fear of
being great, would be so astonishing a reversal of a policy steadfastly
maintained by the whole line of our responsible statesmen since 1823 as
to be grotesque.

John Quincy Adams, writing in April of that year, as Secretary of
State, to our Minister to Spain, pointed out that the dominion of Spain
upon the American continents, North and South, was irrevocably gone,
but warned him that Cuba and Porto Rico still remained nominally
dependent upon her, and that she might attempt to transfer them. That
could not be permitted, as they were "natural appendages to the North
American continent." Subsequent statements turned more upon what Mr.
Adams called "the transcendent importance of Cuba to the United
States"; but from that day to this I do not recall a line in our state
papers to show that the claim of the United States to control the
future of Porto Rico as well as of Cuba was ever waived. As to Cuba,
Mr. Adams predicted that within half a century its annexation would be
indispensable. "There are laws of political as well as of physical
gravitation," he said; and "Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own
unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can
gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law
of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom." If Cuba is incapable of
self-support, and could not therefore be left, in the cheerful language
of Congress, to her own people, how much less could little Porto Rico
stand alone?

There remains the alternative of giving Porto Rico back to Spain at the
end of the war. But if we are warranted now in making war because the
character of Spanish rule in Cuba was intolerable, how could we justify
ourselves in handing back Porto Rico to the same rule, after having
once emancipated her from it? The subject need not be pursued. To
return Porto Rico to Spain, after she is once in our possession, is as
much beyond the power of the President and of Congress as it was to
preserve the peace with Spain after the destruction of the _Maine_ in
the harbor of Havana. From that moment the American people resolved
that the flag under which this calamity was possible should disappear
forever from the Western hemisphere, and they will sanction no peace
that permits it to remain.

The question of the Philippines is different and more difficult. They
are not within what the diplomatists of the world would recognize as
the legitimate sphere of American