licy of taking these islands we control into full
partnership with the States of this Union. Nor need you be much
disturbed by the interested outcries as to the injustice you do by
refusing to admit them.

When it is said you are denying the natural rights Mr. Jefferson
proclaimed, you can answer that you are giving these people, in their
distant islands, the identical form of government Mr. Jefferson himself
gave to the territories on this continent which he bought. When it is
said you are denying our own cardinal doctrine of self-government, you
can point to the arrangements for establishing every particle of
self-government with which these widely different tribes can be safely
trusted, consistently with your responsibility for the preservation of
order and the protection of life and property in that archipelago, and
the pledge of more the moment they are found capable of it. When you
are asked, as a leading champion[15] asked the other night at
Philadelphia, "Does your liberation of one people give you the right to
subjugate another?" you can answer him, "No; nor to allow and aid
Aguinaldo to subjugate them, either, as you proposed." When the idle
quibble that after Dewey's victory Spain had no sovereignty to cede is
repeated, it may be asked, "Why acknowledge, then, that she did cede it
in Porto Rico and relinquish it in Cuba, yet deny that she could cede
it in the Philippines?" Finally, when they tell you in mock heroics,
appropriated from the great days of the anti-slavery struggle for the
cause now of a pinchbeck Washington, that no results of the irrevocable
past two years are settled, that not even the title to our new
possessions is settled, and never will be until it is settled according
to their notions, you can answer that then the title to Massachusetts
is not settled, nor the title to a square mile of land in most of the
States from ocean to ocean. Over practically none of it did we assume
sovereignty by the consent of the inhabitants.

[15] General Carl Schurz, at the Philadelphia Anti-Imperialist
Convention, February 22, 1900.

[Sidenote: Where is your Real Interest?]

Quite possibly these controversies may embarrass the Government and
threaten the security of the party in power. New and perplexing
responsibilities often do that. But is it to the interest of the
sincere and patriotic among the discontented to produce either result?
The one thing sure is that no party in power in this co