rch morning of 1900, at which our Government could have stopped with
honor, was at the outset. I, for one, would gladly have stopped there.
How was it then with some at the West who are discontented now? Shake
not your gory locks at me or at my fellow-citizens in the East. You
cannot say we did it. In 1898, just as a few years earlier in the
debate about Venezuela, the loudest calls for a belligerent policy came
not from the East, "the cowardly, commercial East," as we were
sometimes described, but from the patriotic and warlike West. The
farther West you came, the louder the cry for war, till it reached its
very climax on what we used to call the frontier, and was sent
thundering Eastward upon the National Capital in rolling reverberations
from the Sierras and the Rockies which few public men cared to defy. At
that moment, perhaps, if this popular and congressional demand had not
pushed us forward, we might have stopped with honor--certainly not
later. From the day war was flagrant down to this hour there has been
no forward step which a peremptory national or international obligation
did not require. To the mandate alone of Duty, stern daughter of the
voice of God, the American people have bowed, as, let us hope, they
always will. It is not true that, in the final decision as to any one
step in the great movement hitherto, our interests have been first or
chiefly considered.

But in all these constitutional discussions to which we have referred,
one clause in the Constitution has been curiously thrust aside. The
framers placed it on the very forefront of the edifice they were
rearing, and there declared for our instruction and guidance that "the
people do ordain and establish this Constitution ... to promote the
general welfare." By what right do statesmen now venture to think that
they can leave our national interests out of the account? Who and where
is the sentimentalist who arraigns us for descending to too sordid a
level when we recognize our interest to hold what the discharge of duty
has placed in our hand? Since when has it been statesmanship to shut
our eyes to the interests of our own country, and patriotism to
consider only the interests or the wishes of others? For my own part, I
confess to a belief in standing up first for my own, and find it
difficult to cherish much respect for the man who won't: first for my
own family rather than some other man's; first for my own city and
State rather than for somebo