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III. .

A BLIND MAN'S HOLIDAY.

And unregretful, threw us all away

To flaunt it in a Blind Man's Holiday."

LOWELL.

III.

A BLIND MAN'S HOLIDAY.*

I wish to maintain a single proposition. We should withdraw from the Philippine Islands as soon as in dignity we can. It is bad statesmanship to make these alien people our partners; it is a crime to make them our slaves. If we hold their lands there is no middle course. Only a moral question brings a crisis to man or nation. In the presence of a crisis, only righteousness is right and only justice is safe.

I ask you to consider with me three questions of the hour. Why do we want the Philippines? What can we do with them? What will they do to us?

These questions demand serious consideration, not one at a time but all together. We should know clearly our final intentions as a nation, for it is never easy to retrace false steps. We have made too many of these already. It is time for us to grow serious. Even the most headlong of our people admit that we stand in the presence of a real crisis, while, so far as we can see, there is no hand at the helm. But the problem is vir

*Read before the Graduate Club of Leland Stanford Junior University, Feb. 14, 1899: and afterwards (April 3) published for the Club by the courtesy of Mr. John J. Valentine.

tually solved when we know what our true interests are. Half the energy we have spent in getting into trouble will take us honorably out of it. Once convinced that we do not want the Philippines it will be easy to abandon them with honor. If we are to take them we cannot get at it too soon. The difficulty is that we do not

yet know what we want, and we are afraid that if we once let these people go we shall never catch them again. With our longings after Imperialism we have not had the nerve to act.

Let us glance for a moment at the actual condition of affairs. By the fortunes of war the capital of the Philippine Islands fell, last May, into the hands of our navy. The city of Manila we have held, and by dint of bulldog diplomacy our final treaty of peace has assigned to us the four hundred or fourteen hundred islands of the whole archipelago. To these we have as yet no real title. We can get none till the actual owners have been consulted. We have a legal title, of course, but no moral title and no actual possession. We have only purchased Spain's quitclaim deed to property she could not hold, and which she cannot transfer. For the right to finish the conquest of the Philippines and to close out the insurrection which has gone on for almost a century we have agreed, on our part, to pay $20,000,000 in cash, for the people of the Islands and the land on which they were born, and which, in their fashion, they have cultivated. This is a sum absurdly large, if we consider only the use we are likely to make of the region and the probable cost of its reconquest and rule. It seems criminally small if we consider the possible returns to us or to Spain from peddling out the islands as old junk in the open market, or

from leasing them to commercial companies competent The price is high when States for a century has property and would not

to exploit them to their utmost. we remember that the United felt absolutely no need for such have taken any of it, or all of it, or any other like property as a gift. The price is high, too, when we observe that the failure of Spain placed the islands not in our hands but in the hands of their own people, a third party, whose interest we, like Spain, have as yet failed to consider. Emilio Aguinaldo, the liberator of the Filipinos, the "Washington of the Orient," is the de facto ruler of most of Luzon. In our hands is the city of Manila, and not much else, and we cannot extend our power except by bribery or by force. We may pervert these fragile patriots as Spain claims to have done; or, like Spain, we may redden the swamps of Luzon with their rebellious blood.

"Who are these Americans?" Aguinaldo is reported to ask, "these people who talk so much of freedom and justice and the rights of man, who crowd into our islands and who stand as the Spaniards did between us and our liberties?"

What right have we indeed? The right of purchase from Spain. We held Spain by the throat and she could not choose but sell.

If, at the close of our Revolutionary War, the King of France, coming in at the eleventh hour and driving the English from our capital, had bought a quit-claim deed to the colonies, proposing to retain them in the interest of French commerce, he would have held exactly the position in which our administration has placed the United States.

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