so lifting this
Nation of seventy-five millions bodily backward two years on its path,
there are many who are still putting forth all their energies in
straining our Constitution and defying our history, to show that we
have no possessions whose people are not entitled to citizenship and
ultimately to Statehood. Grant that, and instead of reversing engines
safely in mid-career, as they vainly hope, they must simply plunge us
over the precipice. The movement began in the demand that our Dingley
tariff--as a matter of right, not of policy, for most of these people
denounce the tariff itself as barbarous--that our Dingley tariff should
of necessity be extended over Porto Rico as an integral part of the
United States. Following an assent to this must have come inevitably
all the other rights and privileges belonging to citizenship, and then
no power could prevent the admission of the State of Porto Rico.

Some may think that in itself would be no great thing, though it is for
you to say how Massachusetts would relish having this mixed population,
a little more than half colonial Spanish, the rest negro and
half-breed, illiterate, alien in language, alien in ideas of right,
interests, and government, send in from the mid-Atlantic, nearly a
third of the way over to Africa, two Senators to balance the votes of
Mr. Hoar and Mr. Lodge; for you to say how Massachusetts would regard
the spectacle of her senatorial vote nullified, and one third of her
representation in the House offset on questions, for instance, of
sectional and purely Northern interest, in the government of this
continent, and in the administration of this precious heritage of our
fathers.

Or, suppose Massachusetts to be so little Yankee (in the best sense
still) that she could bear all this without murmur or objection--is it
to be imagined that she can lift other States in this generation to her
altruistic level? How would Kansas, for example, enjoy being balanced
in the Senate, and nearly balanced in the House, on questions relating
to the irrigation of her arid plains, or the protection of her
beet-root industry, or on any others affecting the great central
regions of this continent, by these voices from the watery waste of the
ocean? Or how would West Virginia or Oregon or Connecticut, or half a
dozen others of similar population, regard it to be actually outvoted
in their own home, on their own continent, by this Spanish and negro
waif from the mid-Atlan