutions as free as those who give unbridled license to their appetites? Have we lost anything of our freedom, or derogated anything from our standing among our fellows? We still have, indeed, the freedom to break our temperate resolutions if we want to. And so it is with the nation. We walk among the other nations as free as the air, and with as much pride as our power will permit, and so far as they are concerned our sovereignty is limitless and illimitable. If we have made good resolutions to ourselves and promised ourselves to keep them for the good of our health, that is no

concern of theirs. We have promised them nothing and owe them nothing. So far as they are concerned, we have a perfect right to break our resolutions.

The idea that limitations on our sovereign powers, when applied to our own municipal concerns, limit the sovereignty of the nation in the great family of nations and put it at a disadvantage there has no foundation in fact. Every constitutional limitation on the power of government, whether written or unwritten, for the protection of the citizen and the guaranty of wise and orderly government is to some extent an impeachment of sovereignty intraterritorially. But no nation has ever presumed to say that such limitations derogate from the standing of the nation extraterritorially. All nations do in fact maintain the contrary when they hold other nations up to the performance of international obligations notwithstanding internal municipal limitations which may stand in the

way.

The language of Washington was that "The great rule for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible;" that it was "unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of Old World politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friend. ships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course." This was the language of prudence, from the lips of him who was godlike in prudence and courage; but it has suddenly become cowardly and un-American to longer give heed to prudential considerations. Washington's fear was not that we should engage in the colonizing business and thus become entangled with European interests. His warn