tish policy--towards those communities,--two
of them Spanish, one African? So far as foreign powers are concerned, we
have laid down the principle of "Hands-off." So far as their own
government was concerned, we insisted that the only way to learn to walk
was to try to walk, and that the history of mankind did not show that
nations placed under systems of "tutelage,"--taught to lean for support
on a superior power,--ever acquired the faculty of independent action.

Of this, with us, fundamental truth, the British race itself furnishes a
very notable example. In the forty-fourth year of the Christian era the
island of Great Britain was occupied by what the "Imperial" Romans
adjudged to be an inferior race. To the Romans the Britons
unquestionably were inferior. Every child's history contains an account
of the course then pursued by the superior towards that inferior race,
and its results. The Romans occupied Great Britain, and they occupied it
hard upon four centuries, holding the people in "tutelage," and
protecting them against themselves, as well as against their enemies.
With what result? So emasculated and incapable of self-government did
the people of England become during their "tutelage" that, when Rome at
last withdrew, they found themselves totally unfitted for
self-government, much more for facing a foreign enemy. As the last, and
best, historian of the English people tells us, the purely despotic
system of the imperial government "by crushing all local independence,
crushed all local vigor. Men forgot how to fight for their country when
they forgot how to govern it."[3] The end was that, through six
centuries more, England was overrun, first by those of one race, and
then by those of another, until the Normans established themselves in it
as conquerors; and then, and not until then, the deteriorating effect of
a system of long continued "tutelage" ceased to be felt, and the
islanders became by degrees the most energetic, virile, and
self-sustaining of races. As nearly, therefore, as can be historically
stated, it took eight centuries for the people of England to overcome
the injurious influence of four centuries of just such a system as it is
now proposed by us to inflict on the Philippines.[4] Hindostan would
furnish another highly suggestive example of the educational effects of
"tutelage" on a race. After a century and a half of that British
"tutelage," what progress has India made towards fitness for
self