e United States would not
avail itself of the right to send out privateers, reserved under the
Declaration of Paris. The fast-thickening disasters of Spain prevented
her from doing it, and thus substantially completed the practice or
acquiescence of the civilized world, essential to the acceptance of a
principle in International Law. It is safe to assume that Christendom
will henceforth treat Privateering as under international ban.

The United States promoted the cause of genuine International
Arbitration by promptly and emphatically rejecting an insidious
proposal for a spurious one. It taught those who deliberately prefer
War to Arbitration, and, when beaten at it, seek then to get the
benefit of a second remedy, that honest Arbitration must come before
War, to avert its horrors, not after War, to evade its penalties.

The United States promoted peace among nations, and so served humanity,
by sternly enforcing the rule that they who bring on an unjust war must
pay for it. For years the overwhelming tendency of its people had been
against any territorial aggrandizement, even a peaceful one; but it
unflinchingly exacted the easiest, if not the only, payment Spain could
make for a war that cost us, at the lowest, from four to five hundred
million dollars, by taking Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It
requires some courage to describe this as either a violation of
International Law, or a display of unprecedented severity by an
implacable conqueror, in the very city and before the very generation
that saw the Franco-Prussian War concluded, not merely by a partition
of territory, but also by a cash payment of a thousand millions
indemnity.

The United States promoted the peaceful liberalizing of oppressive rule
over all subject peoples by making it more difficult to negotiate loans
in the markets of the world to subdue their outbreaks. For it firmly
rejected in the Cuban adjustments the immoral doctrine that an
ill-treated and revolting colony, after gaining its freedom, must still
submit to the extortion from it of the cost of the parent country's
unsuccessful efforts to subdue it. We therefore left the so-called
Cuban bonds on the hands of the Power that issued them, or of the
reckless lenders who advanced the money. At the same time the United
States strained a point elsewhere in the direction of protecting any
legitimate debt, and of dealing generously with a fallen foe, by a
payment which the most carping cri