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VIII
LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

This address was delivered on the invitation of the Board of Trustees, at Princeton University, in Alexander Hall, on October 21, 1899.

LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

The invitation for to-day with which Princeton honored me was accompanied with the hint that a discussion of some phase of current public affairs would not be unwelcome. That phase which has for the past year or two most absorbed public attention is now more absorbing than ever. Elsewhere I have already spoken upon it, more, perhaps, than enough. But I cannot better obey the summons of this honored and historic University, or better deserve the attention of this company of scholars, gentlemen, and patriots, than by saying with absolute candor what its present aspects prompt.

Questions that have been Disposed of.

And first, the chaos of opinion into which the country was thrown by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War ceases to be wholly without form and void. The discussions of a year have clarified ideas; and on some points we may consider that the American people have substantially reached definite conclusions.

There is no need, therefore, to debate laboriously before you whether Dewey was right in going to Manila. Everybody now realizes that, once war was begun, absolutely the most efficient means of making it speedily and overwhelmingly victorious, as well as of defending the most exposed half of our own coast, was to go to Manila. "Find the Spanish fleet and destroy it" was as wise an order as the President ever issued, and he was equally wise in choosing the man to carry it out.

So, also, there is no need to debate whether Dewey was right in staying there. From that come his most enduring laurels. The American people admire him for the battle which sank the Spanish navy; but they trust and love him for the months of trial and triumph that followed. The Administration that should have ordered him to abandon the Eastern foothold he had conquered for his country—to sail away like a sated pirate from the port where his victory broke down all civilized authority but our own, and his presence alone prevented domestic anarchy and foreign spoliation—would have deserved to be hooted out of the capital.

So, again, there is no need to debate whether the Peace Commissioners should have thrown away in Paris what Dewey had won in Manila. The public servant who, without instructions, should in a gush of irresponsible sentimentality abandon great possessions to which his country is justly entitled, whether by conquest or as indemnity for unjust war, would be not only an unprofitable but a faithless servant. It was their obvious duty to hold what Dewey had won, at least till the American people had time to consider and decide otherwise.

Is there any need to debate whether the American people will abandon it now? Those who have a fancy for that species of dialectics may weigh the chances, and evolve from circumstances of their own imagination, and canons of national and international obligation of their own manufacture, conclusions to their own liking. I need not consume much of your time in that unprofitable pursuit. We may as well, here and now, keep our feet on solid ground, and deal with facts as they are. The American people are in lawful possession of the Philippines, with the assent of all Christendom, with a title as indisputable as the title to California; and, though the debate will linger for a while, and perhaps drift unhappily into partizan contention, the generation is yet unborn that will see them abandoned to the possession of any other Power. The Nation that scatters principalities as a prodigal does his inheritance is too sentimental and moon-shiny for the Nineteenth Century or the Twentieth, and too unpractical for Americans of any period. It may flourish in Arcadia or Altruria, but it does not among the sons of the Pilgrims, or on the continent they subdued by stern struggle to the uses of civilization.

Nevertheless, our people did stop to consider very carefully their constitutional powers. I believe we have reached a point also where the result of that consideration may be safely assumed. The constitutional arguments have been fully presented and the expositions and decisions marshaled. It is enough now to say that the preponderance of constitutional authorities, with Gouverneur Morris, Daniel Webster, and Thomas H. Benton at their head, and the unbroken tendency of decisions by the courts of the United States for at least the last fifty years, from Mr. Chief Justice Waite and Mr. Justice Miller and Mr. Justice Stanley Matthews, of the Supreme Court, down to the very latest utterance on the subject, that of Mr. Justice Morrow of the Circuit Court of Appeals, sustain the power to acquire "territory or other property" anywhere, and govern it as we please.⁹ Inhabitants of such territory (not obviously incapable) are secure in the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution; but they have no political rights under it, save as Congress confers them. The evidence in support of this view has been fully set forth, examined, and weighed, and, unless I greatly mistake, a popular decision on the subject has been reached. The constitutional power is no longer seriously disputed, and even those who raised the doubt do not seem now to rely upon it.

Contributions to International Law and Morality.

In thus summarizing what has been already settled or disposed of in our dealings with the questions of the war, I may be permitted to pause for a moment on the American contributions it brought about to international morality and law. On the day on which the American Peace Commissioners to Paris sailed for home after the ceremonial courtesy with which their labors were concluded, the most authoritative journal in the world published an interview with the eminent President of the corresponding Spanish Commission, then and for some time afterward President also of the Spanish Senate, in which he was reported as saying: "We knew in advance that we should have to deal with an implacable conqueror, who would in no way concern himself with any pre-existing International Law, but whose sole object was to reap from victory the largest possible advantage. This conception of International Law is absolutely new; it is no longer a case of might against right, but of might without right.... The Americans have acted as vainqueurs parvenus."¹⁰

Much may be pardoned to the anguish of an old and trusted public servant over the misfortunes of his native land. We may even, in our sympathy, endeavor to forget what country it was that proposed to defy the agreements of the Conference of Paris and the general judgment of nations by resorting to privateering, or what country it was that preferred to risk becoming an asylum for the criminals of a continent rather than revive, even temporarily, that basic and elementary implement of modern international justice, an extradition treaty, which had been in force with acceptable results for over twenty years. But when Americans are stigmatized as "vainqueurs parvenus," who by virtue of mere strength violate International Law against a prostrate foe, and when one of the ablest of their American critics encourages the Spanish contention by talking of our "bulldog diplomacy at Paris," it gives us occasion to challenge the approval of the world—as the facts amply warrant—for the scrupulous conformity to existing International Law, and the important contributions to its beneficent advancement that have distinguished the action of the United States throughout these whole transactions. Having already set these forth in some detail before a foreign audience,¹¹ I must not now do more than offer the briefest summary.

The United States ended the toleration of Privateering. It was perfectly free to commission privateers on the day war was declared. Spain was equally free, and it was proclaimed from Madrid that the Atlantic would soon swarm with them, sweeping American commerce from the ocean. Under these circumstances one of the very first and noblest acts of the President was to announce that the United States would not avail itself of the right to send out privateers, reserved under the Declaration of Paris. The fast-thickening disasters of Spain prevented her from doing it, and thus substantially completed the practice or acquiescence of the civilized world, essential to the acceptance of a principle in International Law. It is safe to assume that Christendom will henceforth treat Privateering as under international ban.

The United States promoted the cause of genuine International Arbitration by promptly and emphatically rejecting an insidious proposal for a spurious one. It taught those who deliberately prefer War to Arbitration, and, when beaten at it, seek then to get the benefit of a second remedy, that honest Arbitration must come before War, to avert its horrors, not after War, to evade its penalties.

The United States promoted peace among nations, and so served humanity, by sternly enforcing the rule that they who bring on an unjust war must pay for it. For years the overwhelming tendency of its people had been against any territorial aggrandizement, even a peaceful one; but it unflinchingly exacted the easiest, if not the only, payment Spain could make for a war that cost us, at the lowest, from four to five hundred million dollars, by taking Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It requires some courage to describe this as either a violation of International Law, or a display of unprecedented severity by an implacable conqueror, in the very city and before the very generation that saw the Franco-Prussian War concluded, not merely by a partition of territory, but also by a cash payment of a thousand millions indemnity.

The United States promoted the peaceful liberalizing of oppressive rule over all subject peoples by making it more difficult to negotiate loans in the markets of the world to subdue their outbreaks. For it firmly rejected in the Cuban adjustments the immoral doctrine that an ill-treated and revolting colony, after gaining its freedom, must still submit to the extortion from it of the cost of the parent country's unsuccessful efforts to subdue it. We therefore left the so-called Cuban bonds on the hands of the Power that issued them, or of the reckless lenders who advanced the money. At the same time the United States strained a point elsewhere in the direction of protecting any legitimate debt, and of dealing generously with a fallen foe, by a payment which the most carping critic will some day be ashamed to describe as "buying the inhabitants of the Philippines at two dollars a head."¹²

All these are acts distinctly in accord with International Law so far as it exists and applies, and distinctly tending to promote its humane and Christian extension. Let me add, in a word, that the peace negotiations in no way compromised or affected the Monroe Doctrine, which stands as firm as ever, though much less important with the disappearance of any probable opposition to it; and that the prestige they brought smoothed the way for the one hopeful result of the Czar's Conference at The Hague, a response to the American proposal for a permanent International Court of Arbitration.

A trifling but characteristic inaccuracy concerning the Peace Commission may as well be corrected before the subject is left. This is the statement, apparently originating from Malay sources, but promptly indorsed in this country by unfriendly critics, to the effect that the representative of Aguinaldo was uncivilly refused a hearing in Paris. It was repeated, inadvertently, no doubt, with many other curious distortions of historic facts, only the other day, by a distinguished statesman in Chicago.¹³ As he put it, the doors were slammed in their faces in Washington as well as in Paris. Now, whatever might have happened, the door was certainly never slammed in their faces in Paris, for they never came to it. On the contrary, every time Mr. Agoncillo approached any member of the Commission on the subject, he was courteously invited to send the Commissioners a written request for a hearing, which would, at any rate, receive immediate consideration. No such request ever came, and any Filipino who wrote for a hearing in Paris was heard.

The Present Duty.

Meanwhile we are now in the midst of hostilities with a part of the native population, originating in an unprovoked attack upon our troops in the city they had wrested from the Spaniards, before final action on the treaty. It is easy to say that we ought not to have got into this conflict, and to that I might agree. "I tell you, they can't put you in jail on that charge," said the learned and disputatious counsel to the client who had appealed from his cell for help. "But I am in," was the sufficient answer. The question just then was not what might have been done, but what can be done. I wish to urge that we can only end this conflict by manfully fighting through it. The talk one hears that the present situation calls for "diplomacy" seems to be mistimed. That species of diplomacy which consists in the tact of prompt action in the right line at the right time might, quite possibly, have prevented the present hostilities. Any diplomacy now would seem to our Tagal antagonists the raising of the white flag—the final proof that the American people do not sustain their Army in the face of unprovoked attack. Every witness who came before the American Peace Commission in Paris, or sent it a written statement, English, German, Belgian, Malay, or American, said the same thing. Absolutely the one essential for dealing with the Filipinos was to convince them at the very outset that what you began you stood to; that you did not begin without consideration of right and duty, or quail then before opposition; that your purpose was inexorable and your power irresistible, while submission to it would always insure justice. On the contrary, once let them suspect that protests would dissuade and turbulence deter you, and all the Oriental instinct for delay and bargaining for better terms is aroused, along with the special Malay genius for intrigue and double-dealing, their profound belief that every man has his price, and their childish ignorance as to the extent to which stump speeches here against any Administration can cause American armies beyond the seas to retreat.

No; the toast which Henry Clay once gave in honor of an early naval hero fits the present situation like a glove. He proposed "the policy which looks to peace as the end of war, and war as the means of peace." In that light I maintain that the conflict we are prosecuting is in the line of national necessity and duty; that we cannot turn back; that the truest humanity condemns needless delay or half-hearted action, and demands overwhelming forces and irresistible onset.

Eliminate Temporary Discouragements.

But in considering this duty, just as in estimating the Treaty of Paris, we have the right to eliminate all account of the trifling success, so far, in the Philippines, or of the great trouble and cost. What it was right to do there, and what we are bound to do now, must not be obscured by faults of hesitation or insufficient preparation, for which neither the Peace Commissioners nor the people are responsible. I had occasion to say before a college audience last June what I now repeat with the additional emphasis subsequent events have warranted—that the difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own making; and I repeat that it is still not for us, here and now, to apportion the blame. We have not the knowledge to say just who, or whether any man or body, is wholly at fault. What we do know is that the course of hesitation and inaction which the Nation pursued in face of an openly maturing attack was precisely the policy sure to give us the greatest trouble, and that we are now paying the penalty. If the opposite course had been taken at the outset—unless all the testimony from foreign observers and from our own officers is at fault—there would have been either no outbreak at all, or only one easily controlled and settled to the general satisfaction of most of the civilized and semi-civilized inhabitants of the island.

On the personal and partizan disputes already lamentably begun, as to senatorial responsibility, congressional responsibility, or the responsibility of this or that executive officer, we have no occasion here to enter. What we have a right to insist on is that our general policy in the Philippines shall not be shaped now merely by the just discontent with the bad start. The reports of continual victories, that roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted—all these are beside the real question. They must not obscure the duty of restoring order in the regions where our troops have been assailed, or prejudice our subsequent course.

I venture to say of that course that neither our duty nor our interest will permit us to stop short of a pacification which can only end in the establishment of such local self-government as the people are found capable of conducting, and its extension just as far and as fast as the people prove fit for it.

Pacification and Natural Course of Organization.

The natural development thus to be expected would probably proceed safely, along the lines of least resistance, about in this order: First, and till entirely clear that it is no longer needed, Military Government. Next, the rule of either Military or Civil Governors (for a considerable time probably the former), relying gradually more and more on native agencies. Thirdly, the development of Dependencies, with an American Civil Governor, with their foreign relations and their highest courts controlled by us, and their financial system largely managed by members of a rigidly organized and jealously protected American Civil Service, but in most other respects steadily becoming more self-governing. And, finally, autonomous governments, looking to us for little save control of their foreign relations, profiting by the stability and order the backing of a powerful nation guarantees, cultivating more and more intimate trade and personal relations with that nation, and coming to feel themselves participants of its fortunes and renown.

Such a course Congress, after full investigation and deliberation, might perhaps wisely formulate. Such a course, with slight modifications to meet existing limitations as to his powers, has already been entered upon by the President, and can doubtless be carried on indefinitely by him until Congress acts. This action should certainly not be precipitate. The system demands most careful study, not only in the light of what the English and Dutch, the most successful holders of tropical countries, have done, but also in the light of the peculiar and varied circumstances that confront us on these different and distant islands, and among these widely differing races—circumstances to which no previous experience exactly applies, and for which no uniform system could be applicable. If Congress should take as long a time before action to study the problem as it has taken in the Sandwich Islands, or even in Alaska, the President's power would still be equal to the emergency, and the policy, while flexible, could still be made as continuous, coherent, and practical as his best information and ability would permit.

Evasions of Duty.

Against such a conscientious and painstaking course in dealing with the grave responsibilities that are upon us in the East, two lines of evasion are sure to threaten. The one is the policy of the upright but short-sighted and strictly continental patriot—the same which an illustrious statesman of another country followed in the Sudan: "Scuttle as quick as you can."

The other is the policy of the exuberant patriot who believes in the universal adaptability and immediate extension of American institutions. He thinks all men everywhere as fit to vote as himself, and wants them for partners. He is eager to have them prepare at once, in our new possessions, first in the West Indies, then in the East, to send Senators and Representatives to Congress, and his policy is: "Make Territories of them now, and States in the American Union as soon as possible." I wish to speak with the utmost respect of the sincere advocates of both theories, but must say that the one seems to me to fall short of a proper regard for either our duty or our interest, and the other to be national suicide.

Gentlemen in whose ability and patriotism we all have confidence have lately put the first of these policies for evading our duty in the form of a protest "against the expansion and establishment of the dominion of the United States, by conquest or otherwise, over unwilling peoples in any part of the globe." Of this it may be said, first, that any application of it to the Philippines probably assumes a factional and temporary outbreak to represent a settled unwillingness. New Orleans was as "unwilling," when Mr. Jefferson annexed it, as Aguinaldo has made Manila; and Aaron Burr came near making the whole Louisiana Territory far worse. Mr. Lincoln, you remember, always believed the people of North Carolina not unwilling to remain in the Union, yet we know what they did. But next, this protest contemplates evading the present responsibility by a reversal of our settled policy any way. Mr. Lincoln probably never doubted the unwillingness of South Carolina to remain in the Union, but that did not change his course. Mr. Seward never inquired whether the Alaskans were unwilling or not. The historic position of the United States, from the day when Jefferson braved the envenomed anti-expansion sentiment of his time and bought the territory west of the Mississippi, on down, has been to consider, not the willingness or unwillingness of any inhabitants, whether aboriginal or colonists, but solely our national opportunity, our own duty, and our own interests.

Is it said that this is Imperialism? That implies usurpation of power, and there is absolutely no ground for such a charge against this Administration at any one stage in these whole transactions. If any complaint here is to lie, it must relate to the critical period when we were accepting responsibility for order at Manila, and must be for the exercise of too little power, not too much. It is not Imperialism to take up honestly the responsibility for order we incurred before the world, and continue under it, even if that should lead us to extend the civil rights of the American Constitution over new regions and strange peoples. It is not Imperialism when duty keeps us among these chaotic, warring, distracted tribes, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous, to help them, as far as their several capacities will permit, toward self-government, on the basis of those civil rights.

A terser and more taking statement of opposition has been recently attributed to a gentleman highly honored by this University and by his townsmen here. I gladly seize this opportunity, as a consistent opponent during his whole political life, to add that his words carry great weight throughout the country by reason of the unquestioned ability, courage, and patriotic devotion he has brought to the public service. He is reported as protesting simply against "the use of power in the extension of American institutions." But does not this, if applied to the present situation, seem also to miss an important distinction? What planted us in the Philippines was the use of our power in the most efficient naval and military defense then available for our own institutions where they already exist, against the attack of Spain. If the responsibility entailed by the result of these acts in our own defense does involve some extension of our institutions, shall we therefore run away from it? If a guaranty to chaotic tribes of the civil rights secured by the American Constitution does prove to be an incident springing from the discharge of the duty that has rested upon us from the moment we drove Spain out, is that a result so objectionable as to warrant us in abandoning our duty?

There is, it is true, one other alternative—the one which Aguinaldo himself is said to have suggested, and which has certainly been put forth in his behalf with the utmost simplicity and sincerity by a conspicuous statesman at Chicago. We might at once solicit peace from Aguinaldo. We might then encourage him to extend his rule over the whole country,—Catholic, pagan, and Mohammedan, willing and unwilling alike,—and promise him whatever aid might be necessary for that task. Meantime, we should undertake to protect him against outside interference from any European or Asiatic nation whose interests on that oceanic highway and in those commercial capitals might be imperiled!¹⁴ I do not desire to discuss that proposition. And I submit to candid men that there are just those three courses, and no more, now open to us—to run away, to protect Aguinaldo, or to back up our own army and firmly hold on!

Objections to Duty.

If this fact be clearly perceived, if the choice between these three courses be once recognized as the only choice the present situation permits, our minds will be less disturbed by the confused cries of perplexity and discontent that still fill the air. Thus men often say, "If you believe in liberty for yourself, why refuse it to the Tagals?" That is right; they should have, in the degree of their capacity, the only kind of liberty worth having in the world, the only kind that is not a curse to its possessors and to all in contact with them—ordered liberty, under law, for which the wisdom of man has not yet found a better safeguard than the guaranties of civil rights in the Constitution of the United States. Who supposes that to be the liberty for which Aguinaldo is fighting? What his people want, and what the statesman at Chicago wishes us to use the Army and Navy of the United States to help him get, is the liberty to rule others—the liberty first to turn our own troops out of the city and harbor we had in our own self-defense captured from their enemies; the liberty next to rule that great commercial city, and the tribes of the interior, instead of leaving us to exercise the rule over them that events have forced upon us, till it is fairly shown that they can rule themselves.

Again it is said, "You are depriving them of freedom." But they never had freedom, and could not have it now. Even if they could subdue the other tribes in Luzon, they could not establish such order on the other islands and in the waters of the archipelago as to deprive foreign Powers of an immediate excuse for interference. What we are doing is in the double line of preventing otherwise inevitable foreign seizure and putting a stop to domestic war.

"But you cannot fit people for freedom. They must fit themselves, just as we must do our own crawling and stumbling in order to learn to walk." The illustration is unfortunate. Must the crawling baby, then, be abandoned by its natural or accidental guardian, and left to itself to grow strong by struggling, or to perish, as may happen? Must we turn the Tagals loose on the foreigners in Manila, and on their enemies in the other tribes, that by following their instincts they may fit themselves for freedom?

Again, "It will injure us to exert power over an unwilling people, just as slavery injured the slaveholders themselves." Then a community is injured by maintaining a police. Then a court is injured by rendering a just decree, and an officer by executing it. Then it is a greater injury, for instance, to stop piracy than to suffer from it. Then the manly exercise of a just responsibility enfeebles instead of developing and strengthening a nation.

"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." "No man is good enough to govern another against his will." Great truths, from men whose greatness and moral elevation the world admires. But there is a higher authority than Jefferson or Lincoln, Who said: "If a man smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." Yet he who acted literally on even that divine injunction toward the Malays that attacked our Army in Manila would be a congenital idiot to begin with, and his corpse, while it lasted, would remain an object-lesson of how not to deal with the present stage of Malay civilization and Christianity.

Why mourn over our present course as a departure from the policy of the fathers? For a hundred years the uniform policy which they began and their sons continued has been acquisition, expansion, annexation, reaching out to remote wildernesses far more distant and inaccessible then than the Philippines are now—to disconnected regions like Alaska, to island regions like Midway, the Guano Islands, the Aleutians, the Sandwich Islands, and even to quasi-protectorates like Liberia and Samoa. Why mourn because of the precedent we are establishing? The precedent was established before we were born. Why distress ourselves with the thought that this is only the beginning, that it opens the door to unlimited expansion? The door is wide open now, and has been ever since Livingston in Paris jumped at Talleyrand's offer to sell him the wilderness west of the Mississippi instead of the settlements eastward to Florida, which we had been trying to get; and Jefferson eagerly sustained him. For the rest, the task that is laid upon us now is not proving so easy as to warrant this fear that we shall soon be seeking unlimited repetitions of it.

Evasion by Embrace.

That danger, in fact, can come only if we shirk our present duty by the second of the two alternative methods of evasion I have mentioned—the one favored by the exuberant patriot who wants to clasp Cuban, Kanaka, and Tagal alike to his bosom as equal partners with ourselves in our inheritance from the fathers, and take them all into the Union as States.