irgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman
and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is
incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons,
shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, brigands,
epidemics, devastating fires, etc.

It is a beautiful country, copiously endowed by Nature, where the
effulgent morning sun contributes to a happy frame of mind--where the
colonist's rural life passes pleasantly enough to soothe the longing
for "home, sweet home."

"And yet perhaps if countries we compare
And estimate the blessings which they share,
Though patriots flatter, yet shall wisdom find
An equal portion dealt to all mankind."

Such is America's new possession, wherein she has assumed the moral
responsibility of establishing a form of government on principles
quite opposite to those of the defunct Spanish _regime_: whether
it will be for better or for worse cannot be determined at this
tentative stage. Without venturing on the prophetic, one may not
only draw conclusions from accomplished facts, but also reasonably
assume, in the light of past events, what might have happened under
other circumstances. There is scarcely a Power which has not, in
the zenith of its prosperity, consciously or unconsciously felt the
"divine right" impulse, and claimed that Providence has singled it
out to engraft upon an unwilling people its particular conception of
human progress. The venture assumes, in time, the more dignified name
of "mission"; and when the consequent torrents of blood recede from
memory with the ebbing tide of forgetfulness, the conqueror soothes
his conscience with a profession of "moral duty," which the conquered
seldom appreciate in the first generation. No unforeseen circumstances
whatever caused the United States to drift unwillingly into Philippine
affairs. The war in Cuba had not the remotest connexion with these
Islands. The adversary's army and navy were too busy with the task
of quelling the Tagalog rebellion for any one to imagine they could
be sent to the Atlantic. It was hardly possible to believe that
the defective Spanish-Philippine squadron could have accomplished
the voyage to the Antilles, in time of war, with every neutral port
_en route_ closed against it. In any case, so far as the ostensible
motive of the Spanish-American War was concerned, American operations
in the Philippines might have ended with the Battle of C