corporations or agents of corporations, as Government officials or as members of some profession requiring higher than native fitness. There is no chance for the American workman, but for syndicates it offers great opportunities. Yes, for the syndicates who handle politics as an incident in business. But the more syndicates we can induce to leave the shelter of our flag, the better for our people. Let them take their chances without our help.

If it were possible to exterminate the Filipinos as we have destroyed the Indians, replacing their institutions and their people by ours, the political objections to annexation would, in the main, disappear whatever might be said of the moral ones.

For our treatment of the Indian, there is, in general, no moral justification. There is a good political excuse in this-that we could and did use their land in a better way than was possible to them. We have no such excuse in Luzon; we cannot use the land except as we use the lives of the people.

We cannot plant free institutions in the Orient because once planted they will not grow; if they grow they will not be free. We cannot exterminate these people, and if we did we could not use their land for our own people; we could only fill it with Asiatic colonists, Malay, Chinese, or Japanese, more of the same kind, not of our kind. Any attempt to govern the tropical possessions of the United States on democratic principles," says Mr. W. Alleyne Ireland, one of our wisest authorities, "is doomed to certain failure. It has been already shown that without forced labor, or at least some form of indentured labor, large industries cannot be developed in tropical colonies." Such forced labor can be controlled only by the compulsion of the Government as in Java, or by the activity of great corporations as in Hawaii and Trinidad.

"It is thought by many," says Mr. Ireland, "that though it may be unadvisable to grant the (tropical) colonies representative government at present, the time will soon come when the people will show themselves capable of self-government. Judging from past experience there would seem to be little hope that these pleasant anticipations will ever be realized. We look in vain for a single instance within the tropics of a really well-governed country."

The notion that in these fertile Islands our surplus working men shall find homes is the height of absurdity. Our labor leaders understand this well enough, and for once they stand together on the side of common sense. Scarcely any part of the United States is so crowded with people as Luzon or Porto Rico; in no part is the demand for labor less or its rewards so meager. Ten cents a day is not a free man's scale of wages; and no change of government can materially

alter this relation.

In the tropics the conditions of subsistence are so easy and the incentives to industry so slight that all races exposed to relaxing influences become pauperized. It is the free lunch system on a boundless scale, the environment of Nature too generous to be just, too kind to be exacting.

For the control of dependent nations and slave races the fair sounding name of Imperialism has lately come into use. It has been hailed with joy on the one hand for it is associated with armorial bearings and more than royal pomp and splendor. It has been made a term of reproach on the other, and our newspaper politicians now hasten to declare that they favor expansion only when it has no taint of Imperialism. But to our British friends nothing could be more ridiculous. You must have an iron hand or you get no profits. To cast aside Imperialism is to cast away the sole method by which tropical colonies have ever been made profitable to commerce or tolerable in politics. On the other hand these same people tell us that they have not the slightest thought of making States of Cuba or the Philippines, or of admitting the Filipinos to citizenship. if the Filipino is not a citizen of his own land, who is?

We are advised on good patrician authority that all is well, whatever we do, if we avoid the fatal mistake of admitting the brown races to political equality-of letting them govern us. We must rule them for their own good-never for our advantage. In other words, lead or drive the inferior man along, but never recognize his will, his manhood, his equality; never let him count one when he is measured against you.

These maxims should be familiar; they are the philosophy of slavery, and they only lack the claim of the right to buy and sell the bodies and souls of men. Our purchase of the Filipinos from Spain, and our subsequent treatment of the resultant slave insurrection supplies the missing element.

One plan or the other we must adopt; either self-rule or Imperialism; there is no middle course, and both under present conditions are virtually impossible. Let the friends of annexation develop some plan of government, any plan whatever, and its folly and ineffectiveness will speedily appear. To go ahead without a plan means certain disaster, and that very soon; whatever we do or do not do, there is no time to lose.

Conquest of the Orient is not expansion, for there is no room for free manhood to grow there. It is useless to disclaim Imperialism when we are red-handed in the very act. Annexation without Imperialism is sheer anarchy. Annexation with Imperialism may be much worse, for so far as it goes it means the abandonment of democracy. The Union

cannot endure "half slave, half free," half republic, half empire. We may make vassal tribes of the Filipinos, but never free States in the sense in which the name "State" applies to Maine, Iowa, or California. The Philippines can have no part in the Federal Union. Their self-government must be of a wholly different kind, the outgrowth of their own needs and dispositions. What they need is not our freedom, but some form of paternal despotism or monarchy of their own choosing which shall command their loyalty and yet keep them in peace.

"It is no man's duty to govern any other man.” Still less is it a nation's duty to govern another nation. All that the weak nations ask of the strong is: "Stand out of my sunlight and let me alone."

We have never adopted the theory that each small nation must be tributary to some other, and that each nation of the lazy tropics must have slave drivers from Europe to make its people work.

Imperialism means such a control of tropical lands that they may be economically productive or that their doors may be thrown open to commerce. It is a definite business, difficult and costly, with few rewards and many dangers. It is fairly well understood by some of those engaged in it. It has been successfully conducted under certain very narrow lines by Great Britain and by Holland, although both countries have the record of many failures before they learned the art. Germany has tried it for a little while, as have also Japan and Belgium, none of these with successful results. Spain is out of the business in final bankruptcy and her assets are in our hands for final disposition. France has made failures only, and this because she has held colonies for her own ends, regardless of their own interests.

"No sooner," says Lionel Dècle, "was the island (of Madagascar) in the hands of these (French colonial leaders) than they closed it to all foreign prospectors. They imposed prohibitive duties on all foreign goods, keeping the country for the French colonists that never came, and that never will come."

Control of the tropics has none of the glories we vulgarly associate with imperial sway. Its details are trivial, paltry and exasperating in the last degree. The more successful as to money, the more offensive to freedom. In some regions, as Guiana, no nation has yet accomplished anything either in bringing civilization or in making money, while in Java and Trinidad the results, however great, have been financial or commercial only. Every dollar made in Java has been blood money, red with the blood of Dutch soldiers on the one side and with that of the Malay people

on the other. In Jamaica, the abolition of slavery marked the end of industrial prosperity.

The voice of common British opinion is that it is our turn to take a hand in the control of the tropics. This idea is assumed in Kipling's appeal, "Take Up the White Man's Burden," and the real force of his verse is a warning that there is no easy way to success. The motive is not glory, but the profit to the world. It is our duty, with the others, to share the burden of tropical control that we may increase the wealth and commerce of the nations. There is some reason in this appeal. It is a business we cannot wholly shirk. I maintain, however, that so far as we are concerned, this is a matter purely for individual enterprise. The American merchant, missionary, and miner have taken up the white man's burden cheerfully; the American Government cannot.

"A certain class of mind," says Mr. Charles T. Lummis, "froths, at the bare suggestion that the United States cannot 'do anything any other nation can.' Well, it cannot-and remain United States. A gentleman has all the organs of a blackguard. But a gentleman cannot lie, steal, bully nor ravish. A republic cannot be a despotism. The Almighty himself cannot make two mountains without a valley between them. The one would cease to be a republic; the other would cease to be two mountains. It is no more to the reproach of the United States that it cannot be a tyrant than to God's shame that He cannot be a fool."

I notice that not one of our tried friends in England, men like Bryce, Morley, and Goldwin Smith, who understand our spirit and our laws, urge the holding of the Philippines. In England, as in America, the call to hold the Philippines is mainly that of the jingo and the politician, the reckless and conscienceless elements in the public life of each nation joining hands with each other.

This is the

The white man's burden, in the British sense, is to force the black man to support himself and the white man, too. meaning of "control of the tropics." The black man cannot be exterminated at home as the red man can; therefore, let us make him carry double. The world needs all that we can get out of him. This may be all the better for the black man in need of exercise, but it is the old spirit of slavery, and its disguise is the thinnest.

Our Monroe Doctrine pledges us to a national interest in the tropics of the New World. This is because throughout the New World American citizens have interests which our flag must protect. In matters of legitimate interest no nation has been less isolated than America; but our influence goes abroad without our armies. Force of brains is greater than force of arms, more worthy and more lasting.

Of all the recent phases of American expansion the most important and most honorable is that which is called the "peaceful conquest of Mexico." We hear little of it because it sounds no trumpets and vaunts not itself. The present stability of Mexico is largely due to American influences. Every year American intelligence and American capital find better and broader openings there. In time, Mexico shall become a republic in fact as well as in name, side by side in the friendliest relation with her sister republic of broader civilization. It is not necessary that the same flag should float over both. If one be red, white, and blue, let the other be green, white, and red-what matter? The development of Mexico, the "awakening of a nation," is thus a legitimate form of expansion. It is not a widening of governmental responsibility, but a widening of American influence and an extension of republican ideas. The next century will see Mexico an American instead of a Spanish republic, and this without war, conquest, or intrigue.

The purpose of the Monroe Doctrine is not to keep the European flag from America. Its function is to prevent the extension here of European colonial methods, the domination of weak races by strong, of one race for the good of another, of the principle of inequality of right which underlies slavery.

The spread of law and order, respect for manhood, of industrial wisdom and commercial integrity, this is the true "white man's burden," not the conquest and enslavement of men of other races. Expansion is most honorable and worthy if only that which is worthy and honorable is allowed to expand. The love of adventure, a precious heritage of our race, may find its play under any flag if it cannot honorably take our own to shelter it.

The world of action is just as wide to-day as it ever was, and if the red, white, and blue floated over every foot of it, it would be no wider.

If after our conquest of Mexico, while our flag floated over Chapultepec, we had never hauled it down but had seized the whole land, we should have gained nothing for civilization. The splendid natural development of the country by which, in Diaz's own words, it has become "the germ of a great nation," would have been impossible under our forms, as under the imperial forms of Napoleon and Maximilian. The modern growth of Japan would never have taken place had she, like India, been numbered with England's vassals. A nation must develop from within by natural processes if it is to become great and permanent.

"The silent, sullen peoples, half devil and half child,'" shall weigh us and our God," not by our force of arms nor by our