hey are
training, to exert the greatest influence and accomplish the most good
by working intelligently in line with the patriotic aspirations and the
inevitable tendencies of the American people, rather than against them.
Unite the efforts of all men of good will to make the appointment of
any person to these new and strange duties beyond seas impossible save
for proved fitness, and his removal impossible save for cause. Rally
the colleges and the churches, and all they influence, the brain and
the conscience of the country, in a combined and irresistible demand
for a genuine, trained, and pure Civil Service in our new possessions,
that shall put to shame our detractors, and show to the world the
Americans of this generation, equal still to the work of civilization
and colonization, and leading the development of the coming century as
bravely as their fathers led it in the last.

IX

A CONTINENTAL UNION

This speech was delivered on the invitation of the Massachusetts Club,
at their regular dinner in Boston, March 3, 1900.

A CONTINENTAL UNION

A third of a century ago I had the honor to be a guest at this club,
which met then, as now, in Young's Hotel. It has ever since been a
pleasure to recall the men of Boston who gathered about the board,
interested, as now, in the affairs of the Republic to which they were
at once ornament and defense. Frank Bird sat at the head. Near him was
Henry Wilson. John M. Forbes was here, and John A. Andrew, and George
S. Boutwell, and George L. Stearns, and many another, eager in those
times of trial to seek and know the best thing to be done to serve this
country of our pride and love. They were practical business men, true
Yankees in the best sense; and they spent no time then in quarreling
over how we got into our trouble. Their one concern was how to get out
to the greatest advantage of the country.

Honored now by another opportunity to meet with the club, I can do no
better than profit by this example of your earlier days. You have asked
me to speak on some phase of the Philippine question. I would like to
concentrate your attention upon the present and practical phase, and to
withdraw it for the time from things that are past and cannot be
changed.

[Sidenote: Things that Cannot be Undone.]

Stare decisis. There are some things settled. Have we not a better and
more urgent use for our time now than in showing why some of us would
have liked them settled d