ity to learn. It might be remembered that we have
encountered some varieties of conditions already. The work in Florida
was different from that at Plymouth Rock; Louisiana and Texas showed
again new sets of conditions; California others; Puget Sound and Alaska
still others; and we did not always have unbroken success and plain
sailing from the outset in any of them.

It is said we cannot colonize the tropics, because our people cannot
labor there. Perhaps not, especially if they refuse to obey the prudent
precautions which centuries of experience have enjoined upon others.
But what, then, are we going to do with Porto Rico? How soon are our
people going to flee from Arizona? And why is life impossible to
Americans in Manila and Cebu and Iloilo, but attractive to the throngs
of Europeans who have built up those cities? Can we mine all over the
world, from South Africa to the Klondike, but not in Palawan? Can we
grow tobacco in Cuba, but not in Cebu; or rice in Louisiana, but not in
Luzon?

An alarm is raised that our laboring classes are endangered by
competition with cheap tropical labor or its products. How? The
interpretation of the Constitution which would permit that is the
interpretation which has been repudiated in an unbroken line of
decisions for over half a century. Only one possibility of danger to
American labor exists in our new possessions--the lunacy, or worse, of
the dreamers who want to prepare for the admission of some of them as
States in the American Union. Till then we can make any law we like to
prevent the immigration of their laborers, and any tariff we like to
regulate the admission of their products.

It is said we are pursuing a fine method for restoring order, by
prolonging the war we began for humanity in order to force liberty and
justice on an unwilling people at the point of the bayonet. The sneer
is cheap. How else have these blessings been generally diffused? How
often in the history of the world has barbarism been replaced by
civilization without bloodshed? How were our own liberty and justice
established and diffused on this continent? Would the process have been
less bloody if a part of our own people had noisily taken the side of
the English, the Mexican, or the savage, and protested against "extreme
measures"?

Some say a war to extend freedom in Cuba or elsewhere is right, and
therefore a duty; but the war in the Philippines now is purely selfish,
and therefore a crime. The pr