e decision actually rendered, and it would be absurd to
stretch this mere dictum of three quarters of a century ago, relating
then, at any rate, to this continent alone, to carry the Dingley tariff
now across to the antipodes.

[Sidenote: Duties of the Hour.]

Brushing aside, then, these bugbears, gentlemen, what are the obvious
duties of the hour?

First, hold what you are entitled to. If you are ever to part with it,
wait at least till you have examined it and found out that you have no
use for it. Before yielding to temporary difficulties at the outset,
take time to be quite sure you are ready now to abandon your chance for
a commanding position in the trade of China, in the commercial control
of the Pacific Ocean, and in the richest commercial development of the
approaching century.

Next, resist admission of any of our new possessions as States, or
their organization on a plan designed to prepare them for admission.
Stand firm for the present American Union of sister States, undiluted
by anybody's archipelagos.

Make this fight easiest by making it at the beginning. Resist the first
insidious effort to change the character of this Union by leaving the
continent. The danger commences with the first extra-continental State.
We want no Porto Ricans or Cubans to be sending Senators and
Representatives to Washington to help govern the American Continent,
any more than we want Kanakas or Tagals or Visayans or Mohammedan
Malays. We will do them good and not harm, if we may, all the days of
our life; but, please God, we will not divide this Republic, the
heritage of our fathers, among them.

Resist the crazy extension of the doctrine that government derives its
just powers from the consent of the governed to an extreme never
imagined by the men who framed it, and never for one moment acted upon
in their own practice. Why should we force Jefferson's language to a
meaning Jefferson himself never gave it in dealing with the people of
Louisiana, or Andrew Jackson in dealing with those of South Carolina,
or Abraham Lincoln with the seceding States, or any responsible
statesman of the country at any period in its history in dealing with
Indians or New Mexicans or Californians or Russians? What have the
Tagals done for us that we should treat them better and put them on a
plane higher than any of these?

And next, resist alike either schemes for purely military governments,
or schemes for territorial civil governments, w