Chapter 9

This new knowledge, these new duties and interests, must have two effects--they must extend our power, influence, and trade, and they must elevate the public service. Every returning soldier or traveler tells the same story--that the very name "American" has taken a new significance throughout the Orient. The shrewd Oriental no longer regards us as a second- or third-class Power. He has just seen the only signs he recognizes of a nation that knows its rights and dare maintain them--a nation that has come to stay, with an empire of its own in the China Sea, and a Navy which, from what he has seen, he believes will be able to defend it against the world. He straightway concludes, after the Oriental fashion, that it is a nation whose citizens must henceforth be secure in all their rights, whose missionaries must be endured with patience and even protected, and whose friendship must be sedulously cultivated. The national prestige is enormously increased, and trade follows prestige--especially in the farther East. Not within a century, not during our whole history, has such a field opened for our reaping. Planted directly in front of the Chinese colossus, on a great territory of our own, we have the first and best chance to profit by his awakening. Commanding both sides of the Pacific, and the available coal-supplies on each, we command the ocean that, according to the old prediction, is to bear the bulk of the world's commerce in the Twentieth Century. Our remote but glorious land between the Sierras and the sea may then become as busy a hive as New England itself, and the whole continent must take fresh life from the generous blood of this natural and necessary commerce between people of different climates and zones.

But these developments of power and trade are the least of the advantages we may hopefully expect. The faults in American character and life which the Little Americans tell us prove the people unfit for these duties are the very faults that will be cured by them. The recklessness and heedless self-sufficiency of youth must disappear. Great responsibilities, suddenly devolved, must sober and elevate now, as they have always done in natures not originally bad, throughout the whole history of the world.

The new interests abroad must compel an improved foreign service. It has heretofore been worse than we ever knew, and also better. On great occasions and in great fields our diplomatic record ranks with the best in the world. No nation stands higher in those new contributions to International Law which form the high-water mark of civilization from one generation to another. At the same time, in fields less under the public eye, our foreign service has been haphazard at the best, and often bad beyond belief--ludicrous and humiliating. The harm thus wrought to our national good name and the positive injury to our trade have been more than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them now, and when the American people wake up to a wrong they are apt to right it.

More important still should be the improvement in the general public service at home and in our new possessions. New duties must bring new methods. Ward politics were banished from India and Egypt as the price of successful administration, and they must be excluded from Porto Rico and Luzon. The practical common sense of the American people will soon see that any other course is disastrous. Gigantic business interests must come to reinforce the theorists in favor of a reform that shall really elevate and purify the Civil Service.

Hand in hand with these benefits to ourselves, which it is the duty of public servants to secure, go benefits to our new wards and benefits to mankind. There, then, is what the United States is to "stand for" in all the resplendent future: the rights and interests of its own Government; the general welfare of its own people; the extension of ordered liberty in the dark places of the earth; the spread of civilization and religion, and a consequent increase in the sum of human happiness in the world.

VIII

LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

This address was delivered on the invitation of the Board of Trustees, at Princeton University, in Alexander Hall, on October 21, 1899.

LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

The invitation for to-day with which Princeton honored me was accompanied with the hint that a discussion of some phase of current public affairs would not be unwelcome. That phase which has for the past year or two most absorbed public attention is now more absorbing than ever. Elsewhere I have already spoken upon it, more, perhaps, than enough. But I cannot better obey the summons of this honored and historic University, or better deserve the attention of this company of scholars, gentlemen, and patriots, than by saying with absolute candor what its present aspects prompt.

[Sidenote: Questions that have been Disposed of.]

And first, the chaos of opinion into which the country was thrown by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War ceases to be wholly without form and void. The discussions of a year have clarified ideas; and on some points we may consider that the American people have substantially reached definite conclusions.

There is no need, therefore, to debate laboriously before you whether Dewey was right in going to Manila. Everybody now realizes that, once war was begun, absolutely the most efficient means of making it speedily and overwhelmingly victorious, as well as of defending the most exposed half of our own coast, was to go to Manila. "Find the Spanish fleet and destroy it" was as wise an order as the President ever issued, and he was equally wise in choosing the man to carry it out.

So, also, there is no need to debate whether Dewey was right in staying there. From that come his most enduring laurels. The American people admire him for the battle which sank the Spanish navy; but they trust and love him for the months of trial and triumph that followed. The Administration that should have ordered him to abandon the Eastern foothold he had conquered for his country--to sail away like a sated pirate from the port where his victory broke down all civilized authority but our own, and his presence alone prevented domestic anarchy and foreign spoliation--would have deserved to be hooted out of the capital.

So, again, there is no need to debate whether the Peace Commissioners should have thrown away in Paris what Dewey had won in Manila. The public servant who, without instructions, should in a gush of irresponsible sentimentality abandon great possessions to which his country is justly entitled, whether by conquest or as indemnity for unjust war, would be not only an unprofitable but a faithless servant. It was their obvious duty to hold what Dewey had won, at least till the American people had time to consider and decide otherwise.

Is there any need to debate whether the American people will abandon it now? Those who have a fancy for that species of dialectics may weigh the chances, and evolve from circumstances of their own imagination, and canons of national and international obligation of their own manufacture, conclusions to their own liking. I need not consume much of your time in that unprofitable pursuit. We may as well, here and now, keep our feet on solid ground, and deal with facts as they are. The American people are in lawful possession of the Philippines, with the assent of all Christendom, with a title as indisputable as the title to California; and, though the debate will linger for a while, and perhaps drift unhappily into partizan contention, the generation is yet unborn that will see them abandoned to the possession of any other Power. The Nation that scatters principalities as a prodigal does his inheritance is too sentimental and moon-shiny for the Nineteenth Century or the Twentieth, and too unpractical for Americans of any period. It may flourish in Arcadia or Altruria, but it does not among the sons of the Pilgrims, or on the continent they subdued by stern struggle to the uses of civilization.

Nevertheless, our people did stop to consider very carefully their constitutional powers. I believe we have reached a point also where the result of that consideration may be safely assumed. The constitutional arguments have been fully presented and the expositions and decisions marshaled. It is enough now to say that the preponderance of constitutional authorities, with Gouverneur Morris, Daniel Webster, and Thomas H. Benton at their head, and the unbroken tendency of decisions by the courts of the United States for at least the last fifty years, from Mr. Chief Justice Waite and Mr. Justice Miller and Mr. Justice Stanley Matthews, of the Supreme Court, down to the very latest utterance on the subject, that of Mr. Justice Morrow of the Circuit Court of Appeals, sustain the power to acquire "territory or other property" anywhere, and govern it as we please.[9] Inhabitants of such territory (not obviously incapable) are secure in the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution; but they have no political rights under it, save as Congress confers them. The evidence in support of this view has been fully set forth, examined, and weighed, and, unless I greatly mistake, a popular decision on the subject has been reached. The constitutional power is no longer seriously disputed, and even those who raised the doubt do not seem now to rely upon it.

[9] Some of these authorities have already been briefly presented in the address at Miami University, pp. 107-158. It may be desirable to consult a few additional ones, covering the main points that have been disputed. They are grouped for convenience in the Appendix.

[Sidenote: Contributions to International Law and Morality.]

In thus summarizing what has been already settled or disposed of in our dealings with the questions of the war, I may be permitted to pause for a moment on the American contributions it brought about to international morality and law. On the day on which the American Peace Commissioners to Paris sailed for home after the ceremonial courtesy with which their labors were concluded, the most authoritative journal in the world published an interview with the eminent President of the corresponding Spanish Commission, then and for some time afterward President also of the Spanish Senate, in which he was reported as saying: "We knew in advance that we should have to deal with an implacable conqueror, who would in no way concern himself with any pre-existing International Law, but whose sole object was to reap from victory the largest possible advantage. This conception of International Law is absolutely new; it is no longer a case of might against right, but of might without right.... The Americans have acted as vainqueurs parvenus."[10]

[10] London "Times," December 17, 1898.

Much may be pardoned to the anguish of an old and trusted public servant over the misfortunes of his native land. We may even, in our sympathy, endeavor to forget what country it was that proposed to defy the agreements of the Conference of Paris and the general judgment of nations by resorting to privateering, or what country it was that preferred to risk becoming an asylum for the criminals of a continent rather than revive, even temporarily, that basic and elementary implement of modern international justice, an extradition treaty, which had been in force with acceptable results for over twenty years. But when Americans are stigmatized as "vainqueurs parvenus," who by virtue of mere strength violate International Law against a prostrate foe, and when one of the ablest of their American critics encourages the Spanish contention by talking of our "bulldog diplomacy at Paris," it gives us occasion to challenge the approval of the world--as the facts amply warrant--for the scrupulous conformity to existing International Law, and the important contributions to its beneficent advancement that have distinguished the action of the United States throughout these whole transactions. Having already set these forth in some detail before a foreign audience,[11] I must not now do more than offer the briefest summary.

[11] See (pp. 70-105) article from "The Anglo-Saxon Review."

The United States ended the toleration of Privateering. It was perfectly free to commission privateers on the day war was declared. Spain was equally free, and it was proclaimed from Madrid that the Atlantic would soon swarm with them, sweeping American commerce from the ocean. Under these circumstances one of the very first and noblest acts of the President was to announce that the United States would not avail itself of the right to send out privateers, reserved under the Declaration of Paris. The fast-thickening disasters of Spain prevented her from doing it, and thus substantially completed the practice or acquiescence of the civilized world, essential to the acceptance of a principle in International Law. It is safe to assume that Christendom will henceforth treat Privateering as under international ban.

The United States promoted the cause of genuine International Arbitration by promptly and emphatically rejecting an insidious proposal for a spurious one. It taught those who deliberately prefer War to Arbitration, and, when beaten at it, seek then to get the benefit of a second remedy, that honest Arbitration must come before War, to avert its horrors, not after War, to evade its penalties.

The United States promoted peace among nations, and so served humanity, by sternly enforcing the rule that they who bring on an unjust war must pay for it. For years the overwhelming tendency of its people had been against any territorial aggrandizement, even a peaceful one; but it unflinchingly exacted the easiest, if not the only, payment Spain could make for a war that cost us, at the lowest, from four to five hundred million dollars, by taking Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It requires some courage to describe this as either a violation of International Law, or a display of unprecedented severity by an implacable conqueror, in the very city and before the very generation that saw the Franco-Prussian War concluded, not merely by a partition of territory, but also by a cash payment of a thousand millions indemnity.

The United States promoted the peaceful liberalizing of oppressive rule over all subject peoples by making it more difficult to negotiate loans in the markets of the world to subdue their outbreaks. For it firmly rejected in the Cuban adjustments the immoral doctrine that an ill-treated and revolting colony, after gaining its freedom, must still submit to the extortion from it of the cost of the parent country's unsuccessful efforts to subdue it. We therefore left the so-called Cuban bonds on the hands of the Power that issued them, or of the reckless lenders who advanced the money. At the same time the United States strained a point elsewhere in the direction of protecting any legitimate debt, and of dealing generously with a fallen foe, by a payment which the most carping critic will some day be ashamed to describe as "buying the inhabitants of the Philippines at two dollars a head."[12]

[12] There has been so much misconception and misrepresentation about this payment of twenty millions that the following exact summary of the facts may be convenient.

When Spain sued for peace in the summer of 1898, she had lost control of the Philippines, and any means for regaining control. Her fleet was sunk; her army was cooped up in the capital, under the guns of the American fleet, and its capture or surrender had only been delayed till the arrival of reinforcements for the American Army, because of the fears expressed by foreigners and the principal residents of Manila that the city might be looted by natives unless American land forces were at hand in strength ample to control them. The Spanish army did so surrender, in fact, shortly after the arrival of these reinforcements, before the news of the armistice could reach them.

In the protocol granting an armistice, the United States exacted at once the cession of Porto Rico and an island in the Ladrones, but reserved the decision as to the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines for the treaty of peace, apparently with a view to the possibility of accepting them as further indemnity for the war.

When the treaty came to be negotiated, the United States required the cession of the Philippines. Its Peace Commissioners stated that their Government "felt amply supported in its right to demand this cession, with or without concessions," added that "this demand might be limited to the single ground of indemnity," and pointed out that it was "not now putting forward any claim for _pecuniary_ indemnity, to cover the enormous cost of the war." It accompanied this demand for a transfer of sovereignty with a stipulation for assuming any existing indebtedness of Spain incurred for public works and improvements of a pacific character in the Philippines. The United States thus asserted its right to the archipelago for indemnity, and at the same time committed itself to the principle of payment on account of the Philippine debt.

When it became necessary to put the Philippine case into an ultimatum, the Peace Commissioners did not further refer to the debt or give any specific reason either for a cession or for a payment. They simply said they now presented "a new proposition, embodying the concessions which, for the sake of immediate peace, their Government is, under the circumstances, willing to tender."

But it was really the old proposition (with the "Open Door" and "Mutual Relinquishment of Claims" clauses added), with the mention for the first time of a specific sum for the payment, and without any question of "pacific improvements." That sum just balanced the Philippine debt--40,000,000 Mexican, or, say, 20,000,000 American dollars.

All these are acts distinctly in accord with International Law so far as it exists and applies, and distinctly tending to promote its humane and Christian extension. Let me add, in a word, that the peace negotiations in no way compromised or affected the Monroe Doctrine, which stands as firm as ever, though much less important with the disappearance of any probable opposition to it; and that the prestige they brought smoothed the way for the one hopeful result of the Czar's Conference at The Hague, a response to the American proposal for a permanent International Court of Arbitration.

A trifling but characteristic inaccuracy concerning the Peace Commission may as well be corrected before the subject is left. This is the statement, apparently originating from Malay sources, but promptly indorsed in this country by unfriendly critics, to the effect that the representative of Aguinaldo was uncivilly refused a hearing in Paris. It was repeated, inadvertently, no doubt, with many other curious distortions of historic facts, only the other day, by a distinguished statesman in Chicago.[13] As he put it, the doors were slammed in their faces in Washington as well as in Paris. Now, whatever might have happened, the door was certainly never slammed in their faces in Paris, for they never came to it. On the contrary, every time Mr. Agoncillo approached any member of the Commission on the subject, he was courteously invited to send the Commissioners a written request for a hearing, which would, at any rate, receive immediate consideration. No such request ever came, and any Filipino who wrote for a hearing in Paris was heard.

[13] General Carl Schurz, at the Chicago Anti-Expansion Convention, October, 1899.

[Sidenote: The Present Duty.]

Meanwhile we are now in the midst of hostilities with a part of the native population, originating in an unprovoked attack upon our troops in the city they had wrested from the Spaniards, before final action on the treaty. It is easy to say that we ought not to have got into this conflict, and to that I might agree. "I tell you, they can't put you in jail on that charge," said the learned and disputatious counsel to the client who had appealed from his cell for help. "But I _am_ in," was the sufficient answer. The question just then was not what might have been done, but what can be done. I wish to urge that we can only end this conflict by manfully fighting through it. The talk one hears that the present situation calls for "diplomacy" seems to be mistimed. That species of diplomacy which consists in the tact of prompt action in the right line at the right time might, quite possibly, have prevented the present hostilities. Any diplomacy now would seem to our Tagal antagonists the raising of the white flag--the final proof that the American people do not sustain their Army in the face of unprovoked attack. Every witness who came before the American Peace Commission in Paris, or sent it a written statement, English, German, Belgian, Malay, or American, said the same thing. Absolutely the one essential for dealing with the Filipinos was to convince them at the very outset that what you began you stood to; that you did not begin without consideration of right and duty, or quail then before opposition; that your purpose was inexorable and your power irresistible, while submission to it would always insure justice. On the contrary, once let them suspect that protests would dissuade and turbulence deter you, and all the Oriental instinct for delay and bargaining for better terms is aroused, along with the special Malay genius for intrigue and double-dealing, their profound belief that every man has his price, and their childish ignorance as to the extent to which stump speeches here against any Administration can cause American armies beyond the seas to retreat.

No; the toast which Henry Clay once gave in honor of an early naval hero fits the present situation like a glove. He proposed "the policy which looks to peace as the end of war, and war as the means of peace." In that light I maintain that the conflict we are prosecuting is in the line of national necessity and duty; that we cannot turn back; that the truest humanity condemns needless delay or half-hearted action, and demands overwhelming forces and irresistible onset.

[Sidenote: Eliminate Temporary Discouragements.]

But in considering this duty, just as in estimating the Treaty of Paris, we have the right to eliminate all account of the trifling success, so far, in the Philippines, or of the great trouble and cost. What it was right to do there, and what we are bound to do now, must not be obscured by faults of hesitation or insufficient preparation, for which neither the Peace Commissioners nor the people are responsible. I had occasion to say before a college audience last June what I now repeat with the additional emphasis subsequent events have warranted--that the difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own making; and I repeat that it is still not for us, here and now, to apportion the blame. We have not the knowledge to say just who, or whether any man or body, is wholly at fault. What we do know is that the course of hesitation and inaction which the Nation pursued in face of an openly maturing attack was precisely the policy sure to give us the greatest trouble, and that we are now paying the penalty. If the opposite course had been taken at the outset--unless all the testimony from foreign observers and from our own officers is at fault--there would have been either no outbreak at all, or only one easily controlled and settled to the general satisfaction of most of the civilized and semi-civilized inhabitants of the island.