leges and
guaranties for their established church, and pledged the United States
to absolute freedom in the exercise of their religion for all these
recent Spanish subjects--pagan, Mohammedan, Confucian, or Christian.

They maintained, in the face of the most vehement opposition, not
merely of Spain, but of well-nigh all Europe, a principle vital to
oppressed people struggling for freedom--a principle without which our
own freedom could not have been established, and without which any
successful revolt against any unjust rule could be made practically
impossible. That principle is that, contrary to the prevailing rule and
practice in large transfers of sovereignty, debts do not necessarily
follow the territory if incurred by the mother country distinctly in
efforts to enslave it. Where so incurred, your representatives
persistently and successfully maintained that no attempt by the mother
country to mortgage to bondholders the revenues of custom-houses or in
any way to pledge the future income of the territory could be
recognized as a valid or binding security--that the moment the hand of
the oppressor relaxed its grasp, his claim on the future revenues of
the oppressed territory was gone. It is a doctrine that raised an
outcry in every Continental bourse, and struck terror to every gambling
European investor in national loans, floated at usurious profits, to
raise funds for unjust wars. But it is right, and one may be proud that
the United States stood like a rock, barring any road to peace which
led to loading either on the liberated territory or on the people that
had freed it the debts incurred in the wars against it. If this is not
International Law now, it will be; and the United States will have made
it.

But your representatives in Paris placed your country in no tricky
attitude of endeavoring either to evade or repudiate just obligations.
They recognized the duty of reimbursement for debts legitimately
incurred for pacific improvements or otherwise, for the real benefit of
the transferred territory. Not till it began to appear that, of the
Philippine debt of forty millions Mexican, or a little under twenty
millions of our money, a fourth had been transferred direct to aid the
war in Cuba, and the rest had probably been spent mainly in the war in
Luzon, did your representatives hesitate at its payment; and even then
they decided to give a lump sum equal to it, which could serve as a
recognition of whatever deb