Those who deny liberty to others deserve it not themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it."

From Aguinaldo, the enlightened and heroic leader of the Filipinos, comes the responsive utterance, written at Cavite, June 18, 1898, at the head-quarters of Admiral Dewey: "I proclaim in the face of the whole world that the aspirations of of my whole life, and the final object of all my desires and efforts, is no other thing than your independence; this means for us the redemption from slavery and tyranny, the reconquest of our lost liberties and our entry into the concert of the civilized nations." Little could he have dreamed when he penned those inspiring words that the countrymen of Abraham Lincoln were to outdo, in savagery, the vanishing Spaniards, and to make the name of America one yet more accursed by his hunted and butchered compatriots.

This stirring declaration would have brought quick and enthusiastic response from the United States were another nation undertaking the same role in the Philippines. But it is our soldiers who are committing the criminal aggressions. Therefore, the criminal power that directs them must be arraigned. The shots from Otis and Lawton are aimed at the freedom of not only eight millions of orientals but at that of seventy millions of Americans. The shattered bodies of the brown patriots, battling for home and indepencence, are not more shattered than are American rights in this conspiracy against justice. Every defense of our nation's course is an attack upon the principles which have made it great. The bullet that pierces the heart of a Filipino lets out the life blood of the Declaration of Independence.

Readers of history, show us a nation in which liberty has ever survived the repudiation of its ideals! Examples strew its pages, but always accompanied with wrecks, In ancient or modern times not one success is chronicled. Each proud kingdom or Commonwealth emerges in turn from slavery to freedom, wealth and power. Its sentiments are lofty, its statesmen, patriots and scholars illumine the period. With the sense of strength comes forgetfulness of the sources of

strength. As wealth and power increase freedom declines. The old catchwords and shibboleths of liberty are flourished long after the goddess herself is in the coffin. Men calling themselves freemen wear their chains with defiant pride. Oppression, struggle, liberty, peace, wealth, power, greed, corruption, war, hypocrisy, despotism, this is the gamut that describes the history and answers for the epitaphs of once proud peoples.

The Civil war of slavery brought us to the verge of the republic's grave. Mrs. Kemble in her fine poem, "Triumph not, Fools," pictures the despair of the weary and oppressed, abroad, with anxious eyes fixed on this:

"Star of redemption to each weeping thrall
Of power decrepit and of rule outworn,"

and imagines their despairing cry,

"She has gone down, woe for the panting world
Back on its path of progress sternly hurled!
Land of sufficient harvests for all dearth.

Home of far-seeing hope, Times latest birth!
Woe for the promised land of the whole earth!"'

Shall its

Then came the uprising of the people here and the redoubled brilliance of the star. Another eclipse is upon it. light be quenched or again emerge to cheer the world? Upon the pending action regarding imperialism the decision

rests.

To the conspirators who noisly assume that we are now a "world power," that we have gone too far on the road of conquest to recede, that our ethics are outgrown, let us echo Mrs. Kemble's words "Triumph not, Fools!" for the verdict is yet unwritten. The Statesman from Ohio and the fluent Secretary from Massachusetts may try with honied tongues to prove wrong right, but Lowell provided the answer for them years ago: "Here, now, is a piece of barbarism which Christ and the nineteenth century say shall cease, and which Messrs. Smith, Brown and others say shall not cease. I would by no means decry the eminent respectability of these gentlemen, but I confess, that, in such a wrestling match, I cannot help having my fears for them."

No despairing mood possesses the anti-imperialists of Massachusetts. Intelligence and conscience are not dismayed by numbers, and with these forces the ultimate decision rests. Out of the tiniest minority they can evolve the overwhelming majority.

What is the confronting situation and what are the forces in conflict? The past is repeating itself and history furnishes a close parallel with the present. Transport yourself in imagination forty years backward. It is 1859; John Brown and Harper's Ferry dominate the scene. On one hand is the defeated and wounded enthusiast awaiting the penalty of broken law, the law of Virginia, not of God. At the north his friends and helpers, Gerrit Smith, George L. Stearns and Frederic Douglass flee to Canada or elsewhere for safety. At Concord, Massachusetts, the attempt to kidnap Frank Sanborn is barely frustrated. Even anti-slavery lips are for the moment paralyzed.

Against Brown are the administration, the subservient press and pulpit, society, fashion, all the material weight and apparent influence of the country. At Brooklyn, in Plymouth church, amid the frequent interruptions of a turbulent audience, Wendell Phillips hurls his defiance at the powers that be. Listen to his brave words, as true to-day as on the evening of their utterance:

"No Civil Society, no government, can exist except on the willing submission of all its citizens, and by the performance of the duty of rendering equal justice between man and man. Whatever calls itself a government, and refuses that duty, or has not that assent, is no government. It is only a pirate-ship. Virginia, the Commonwealth of Virginia! She is only a chronic insurrection. She is a pirate ship, and John Brown sails the sea a Lord High Admiral of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every pirate he meets on God's ocean of the nineteenth century. In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority."

To Aguinaldo, fighting in the same cause for which John Brown died, sustained by the same hopes and aspirations, our sympathies are due as were the sympathies of all lovers of

liberty to John Brown.

Would that those burning words of Freedom's greatest orator, passing the despotic censorship of a government engaged in throttling free speech, might carry consolation to the betrayed and harassed hero of the Philip pines! In the utter defeat of his assailant's purpose rests the salvation of liberty in the United States.

The faint hearts and temporizers who now put their trust in the President and military power of the United States will read, in future history, on how a weak a reed they leaned. Temporarily,

"Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet

The truth alone is strong,

And, albeit, she wanders outcast now,

I see around her throng

Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to

Enshield her from all wrong."'

The contemners of Aguinaldo would have been the denouncers of John Brown in the dark days preceding the glare of the civil war.

The

What has brought the nation to its present attitude? Righteousness does not in a night blossom into crime. generation has not yet finished garnishing the sepulchres of the reformers or building their monuments in the public squares. Yet this ostentatious homage to the memory of Lincoln and the abolitionist is the strongest evidence of moral relapse. When did a people drifting away from justice ever cease to protest, loudly, its particular regard for that virtue? The truth is clear that the decadent process has been a prolonged one. Material growth and aims have obscured the forces at work sapping the foundation of morals. So at the touch of war the nation stood self-revealed and astonished at its own barbaric instincts.

Students and reformers alone have discerned and feared the decay of public conscience and civic virtue. Private indifference to official scandals cannot long co-exist with a republic. We have been fitting ourselves for the yoke and, at length, the tyrant has appeared to place it on our necks.

this respect your own State of Pennsylvania has sounded a depth of corruption and shamelessness that makes its claim to self-government a farce. The vulgarian spoilsmen are your

masters.

The Keystone State is a type of the nation at large. The probabilities of the next presidential election are not reckoned on the enlightened opinion of the people, but the management of Mark Hanna and the opposing Democratic bosses. The largest purse, not the highest principles, is expected to secure the race.

And it will unless there is another uprising, like that of 1861, and a fresh insurrection of conscience.

Disinterested observers have noted the steady lapse of the nation from its high standards. Goldwin Smith graphically described it. "Multi-millionism," he says, "with its boundless luxury, its palatial mansions and its matrimonial alliances with the European aristocracy, the decay of religion, which, though still the social rule, at least in the East, has been losing its hold upon practical life; the growing thirst for pleasure and for money as the means; the intensity of commercial speculation consequent on the thirst for money; a yellow press, appealing not only to love of sensation but to immoral tastes, all are factors in the change which has been going on in the national character, and the cause of its visible departure from the old Washington and Jefferson ideal."

Our friendly critic might have gone deeper and developed the causes whose symptoms, only, he has enumerated. The disregard for human rights, shown in the monopoly of land, and the tariffs for private revenue only, have been prime facfactor in the moral rottenness noted,—although the second is a necessary sequence of the first. The greed for land and the power which its possession gives, is a source of wars. From wars come heavy taxes and their makeshift tariffs, and tariffs are resting-places for privilege and special interests. The seeds of the Revolutionary war developed in the compromises of the Constitution from which came naturally the civil war; and from the conditions left by the civil war the Spanish war came in logical order. "For what can war but endless war still