one, would have been content. But having chosen to go
to war, and having been speedily and overwhelmingly successful, we
should be ashamed even to think of running away from what inexorably
followed. Mark what the successive steps were, and how link by link the
chain that binds us now was forged.

The moment war was foreseen the fleet we usually have in Chinese waters
became indispensable, not merely, as before, to protect our trade and
our missionaries in China, but to checkmate the Spanish fleet, which
otherwise held San Francisco and the whole Pacific coast at its mercy.
When war was declared our fleet was necessarily ordered out of neutral
ports. Then it had to go to Manila or go home. If it went home, it left
the whole Pacific coast unguarded, save at the particular point it
touched, and we should have been at once in a fever of apprehension,
chartering hastily another fleet of the fastest ocean-going steamers we
could find in the world, to patrol the Pacific from San Diego to Sitka,
as we did have to patrol the Atlantic from Key West to Bar Harbor.
Palpably this was to go the longest way around to do a task that had to
be done in any event, as well as to demoralize our forces at the
opening of the war with a manoeuver in which our Navy has never been
expert--that of avoiding a contest and sailing away from the enemy! The
alternative was properly taken. Dewey went to Manila and sank the
Spanish fleet. We thus broke down Spanish means for controlling the
Philippines, and were left with the Spanish responsibility for
maintaining order there--responsibility to all the world, German,
English, Japanese, Russian, and the rest--in one of the great centers
and highways of the world's commerce.

But why not turn over that commercial center and the island on which it
is situated to the Tagals? To be sure! Under three hundred years of
Spanish rule barbarism on Luzon had so far disappeared that this
commercial metropolis, as large as San Francisco or Cincinnati, had
sprung up and come to be thronged by traders and travelers of all
nations. Now it is calmly suggested that we might have turned it over
to one semi-civilized tribe, absolutely without experience in governing
even itself, much less a great community of foreigners, probably in a
minority on the island, and at war with its other inhabitants--a tribe
which has given the measure of its fitness for being charged with the
rights of foreigners and the care of a commercia