ultimately they must be
admitted into the Union as States. No public duty is more urgent at
this moment than to resist from the very outset the concession of such
a possibility. In no circumstances likely to exist within a century
should they be admitted as States of the Union. The loose, disunited,
and unrelated federation of independent States to which this would
inevitably lead, stretching from the Indian Archipelago to the
Caribbean Sea, embracing all climes, all religions, all races,--black,
yellow, white, and their mixtures,--all conditions, from pagan
ignorance and the verge of cannibalism to the best product of centuries
of civilization, education, and self-government, all with equal rights
in our Senate and representation according to population in our House,
with an equal voice in shaping our national destinies--that would, at
least in this stage of the world, be humanitarianism run mad, a
degeneration and degradation of the homogeneous, continental Republic
of our pride too preposterous for the contemplation of serious and
intelligent men. Quite as well might Great Britain now invite the
swarming millions of India to send rajas and members of the lower
House, in proportion to population, to swamp the Lords and Commons and
rule the English people. If it had been supposed that even Hawaii, with
its overwhelming preponderance of Kanakas and Asiatics, would become a
State, she could not have been annexed. If the territories we are
conquering must become States, we might better renounce them at once
and place them under the protectorate of some humane and friendly
European Power with less nonsense in its blood.

This is not to deny them the freest and most liberal institutions they
are capable of sustaining. The people of Sitka and the Aleutian Islands
enjoy the blessings of ordered liberty and free institutions, but
nobody dreams of admitting them to Statehood. New Mexico has belonged
to us for half a century, not only without oppression, but with all the
local self-government for which she was prepared; yet, though an
integral part of our continent, surrounded by States, and with an
adequate population, she is still not admitted to Statehood. Why should
not the people on the island of Porto Rico, or even of Cuba, prosper
and be happy for the next century under a rule similar in the main to
that under which their kinsmen of New Mexico have prospered for the
last half-century?

With some necessary modifications