onal
fashion.

"But I cannot agree with the principle on which this legislation
or any legislation on the subject which we have had in the
country since 1870 rests. I feel bound to enter a protest.
I believe that everything in the way of Chinese exclusion
can be accomplished by reasonable, practical and wise measures
which will not involve the principle of striking at labor,
and will not involve the principle of striking at any class
of human beings merely because of race, without regard to
the personal and individual worth of the man struck at. I
hold that every human soul has its rights, dependent upon
its individual personal worth and not dependent upon color
or race, and that all races, all colors, all nationalities
contain persons entitled to be recognized everywhere they go
on the face of the earth as the equals of every other man."

I do not think any man ever hated more than I have hated the
affectation or the reality of singularity. I know very well
that the American people mean to do right, and I believe with
all my heart that the men and the party with whom I have acted
for fifty years mean to do right. I believe the judgment
of both far better than my own. But every man's conscience
is given to him as the lamp for his path. He cannot walk
by another light.

It is also true that the great political principles which
have been in issue for the last thirty years, have been, in
general, those that have been debated for centuries, and
which cannot be settled by a single vote, in a legislative
body, by the result of a single election, or even by the opinion
of a single generation. In nearly every one of what I am
sorry to say are the numerous instances where I have been
compelled to act upon my judgment against that of my own party,
and even against that of the majority of my own countrymen,
the people have subsequently come around to my way of thinking,
and in all of them, I believe, I have had on my side the opinion
of the great men of the great generations of the past. Certainly
the Chinese Exclusion Bill and the Chinese Treaty; the Spanish
Treaty and the War against the Philippine people could not
have lived an hour before the indignation of the American
people at any time from the beginning down to the time when,
in 1876, they celebrated the centennial of their Independence.

CHAPTER X
THE WASHINGTON TREATY AND THE GENEVA AWARD

The Treaty of Washington, creditable to all who engaged in
i