lorida. When
one of the most respected in the long line of our able Secretaries of
State, Mr. William L. Marcy, negotiated a treaty in 1854 for the
annexation of the Sandwich Islands, he provided that they should be
incorporated as a State, with the same degree of sovereignty as other
States, and on perfect equality with them. The schemes prior to 1861
for the purchase or annexation of Cuba practically all looked to the
same result. Not till the annexation of San Domingo was proposed did
this feature disappear from our treaties. It is only candid to add that
the habit of regarding this as the necessary destiny of any United
States Territory as soon as it has sufficient population has been
universal. It is no modern vagary, but the practice, if not the theory,
of our whole national life, that would open the doors of our Senate and
House, and give a share in the Government to these wild-eyed newcomers
from the islands of the sea.

The calamity of admitting them cannot be overrated. Even in the case of
the best of these islands, it would demoralize and degrade the national
suffrage almost incalculably below the point already reached. To the
Senate, unwieldy now, and greatly changed in character from the body
contemplated by the Constitution, it would be disastrous. For the
present States of the Union it would be an act of folly like that of a
business firm which blindly steered for bankruptcy by freely admitting
to full partnership new members, strangers, and non-residents, not only
otherwise ill qualified, but with absolutely conflicting interests. And
it would be a distinct violation of the clause in the preamble that
"we, the people,... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of _America_."

There is the only safe ground--on the letter and the spirit of the
Constitution. It contemplated a Continental Union of sovereign States.
It limited that Union to the American Continent. The man that takes it
farther sounds its death-knell.

[Sidenote: The General Welfare.]

I have designedly left to the last any estimate of the material
interests we serve by holding on in our present course. Whatever these
may be, they are only a subordinate consideration. We are in the
Philippines, as we are in the West Indies, because duty sent us; and we
shall remain because we have no right to run away from our duty, even
if it does involve far more trouble than we foresaw when we plunged
into the war that entailed