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CHAPTER XXI.

Seduced By Destiny.

Destiny is a great word. It lights up the sorrows of life by taking away personal responsibility. It justifies crime by making it the work of God. If you have been a vicious spendthrift and squandered your substance on fast women and fast horses, convert yourself to Destiny in your latter days and edify your grandchildren by tracing the footprints of God through your miscreant career and showing them how good it was for your soul to have been a rogue. If you wish Naboth's field or his oil refinery, be a Sunday School Superintendent and a college settlement patron and tell him that the progress of the world demands the concentration of fields and the heaping up of refineries, and that you feel yourself divinely appointed to carry forward progress on the back of your bank account. You would not have bamfoozled Nathan of old, but the parsons who are gathering grains of gold on the shores of civilization, will chipperly rebuke the anguish of Naboth in your behalf. If you want another man's country, take it in the name of God and it shall be well with thee. If you wish the trade and territory of the earth for sordid gain thou art wicked, but if you wish them for sordid gain to glorify God therewith thou art a savior.

There is some subtlety in our relation to territory, but the Lord God is a subtle God visiting the sins of the oppressor upon the oppressed. We desire territory for the reason that propelled the children of Israel, the Vandals, the Huns, Napoleon, and Bismarck, which God knows because he knows all, but he is an accommodating

God in his old age and is pacified by assurance that our illimitable greed and graspingness are unselfish and impersonal, cherished and allowed only to serve Him. But although this is a distinction upon which all followers of true religion will rest in peace, it is a great gain for the ordinary conscience to know that the entire object of expansion is and has been premeditated commercial avarice, the dipping of which in the essence of divinity is the counterpart of immersing spoiled meat in chemistry to give it the outer gloss of perfection.

Now the question for us all is, Why has there been this pains to disguise the truth from us? The object of our political masters is to get more territory for the millionaires to exploit with monopoly which they still call by the obsolete word trade; God and civilization play no part in the matter as a reality. Why do they dip their monopoly greed in liquor of God and civilization, if the expansion of greed is good in itself? Why do they not come bravely and say that trade is the whole affair? Only because expansion is rotten progress, not good for us, and they know we would not take it were we not deceived. Nevertheless some of the most frank have entirely thrown off the mask of holiness and based the entire argument on trade, and these are persons so related to the administration that their words furnish the last proof that absolute monopoly selfishness has been the only motive, at all times, of those steering the Ameri

can state.

I wish to meet this question at its most critical point. They say that we were forced to expand, against our will; they give the impression that there was no previous and settled intention to take the Philippines when our peace agents went to Paris, and that destiny gradually unfolded itself to our representatives and opened their eyes to what must be. This is all false. The men engaged in it know it is false. They know that they were selected because they would execute the directions of McKinley like so many pulleys and straps in a mill.

They were selected because they were good adobe. The president's purpose was fixed to require the Philippines, they virtually knew it and went to perform that mission. All appearance of doubt was a sham. They may not have been explicitly instructed to demand the whole group until after they reached Paris, but that was a mere matter of public policy, the people here were not ready for it, but the commissioners knew well that they would be directed to make that demand. The president had talked the subject over confidentially in all its bearings with them all and severally before they sailed. He may not have said directly, 'We must have the Philippines,' but he had said it by clearly carried implication. The case may be epitomized in five words-The commissioners were McKinley's tools.

Cushman K. Davis, U. S. senator from Minnesota, was one of them, and he made his attitude public before going abroad. To a reporter of the N. Y. World he said:

Events have made us one of the great powers of the earth. Whatever we may have desired ourselves heretofore, destiny bas forced upon us responsibilities that we must recognize and accept. We have become a potent factor in the world's progress. A greater actual naval and military power we are already. We are not strong enough yet, but not an hour must be lost in equipping ourselves to cope with any emergency that may confront us. . We must have a large regular army ready at call in the future. We must have as good a navy as any nation on earth. We have an excellent beginning. Ship for ship we need fear nobody. But we must build ships with true American energy. Nothing must deter us. . . A gun is the earliest thought of the American youth. Men are only grown up boys... China is the coveted part of the earth's surface today, . . . Providence has stepped in to point the future course for us. We must police the Pacific ocean. Its coast has been our vulnerable point.

arms.

You understand, I am on record as favoring the retention of the territory which has been acquired by the splendid victories of our Hereafter, I tell you, the maritime, commercial and polit ical interests will not permit their governing power to be indifferent to their honor or their progress. The United States has ceased to be the China of the Western Continent. We are alive, thank God, and must not be insulted by any power in this world, great or small. And it is that change that ought to make every patriot glad. Wars are inevitable-or all history is false. . . Can we contemplate for an instant the interference of any power that shall abridge the majesty and glory laid at our feet by the incomparable Dewey? say, 'never.' Therefore you may quote me just as strongly as you can as saying 'More battleships, and, after that, more cruisers and battleships again.'* *Associated Press, Aug. 29, '98.

This roaring Comanche was chosen by the light-seeking president, whose mind was not (openly) made up, to go to Paris to complete the work of justice and unselfishness which we had notoriously begun? Nay truly; he was selected on account of his bowie-knife and scalps because the president intended a Spanish massacre. This redman had worked out his policy, if the president had another policy, or was in honest doubt, why did he choose such a cutthroat to represent him? It is a clear case. Just such a person was needed to enforce just such a policy as the White House and Davis unitedly wished-militarism, spoliation, and the full possession of the Philippine archipelago. Day was another negotiating tool. He announced the disinterested sentiment, "A peace treaty can contain anything which the victors put into it.”*

That

But

is the plain English of it, for Charles Dilke, when asked if he thought this country should retain possession of the Philippines, replied: 'Certainly I do. The United States will hold the Philippines by right of conquest.' Day's word beats the last breath out of the moribund doctrines of love and God and civilization and Destinyforcing-us, which had done such cart-horse service to drag the people to expansion.

After reading these strident blasphemies of Davis & Day it is with unmitigated pain that we turn back to their divine origin so few days ago. We will select the angel Smith, this time, as envoy from the McKinley Paradise. This is not Tom, Dick, or Harry Smith, but the wing-worded Charles Emory, the barbed-wire one, of whom something has already been heard in the cabinet and these pages. The only sayings in literature that come up to the passage before us are to be found in the devout Buddha, and I forget where Buddha nearly equals this, but I read it once. It seems but yesterday and was was but yesteryear that Smith said, "Whatever we hold, whether it be more or less, will be held, not for territorial aggrandizement, but solely in acceptance of respon

*Associated Press, Dec. 6, '98.

sibilities which Providence has laid upon us. Men lightly talk of 'imperialism.' Our imperialism is not territorial lust, but benignant trade expansion and civilizing influence, and our flag is at Manila, not in any spirit of spoliation, not in either the greed or the glory of conquest, but, let it be reverently said, under the controlling force of a providential guidance, with the ripe hour, in the development and requirements of our national growth."*

Grey is considered no all-round poet, but in his Elegy he makes a high leap, and like him Charles here gets up among the saviors of mankind, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mahomet, for one brief span, as it were by the aid of stilts. This was the immaculate conception of Davis & Day in Paris. 'We are alive, thank God, and not to be insulted by anybody. Battleships, and then battleships and after that battleships, forever. War is the natural state of mankind.' 'A peace treaty can contain anything the victors want to put into it.' The divine child born of God and McKinley has turned out in a short year to be a common earthly tough, member of a youthful gang of housebreaking Yellow Kids. Smith himself does not stay in the blue very long and the closing stanza of his Elegy in a Country's Church-yard is the Devil's birthmark on the Immaculate. I tremble for Smith's divinity and salvation as I quote it:-"It [our imperialism] is treated in many quarters simply as a question of territorial expansion, but that is a secondary and incidental consideration. The great and overshadowing question is one of commercial opening. The heart of the issue is not mere territory, but trade necessities and facilities. Beyond and behind and beneath this departure lies the broad problem of America's destiny in the commerce and the civilization of the world. . . . Why should we not peacefully and providentially (!!) avail ourselves of the commercial advantages within our grasp? Shall we be worthy of our high mission? I have full faith in my

*At Omaha Auditorium, Oct. 5, '98.

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