use the United States wished indemnity
but to give a technical basis for the American claim to the Philippines.
In the same cablegram, Hay instructed the commissioners to offer Spain
ten or twenty millions for all the islands. Upon this financial basis
the treaty was finally concluded; it was signed on December 10, 1898;
and ratifications were exchanged on April 11, 1899.

The terms of the treaty provided, first, for the relinquishment of
sovereignty over Cuba by Spain. The island was to be occupied by the
United States, in whose hands its subsequent disposition was left. All
other Spanish islands in the West Indies, together with Guam in the
Ladrones, were ceded to the United States. The whole archipelago of the
Philippines, with water boundaries carefully but not quite accurately
drawn, was ceded to the United States, which by the same article agreed
to pay Spain $20,000,000. All claims for indemnity or damages between
the two nations, or either nation and the citizens of the other, were
mutually relinquished, the United States assuming the adjudication and
settlement of all claims of her own citizens against Spain.

This treaty, even more than the act of war, marked a turning point in
the relation of the United States to the outside world. So violent was
the opposition of those who disapproved, and so great the reluctance of
even the majority of those who approved, to acknowledge that the United
States had emerged from the isolated path which it had been treading
since 1823, that every effort was made to minimize the significance of
the beginning of a new era in American history. It was argued by those
delving into the past that the Philippines actually belonged to the
Western Hemisphere because the famous demarcation line drawn by Pope
Alexander VI, in 1493, ran to the west of them; it was, indeed, partly
in consequence of that line that Spain had possessed the islands. Before
Spain lost Mexico her Philippine trade had actually passed across the
Pacific, through the Mexican port of Acapulco, and across the Atlantic.
Yet these interesting historical facts were scarcely related in the
mind of the public to the more immediate and tangible fact that the
annexation of the Philippines gave the United States a far-flung
territory situated just where all the powerful nations of the world were
then centering their interest.

In opposition to those who disapproved of this extension of territory,
it was argued more cogently