r many years--one that
would be seized, if it could be done without war, by any of the great
nations other than our own without hesitation. The only scruple we need
entertain, the sole reason for deliberation, is because it is a duty of
the government to be sure when there are imperial considerations to be
weighed, that the people should be consulted. It was on this account
distinctly, that the President knew the issue of the permanency of
the possession of the Philippines was one of peculiar novelty and
magnitude, that he permitted it to exist. Spain must have been as
acquiescent in this as in yielding the independence of Cuba, and the
concession to us without any intermediate formality of Porto Rico. It
is not inconsistent with the policy of magnanimity that is generally
anticipated after the victory of a great power over a lesser one,
that we should hold the Philippines. We have only to keep the power
we have in peace, and let it work as a wholesome medicine, and all
the islands of the group of which Manila is the central point, will
be ours without conflict. In our system there is healing for wounds,
and attraction for the oppressed. The holding of the islands by Spain
would signify the continued shedding of blood, and drainage of the
vital resources of the peninsula. As against Spain the Philippines
will be united and desperate unto death, while they would without
coercion walk hand in hand with us, and become the greatest of our
dependencies--not states, but territories.

It would be an act of mercy to Spain to send her soldiers and priests
from the Philippines, home. Even if we consent that she may keep
her South Sea possession, she will lose it as she has all the rest,
for the story of the Philippines is that of Spanish South and Central
America, and the modern story of Cuba is the old one of all countries
South and West of the Gulf of Mexico and around by way of the Oceans
to Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Chili, and the rest had the
same bloody stream of history to trace, and sooner or later the
tale must all be told. Since Spain has already surrendered Cuba and
Porto Rico, the record of the Philippines is the last chapter of her
colonial experiences, by which she has dazzled and disgusted the world,
attaining from the plunder of dependencies wealth that she invested
in oppressive warfare to sustain a depraved despotism and display
a grandeur that was unsound, sapping her own strength in colonial
enterpr