untry will dare
abandon these new possessions. That being so, do those of you who
regret it prefer to lose all influence over the outcome? While you are
repining over what is beyond recall, events are moving on. If you do
not help shape them, others, without your high principle and purity of
motive, may. Can you wonder if, while you are harassing the
Administration with impracticable demands for an abandonment of
territory which the American people will not let go, less unselfish
influences are busy presenting candidates for all the offices in its
organization? If the friends of a proper civil service persist in
chasing the ignis fatuus of persuading Americans to throw away
territory, while the politicians are busy crowding their favorites into
the territorial offices, who will feel free from self-reproach at the
results? Grant that the situation is bad. Can there be a doubt of the
duty to make the best of it? Do you ask how? By being an active
patriot, not a passive one. By exerting, and exerting now when it is
needed, every form of influence, personal, social, political,
moral,--the influence of the clubs, the Chambers of Commerce, the
manufactories, the colleges, and the churches,--in favor of the purest,
the ablest, the most scientific, the most disinterested--in a word, the
best possible civil service for the new possessions that the conscience
and the capacity of America can produce, with the most liberal use of
all the material available from native sources.

I have done. I have no wish to argue, to defend, or to attack. I have
sought only to point out what I conceive to be the present danger and
the present duty. It is not to be doubted that all such considerations
will summon you to the high resolve that you will neither shame the
Republic by shirking the task its own victory entails, nor despoil the
Republic by abandoning its rightful possessions, nor degrade the
Republic by admissions of unfit elements to its Union; but that you
will honor it, enrich it, ennoble it, by doing your utmost to make the
administration of these possessions worthy of the Nation that
Washington founded and Lincoln preserved. My last word is an appeal to
stand firm and stand all together for the Continental Union and for a
pure civil service for the Islands.

X

OUR NEW INTERESTS

This address was delivered on Charter Day at the University of
California, on March 23, 1900.

OUR NEW INTERESTS

My subject has be