g)
for a great deal more than double the value it had put upon Cuba, at
its very doors?

[4] It might, of course, have run away and left them to disorder.
That is what a pirate could have done, and would have compelled
the intervention of European governments for the protection of
their own citizens. Or it might have restored them to Spain.
Besides the desertion of natives whose aid against Manila had
been encouraged, that would have been to say that while the
United States went to war because the injustice and barbarity of
Spanish rule in the West Indies were such that they could no
longer be tolerated, it was now so eager to quit and get peace
that it was willing to reestablish that same rule in the East
Indies!

It was certain, then, that the Philippines would be retained, unless
the President and his Commissioners so construed their duty to protect
their country's interests as to throw away, in advance of popular
instruction, all possible chance of indemnity for the war. But there
was an issue of Spanish bonds, called a Philippine loan, amounting to
forty million dollars Mexican, or say a little less than twenty
millions of American money. Warned by the results of inquiry as to the
origin of the Cuban debt, the American Commissioners avoided
undertaking to assume this en bloc. But in their first statement of the
claim for cession of sovereignty in the Philippines, while intimating
their belief in their absolute right to enforce the demand on the
single ground of indemnity, they were careful to say that they were
ready to stipulate "for the assumption of any existing indebtedness of
Spain incurred for public works and improvements of a pacific character
in the Philippines." When they learned that this entire "Philippine
debt" had only been issued in 1897, that apparently a fourth had been
transferred to Cuba to carry on the war against the Cuban insurgents,
and finally against the United States, and that much of what was left
of the remainder, after satisfying the demands of officials for "costs
of negotiation," must have gone to the support of the government while
engaged in prosecuting the war against the natives in Luzon, the
American Commissioners abandoned the idea of assuming it. But even then
they resolved, in the final transfer, to fix an amount at least equal
to the face value of that debt, which could be given to Spain. She
could use it to