an individual to follow his own inclinations
about marrying some needy spinster he may have felt it a duty to
befriend. Because they are helpless and needy and on our hands, must we
take them into partnership? Because we are going to help them, are we
bound to marry them?

[Sidenote: The Porto Rican Question.]

Partly through mere inadvertence, but partly also through crafty
design, the wave of generous sympathy for the suffering little island
of Porto Rico which has been sweeping over the country has come very
near being perverted into the means of turning awry the policy and
permanent course of a great Nation. To relieve the temporary distress
by recognizing the Porto Ricans as citizens, and by an extension of the
Dingley tariff to Porto Rico as a matter of constitutional right,
foreclosed the whole question.

I know it is said, plausibly enough, in some quarters, that Congress
cannot foreclose the question,--has nothing to do with it, in
fact,--but that it is a matter to be settled only by the Supreme Law of
the land, of which Congress is merely the servant. The point need not
be disputed. But it is an unquestioned part of the Supreme Law of the
land, as authoritative within its sphere and as binding as any clause
in the Constitution itself, which declares, in the duly ratified Treaty
of Paris, that the whole question of the civil rights and political
status of the inhabitants in this newly acquired property of ours shall
be reserved for the decision of Congress! Let those who invoke the
Supreme Law of the land learn and bow to it.

As to the mere duty of prompt and ample relief for the distress in
Porto Rico, there is happily not a shade of difference of opinion among
the seventy-five millions of our inhabitants. Nor was the free-trade
remedy, so vehemently recommended, important enough in itself to
provoke serious objection or delay. Cynical observers might find,
indeed, a gentle amusement in noting how in the name of humanity the
blessings of free trade were invoked by means of the demand for an
immediate application of the highest protective tariff known to the
history of economics! The very men who denounce this tariff as a
Chinese wall are the men who demand its application. They say, "Give
Porto Rico free trade," but what their proposal means is, "Deprive
Porto Rico of free trade, and put her within the barbarous Chinese
wall." Their words sound like offering her the liberty of trade with
all the world, b