influence. Our relation to them is
purely the accident of recent war. We are not in honor bound to hold
them, if we can honorably dispose of them. But we know that their
grievances differ only in kind, not in degree, from those of Cuba; and
having once freed them from the Spanish yoke, we cannot honorably
require them to go back under it again. That would be to put us in an
attitude of nauseating national hypocrisy; to give the lie to all our
professions of humanity in our interference in Cuba, if not also to
prove that our real motive was conquest. What humanity forbade us to
tolerate in the West Indies, it would not justify us in reestablishing
in the Philippines.

What, then, can we do with them? Shall we trade them for something
nearer home? Doubtless that would be permissible, if we were sure of
thus securing them a better government than that of Spain, and if it
could be done without precipitating fresh international difficulties.
But we cannot give them to our friend and their neighbor Japan without
instantly provoking the hostility of Russia, which recently interfered
to prevent a far smaller Japanese aggrandizement. We cannot give them
to Russia without a greater injustice to Japan; or to Germany or to
France or to England without raising far more trouble than we allay.
England would like us to keep them; the Continental nations would like
that better than any other control excepting Spain's or their own; and
the Philippines would prefer it to anything save the absolute
independence which they are incapable of maintaining. Having been led
into their possession by the course of a war undertaken for the sake of
humanity, shall we draw a geographical limit to our humanity, and say
we cannot continue to be governed by it in Asiatic waters because it is
too much trouble and is too disagreeable--and, besides, there may be no
profit in it?

Both war and diplomacy have many surprises; and it is quite possible
that some way out of our embarrassing possession may yet be found. The
fact is clear that many of our people do not much want it; but if a way
of relinquishing it is proposed, the one thing we are bound to insist
on is that it shall be consistent with our attitude in the war, and
with our honorable obligations to the islands we have conquered and to
civilization.

[Sidenote: Fear of them as States.]

The chief aversion to the vast accessions of territory with which we
are threatened springs from the fear that