sign of repentance. We are not sworn to good government even in our own cities. We give them self-government and that is all. The people everywhere make their own standards. The standard of Arizona is different from that of Massachusetts, and South Carolina has another still. There is no good government in America except as the people demand it. We want good government on no other terms.

China, Corea, Siam, Turkey, Tartary, Arabia and the peoples of Asia generally, "half devil and half child,' are none of them under good government. The rulers of Central America, of Venezuela, Bolivia, and, worst of all, the unspeakable Hayti are no more efficient or more virtuous than the Filipinos. As men we may care for these things and work for their improvement. As a nation they are none of our business so long as their badness of government does not harm our national interests. We have no nearer concern in the government of the Philippines, nor can we give their people a government any better than they know how to demand. We might do so possibly, but we shall not. We are not in "knight-errantry for our health," and we " and we are in no mood for trying fancy experiments, Those among us who might lead child races to higher civilization are not likely to be called on for advice.

Others say with swelling breasts that the finger of Providence points the way for us, and we cannot choose but obey. The God of battles has punished Spain for her centuries of cruelty, corruption, and neglect, and we are but as the instrument in His hand.

There is a story of a man and his boys who got their breakfast at a tavern where food was scarce and bills were high. As they left the place they complained loudly of the bad treatment they had received. At last one of the boys spoke up: "The Lord has punished that man. I have my pocket full of his spoons."

senators objected. Gallinger and Bate thought a night session for such a purpose a very bad precedent. Mr. Tillman thought the time should be devoted to the anti-scalping bill and Mr. Chandler was anxious to discuss a ticket brokerage bill." There being no senator from Alaska to enter into trade or combination there is no hope for legislation to bring order into the territory.

In a recent address Governor Roosevelt is reported as saying:

"Have you read in the papers that an Alaskan town Wrangel) wants to be transferred to Canada? It wants to get out from under our flag merely because no one has thought it worth while to give Alaska good government. If we govern the Philippines, Cuba, Porto Rico and Hawaii as we have governed Alaska, we shall have the same results."

Mr. Brady, the excellent Governor of Alaska, says:

“There are sixty men in charge of the government of the territory. They have no interests in Alaska except to grab what they can and get away. They are like a lot of hungry codfish. Seven of these officials, eleven per cent of the entire government, are now under indictment for malfeasance in office."

"The terrible prophecy of Las Casas," says an eloquent orator, "has come true for Spain. The countless treasures of gold from her American bondsmen have been sunk forever, her empire richer than Rome's has been inherited by freemen, her proud armada has been scattered, her arms have been overwhelmed, her glory has departed. If ever retributive justice overtook an evil-doer it has overtaken and crushed this arrogant power. An army of the dead, larger by far than the whole Spanish nation, stormed the judgment seat of God demanding justice-stern, retributive justice. God heard and answered. This republic is now striking the last blow for liberty in America, an instrument of justice in the hands of an omnipotent power. In the interest of civilization, of imperative humanity, we now go forth to the rescue of the last victim, strong in the consciousness of the purity of our purpose, and the justice of our cause."

Again let us say, "The Lord has punished this nation. We have our pockets full of her spoons."

Doubtless Spain was very corrupt and very weak and very wicked, but that is not for us to judge while we have our pockets full of her spoons.

The plain fact is this: the guiding hand of Providence, in such connection as this, is mere figure of speech, intended for our own justification. Doubtless Providence plays its part in the affairs of men, but not in such fashion as this. Providence is our expression for the ultimate inevitable righteousness which rules in human history. It hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted them of low degree;" but its voice is not the "sound of popular clamor." "Fame's trumpet "does not set forth its decrees and it is not interested in increasing volume of trade.

The war with Spain was in no sense holy, unless we make it so through its results. Our victories indicate no accession of divine favor. We succeeded because we were bigger, richer, and far more capable than our enemy. Our navy was manned with trained engineers, while that of Spain was not. Our gross wealth made sure the final success of our army in spite of incompetence and favoritism which has risen to the proportions of a national shame. When we have cast aside all hopes of booty we shall be fit to sit in judgment on the sins of Spain. Till then, to say that we alone are led by Divine Providence is wanton blasphemy. Four very different impulses carried us into the war; the feeling of humanity, the love of adventure, the desire for revenge, and the hope of political capital. Strength and wealth and our prestige led us to success. The decision of history to the righteousness of the war will be determined by the motive that finally triumphs.

treasure.

UNIV
OF CA

Again, some say we went to war in the interests of humanity, civilization, and righteousness. In this end we have poured out blood and It is only fair that we should be paid for our losses. Let us fill our pockets with the spoons. It ceases to be a war for humanity when we have forced a humbled enemy, condemned without a hearing, to foot all the bills.

But we would plant the institutions of freedom in the midst of the Orient. Freedom cannot be confined. Expansion is her manifest destiny. "We are like the younger sons of England who, finding their own country inadequate, have gone forth to fill the unoccupied places of the East, and now the time comes when our children are beginning to face the conditions that hedged around our fathers and made us turn our faces towards the West. The United States on this continent have been pretty well surveyed, explored, conquered, and policed. Shall we not see to it that our children shall have as good a forward outlook as we have? We have proved our capacity to expand. We have proved our capacity to compete with any man. It were worse than folly, yea, criminal, to attempt to set back the onward march of manifest destiny."

So runs the current of yellow patriotism. But if the Anglo-Saxon has a destiny incompatible with morality and which cannot be carried out in peace, if it is bound by no pledges and must ride roughshod over the rights and wills of weaker people the sooner he is exterminated the better for the world. In like strain we are reminded that the arguments against expansion to-day were used to oppose the Louisiana purchase in Jefferson's time and the less glorious acquisition of the provinces of conquered Mexico. If expansion to Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Dakota, and California was good national policy, why not still further to the Philippines? But the difference between the one case and the others are many and self-evident. The Louisiana territory and the territory of California were adjacent to our States. They were in the temperate zone with climate in every way favorable to the Anglo-Saxon race and to the personal activity on which free institutions depend. They were virtually uninhabited districts, being peopled chiefly by nomad barbarians who made no use of the land, and whose rights the Anglo-Saxon has never cared to consider. The first governments were established by the free men who entered them. Finally the growth of railroads and the telegraph brought this vast region almost from the first into the closest touch with the East and with the rest of the world. If it were not for the development of transportation, unforeseen by the fathers, the arguments they used against expansionism would have remained valid even as against the Louisiana purchase.

It is said that "Jefferson was a rank expansionist." But there is no record that he favored expansion for bigness' sake, the seizure or purchase of all sorts of land and all sorts of inhabitants regardless of conditions, regardless of rights, and regardless of the interests of our own people.

The Philippines are not contiguous to any land of freedom. They lie in the heart of that region which Ambrose Bierce calls "the horrid zone; Nature's asylum for degenerates." They are already densely populated-more densely than even the oldest of the United States. Their population cannot be exterminated on the one hand, nor made economically potent on the other, except through slavery. Finally the conditions of life are such as to forbid AngloSaxon colonization. Among hundreds of colonial experiments in Brazil, in India, in Africa, in China, there is not to-day such a thing as a self-supporting European colony in the tropics. White men live through officialism alone. There are military posts, so placed as to appropriate the land and enslave the people, but there is not one self-dependent, self-respecting European or American settlement.

Individual exceptions and special cases to the contrary, the Anglo-Saxon or any other civilized race degenerates in the tropics mentally, morally, physically. This statement has been lately denied in some quarters. As opposed to it has been urged the fact that Thackeray and Kipling, the most virile of British men of letters, were born in India, and many other distinguished men have first seen the light in tropical Africa or Polynesia. Several Stanford athletes are natives of Hawaii, and Cuba has furnished her full share of the men of science of the blood of Spain. But this argument indicates a confusion of ideas. Degeneration may be any one of three different kinds; race decline, personal degeneration, and social decay.

The essential of race degeneration is the continuous lowering of the mental or physical powers of each successive generation. Such a process is very slow, requiring centuries before it shows itself. It finds its cause in unwholesome conditions which destroy first the bravest, strongest, and most active, leaving the feeble, indolent, and cowardly to perpetuate the species. Military selection, or the seizure of the strong to replenish the armies, has produced race degeneration in many parts of Europe. Such degeneration has been the curse of Italy and parts of France and Switzerland and doubtless of Spain and Germany also. The dull sodden malarial heat of the tropics spares the indolent longest. In the Song of the Plague, written by some unknown British soldier, we find these words as to India:

"Cut off from the land that bore us

Betrayed by the land we find
When the brightest are gone before us
And the dullest are left behind."

The Anglo-Saxon

This is the beginning of race degeneration. in the tropics deteriorates through the survival of the indolent and the loss of fecundity; but this is met or concealed by a number of other tendencies and is not soon apparent. The birth of a Kipling, a Thackeray, or a Dole could not in any way affect the argument. The British child born in India to-day must be reared in England; and it is to be remembered that not all the regions south of the Tropic of Cancer are to be classed as tropical; most of Mexico, much of India, and the whole Andean region belong to the temperate zone. The equable climate of the Hawaiian Islands is not in any proper sense torrid.

In the tropics the tendency to personal decay is more directly evident. The swarm of malarial organisms, the loss of social restrictions, the reduced value of life, the lack of moral standards, all tend to promote individual laxity and recklessness. "Where there are no Ten Commandments," and "the best is as the worst," there, life is held cheap and men grow careless. Kipling's fable of "Duncan Parenness' tells the story of personal degeneration, and this case is typical of thousands and thousands. Vice and dissipation are confined to no zone, but in the tropics few men of northern blood can escape them.

,,

With individual deterioration goes social decay. Man becomes less careful of his dress, his social observances, his duties to others. Woman loses her regard for conventionalities, for her reputation, and for her character. The little efforts that hold society together are abandoned one by one. The spread of the "Mother Hubbard," crowding out more elaborate forms of dress, indicates a general failure of social conventionalities. The decay of society reacts on the individual. Where it is too warm or too malarial to be conventional, it is too much trouble to be decent. Without going into causes, it is sufficient to say that Anglo-Saxon colonies of self-respecting, self-governing men and women are practically confined to the temperate regions.

The annexation of the Philippines is, therefore, not a movement of expansion. We cannot expand into space already full. Our nation cannot expand where freedom cannot go. Neither the people nor the institutions of the United States can ever occupy the Philippines. The American home cannot endure there, the town-meeting cannot exist. There is no room for free laborers, no welcome for them, and no pay. The sole opening for Americans in any event will be as