ir friends to fear lest they have been so long accustomed to
dogmatize to boys that they have lost the faculty of reasoning with
men.

When the first duty is done, when order is restored in those commercial
centers and on that commercial highway, somebody must then be
responsible for maintaining it--either ourselves or some Power whom we
persuade to take them off our hands. Does anybody doubt what the
American people in their present temper would say to the latter
alternative?--the same people who, a fortnight ago, were ready to break
off their Joint Commission with Great Britain and take the chances,
rather than give up a few square miles of worthless land and a harbor
of which a year ago they scarcely knew the name, on the remote coast of
Alaska. Plainly it is idle now, in a government so purely dependent on
the popular will, to scheme or hope for giving the Philippine task over
to other hands as soon as order is restored. We must, then, be prepared
with a policy for maintaining it ourselves.

Of late years men have unthinkingly assumed that new territory is, in
the very nature of our Government, merely and necessarily the raw
material for future States in the Union. Colonies and dependencies, it
is now said, are essentially inconsistent with our system. But if any
ever entertained the wild dream that the instrument whose preamble says
it is ordained for the United States of _America_ could be stretched to
the China Sea, the first Tagal guns fired at friendly soldiers of the
Union, and the first mutilation of American dead that ensued, ended the
nightmare of States from Asia admitted to the American Union. For that
relief, at least, we must thank the uprising of the Tagals. It was a
Continental Union of independent sovereign States our fathers planned.
Whoever proposes to debase it with admixtures of States made up from
the islands of the sea, in any archipelago, East or West, is a bad
friend to the Republic. We may guide, protect, elevate them, and even
teach them some day to stand alone; but if we ever invite them into our
Senate and House, to help to rule us, we are the most imbecile of all
the offspring of time.

[Sidenote: The Constitutional Objection.]

Yet we must face the fact that able and conscientious men believe the
United States has no constitutional power to hold territory that is not
to be erected into States in the Union, or to govern people that are
not to be made citizens. They are able to cite g