our trade
have been more than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them now,
and when the American people wake up to a wrong they are apt to right
it.

More important still should be the improvement in the general public
service at home and in our new possessions. New duties must bring new
methods. Ward politics were banished from India and Egypt as the price
of successful administration, and they must be excluded from Porto Rico
and Luzon. The practical common sense of the American people will soon
see that any other course is disastrous. Gigantic business interests
must come to reinforce the theorists in favor of a reform that shall
really elevate and purify the Civil Service.

Hand in hand with these benefits to ourselves, which it is the duty of
public servants to secure, go benefits to our new wards and benefits to
mankind. There, then, is what the United States is to "stand for" in
all the resplendent future: the rights and interests of its own
Government; the general welfare of its own people; the extension of
ordered liberty in the dark places of the earth; the spread of
civilization and religion, and a consequent increase in the sum of
human happiness in the world.

VIII

LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

This address was delivered on the invitation of the Board of Trustees,
at Princeton University, in Alexander Hall, on October 21, 1899.

LATER ASPECTS OF OUR NEW DUTIES

The invitation for to-day with which Princeton honored me was
accompanied with the hint that a discussion of some phase of current
public affairs would not be unwelcome. That phase which has for the
past year or two most absorbed public attention is now more absorbing
than ever. Elsewhere I have already spoken upon it, more, perhaps, than
enough. But I cannot better obey the summons of this honored and
historic University, or better deserve the attention of this company of
scholars, gentlemen, and patriots, than by saying with absolute candor
what its present aspects prompt.

[Sidenote: Questions that have been Disposed of.]

And first, the chaos of opinion into which the country was thrown by
the outbreak of the Spanish-American War ceases to be wholly without
form and void. The discussions of a year have clarified ideas; and on
some points we may consider that the American people have substantially
reached definite conclusions.

There is no need, therefore, to debate laboriously before you whether
Dewey was righ