tic?

All this, in itself, may seem to some unimportant, negligible, even
trivial. At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild
enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or
bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it. But make
its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a
State. Then behind Porto Rico stands Cuba, and behind Cuba, in time,
stand the whole of the West Indies, on whom that law of political
gravitation which John Quincy Adams described will be perpetually
acting with redoubled force. And behind them--no, far ahead of them,
abreast of Porto Rico itself--stand the Philippines! The Constitution
which our fathers reverently ordained for the United States of
_America_ is thus tortured by its professed friends into a crazy-quilt,
under whose dirty folds must huddle the United States of America, of
the West Indies, of the East Indies, and of Polynesia; and Pandemonium
is upon us.

[Sidenote: The Degradation of the Republic.]

I implore you, as thinking men, pause long enough to realize the
degradation of the Republic thus calmly contemplated by those who
proclaim this to be our constitutional duty toward our possessions. The
republican institutions I have been trained to believe in were
institutions founded, like those of New England, on the Church and the
school-house. They constitute a system only likely to endure among a
people of high virtue and high intelligence. The republican government
built up on this continent, while the most successful in the history of
the world, is also the most complicated, the most expensive, and often
the slowest. Such are its complications and checks and balances and
interdependencies, which tax the intelligence, the patience, and the
virtue of the highest Caucasian development, that it is a system
absolutely unworkable by a group of Oriental and tropical races, more
or less hostile to each other, whose highest type is a Chinese and
Malay half-breed, and among whom millions, a majority possibly, are far
below the level of the pure Malay.

What holds a nation together, unless it be community of interests,
character, and language, and contiguous territory? What would more
thoroughly insure its speedily flying to pieces than the lack of every
one of these requisites? Over and over, the clearest-eyed students of
history have predicted our own downfall even as a continental republic,
in spite of our measurab