nd "Call" talk on the subject of our recent acquisition of "Islands
beyond the Sea," and the necessity of adopting some policy, commonly
described as "Imperial," in dealing with them. This policy is, in the
minds of most people who favor it, to be indirectly modelled on the
policy heretofore so successfully pursued under somewhat similar
conditions by Great Britain. It involves, as I tried to point out in the
Lexington paper I have referred to, the abandonment or reversal of all
the fundamental principles of our government since its origin, and of
the foreign policy we have heretofore pursued. This, I submit, is
absolutely unnecessary. Another and substitute policy, purely American,
as contradistinguished from the European or British, known as
"Imperial," policy, can readily be formulated.

This essentially American policy would be based both upon our cardinal
political principles, and our recent foreign experiences. It is commonly
argued that, having destroyed the existing government in Cuba, Porto
Rico, and the Philippines, we have assumed a political responsibility,
and are under a moral obligation to provide another government in place
of that which by our action has ceased to exist. What has been our
course heretofore under similar circumstances? Precedents, I submit, at
once suggest themselves. Precedents, too, directly in point, and within
your and my easy recollection.

I refer to the course pursued by us towards Mexico in the year 1848, and
again in 1866; towards Hayti for seventy years back; and towards
Venezuela as recently as three years ago. It is said that the
inhabitants of the islands of the Antilles, and much more those of the
Philippine archipelago, are as yet unfitted to maintain a government;
and that they should be kept in a condition of "tutelage" until they are
fitted so to do. It is further argued that a stable government is
necessary, and that it is out of the question for us to permit a
condition of chronic disturbance and scandalous unrest to exist so near
our own borders as Cuba and Porto Rico. Yet how long, I would ask, did
that condition exist in Mexico? And with what results? How long has it
existed in Hayti? Has the government of Venezuela ever been "stable"?
Have we found it necessary or thought it best to establish a
governmental protectorate in any of those immediately adjacent regions?

What has been, historically, our policy--the American, as distinguished
from the European and Bri