POSSIBLE for us to withdraw from the Philippines.
I am rather thankful it is not given to me to solve that momentous
question." On the 5th of September, he wrote to John Bigelow: "I fear
you are right about the Philippines, and I hope the Lord will be good
to us poor devils who have to take care of them. I marvel at your
suggesting that we pay for them. I should have expected no less of your
probity; but how many except those educated by you in the school of
morals and diplomacy would agree with you? Where did I pass you on the
road of life? You used to be a little my senior [twenty-one years]; now
you are ages younger and stronger than I am. And yet I am going to be
Secretary of State for a little while."

Not all those who advocated the retention of the Philippines did so
reluctantly or under the pressure of a feeling of necessity. In the very
first settlers of our country, the missionary impulse beat strong.
John Winthrop was not less intent than Cromwell on the conquest of all
humanity by his own ideals; only he believed the most efficacious
means to be the power of example instead of force. Just now there was a
renewed sense throughout the Anglo-Saxon public that it was the duty
of the civilized to promote the civilization of the backward, and the
Cromwellian method waxed in popularity. Kipling, at the summit of his
influence, appealed to a wide and powerful public in his "White Man's
Burden," which appeared in 1899.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) towards the light:--
Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?

McKinley asked those having opinions on the subject of this burden to
write to him, and a strong call for the United States to take up her
share in the regeneration of mankind came from important representatives
of the religious public. Nor was the attitude of those different who saw
the possibilities of increased traffic with the East. The expansion of
the area of home distribution seemed a halfway house between the purely
nationalistic policy,