le enjoyment of all of them. How near we all
believed we came to it once or twice! How manifestly, under the
incongruous hodge-podge of additions to the Union thus proposed, we
should be organizing with Satanic skill the exact conditions which have
invariably led to such downfalls elsewhere!

Before the advent of the United States, the history of the world's
efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure. Your very
school-boys are taught the reason. It was because the average of
intelligence and morality was too low; because they lacked the
self-restrained, self-governing quality developed in the Anglo-Saxon
bone and fiber through all the centuries since Runnymede; because they
grew unwieldy and lost cohesion by reason of unrelated territory, alien
races and languages, and inevitable territorial and climatic conflicts
of interest.

On questions vitally affecting the welfare of this continent it is
inconceivable, unthinkable, that even altruistic Massachusetts should
tolerate having her two Senators and thirteen Representatives
neutralized by as many from Mindanao. Yet Mindanao has a greater
population than Massachusetts, and its Mohammedan Malays are as keen
for the conduct of public affairs, can talk as much, and look as
shrewdly for the profit of it.

There are cheerful, happy-go-lucky public men who assure us that the
national digestion has been proved equal to anything. Has it? Are we
content, for example, with the way we have dealt with the negro problem
in the Southern States? Do we think the suffrage question there is now
on a permanent basis which either we or our Southern friends can be
proud of, while we lack the courage either honestly to enforce the rule
of the majority, or honestly to sanction a limitation of suffrage
within lines of intelligence and thrift? How well would our famous
national digestion probably advance if we filled up our Senate with
twelve or fourteen more Senators, representing conditions incomparably
worse?

Is it said this danger is imaginary? At this moment some of the purest
and most patriotic men in Massachusetts, along with a great many of the
very worst in the whole country, are vehemently declaring that our new
possessions are already a part of the United States; that in spite of
the treaty which reserved the question of citizenship and political
status for Congress, their people are already citizens of the United
States; and that no part of the United States can