AMERICAN
AND
ENGLISH STUDIES
AMERICAN
AND
ENGLISH STUDIES
BY
WHITELAW REID
VOLUME I
GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCCXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PUBLISHED, NOVEMBER, 1913
flC
8
v.l
D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON
INTRODUCTION
THESE volumes assemble some of the more impor-
tant contributions made by Whitelaw Reid to the
discussion of matters of public interest. They are
designed to illustrate both his purely intellectual
habit and his point of view as a citizen. The pub-
licist is, in a measure, a man of action, exercising
an influence which, if not always immediately ob-
vious, is nevertheless often decisive, and Mr. Reid's
career brought him into very close and effective
contact with the subjects here treated. More than
once he stepped down into the arena itself. The
ideas on government embodied in many of these
pages were developed not only in the study, but
amongst other practical leaders, fighting for po-
litical ideals which were of value, in his opinion,
solely as they found expression in just laws and
the betterment of American life.
His nomination as Vice-President on the ticket
with Benjamin Harrison in 1892 did not bring him
his first experience as an active participant in po-
litical campaigning. He had assumed that role as
early as 1856, when, being still too young to vote,
he nevertheless took the stump for Fremont. Four
years later, having then a paper of his own, "The
Xenia News/' in the Ohio town where he was
c v n
INTRODUCTION
born, he wrote vigorously in support of Lincoln's
candidacy and made a number of speeches in the
same cause. These episodes foreshadowed the la-
bors of his maturity, simplifying his aim and fix-
ing his vocation. Thenceforth, until the day of his
death at the post of duty as Ambassador to Great
Britain, he was entirely absorbed in public affairs.
All his life he was talking and writing about them,
and there were many occasions, here and abroad,
sometimes, he used ruefully to say, almost too
many, on which he was asked to speak about
them. The task was not difficult. He spoke, indeed,
with a natural facility, in a clear voice of unusual
carrying power, and, having had muchexperience,
he was wont to use his memory more than his man-
uscript, save in instances of long, sustained expo-
sition, when the analysis of some historical theme
or the portrayal of a great character made notes
indispensable. He was ready on his feet, as numer-
ous occasional remarks of his at dinners and the
like plainly testified. But it was characteristic of
his workmanlike methods and of his literary in-
stinct to give to such studies as are here gathered
together a form significant of the essayist, devel-
oping his subject with leisurely care and seeking
to expose it in the light of constructive thought.
He spoke only when he had something to say,
I vi3
INTRODUCTION
and looked well to the basis of his convictions.
When he spoke on education it was as a member
of the Board of Regents, who not only had the
instruction of the young at heart, but knew their
needs from first-hand investigation, advocating
principles which experience had shown him, when
he himself had taught, to be in their interest. Be-
fore his appointment to the Spanish Peace Com-
mission he had thought out his views on the reten-
tion of the Philippines. As is shown by the paper
on that subject now reprinted, hard common sense
and a practice of distinguishing fact from theory
had led him whole-heartedly to commit himself
then to the policy afterward officially adopted. If
the reader seeks any light on Mr. Reid's success in
the diplomatic service, first as Minister to France,
then in the settlement of the negotiations with
Spain and on other special missions, and finally on
his British embassy, he may find it, perhaps, in the
temper of the observations which this book contains
on such topics as the Monroe Doctrine, anarchism,
the statesmanship of Burke, orthe strangely mixed
qualities of Talleyrand. They point to the disinter-
ested manner in which he approached a problem.
He was a staunch believer in party organization,
a devoted Republican, but impatient of the parti-
sanship which colors a man's mental processes.
I viiH
INTRODUCTION
The last of the political portraits that he drew, the
one of Jefferson, dating from but a few short weeks
before his death, is typically scrupulous in its bal-
ancing of the lights and shadows in that perplexing
career.
Intellectual honesty comes by nature, or it does
not come at all. On the other hand, its operations,
like those of any other of a man's inborn resources,
rest largely upon training. The four papers here
grouped under the head of " An Editor's Reflec-
tions," and expressive of Mr. Reid's ideas on jour-
nalism both in his early manhood and in his later
years, explain to some extent, in the emphasis they
place upon disciplinary studies, his attitude toward
the business of life and of letters. In April, 1872,
on the eve of his long career as editor of "The
Tribune," he spoke at the University of the City of
New York on the life of the journalist. No young
man could be considered fit for it, he said, who did
not have some adequate knowledge of the history
of political parties in this country, or failed to add
to that a comprehensive knowledge of the entire
history of the United States. This, too, was only
a beginning. It was the duty of the journalist to
make himself acquainted with the general history
of the world, to know the fundamental principles
of common, constitutional, and international law,
[ viii 3
INTRODUCTION
to learn something about political economy, to ac-
quire a training in logic, to seek familiarity with
more than one foreign language, and to be fastid-
iously competent in the use of his own. It was a
stiff programme. But at least the man who framed
it could claim that he had framed it for himself.
The biography of Mr. Reid, which is now in prep-
aration, will show in detail what use he made of the
instruments of character and professional activity
he thus enumerated; but in the meantime these
two volumes may serve to illustrate the nature and
scope of some of his ideas, and the aptness of his
motto, Per Ardua ad Alia.
ROYAL CORTISSOZ.
New York, June 1, 1913.
Most of the studies in this collection appear now in book
form for the first time. For permission to reprint the few
that have previously been published thanks are due, in the
following instances, to the firms named: "Problems Flowing
from the Spanish War" " Territorial Expansion" "Our
Duty in the Philippines" (The Century Company); "The-
Rise of the United States" (The T. Y. Crowell Company);
" The Practical Issues in a Newspaper Office," "In an
Old Ohio Town" (Henry Holt & Company); " Thomas
Jefferson," " The Scot in America and the Ulster Scot"
(The Macmillan Company); "Talleyrand" (G. P. Put-
nam's Sons) .
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PAGE
INTRODUCTION V
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES 3
University of Cambridge. Summer Meeting, 1906
ORGANIZATION IN AMERICAN LIFE 37
Carnegie Institute. Pittsburgh November 6, 1902
THE DANGER-POINT IN IMMIGRATION 49
New England Society, New York, December 22, 1903
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW 63
Republican Club. New York, May 23, 1905
Lotos Club. New York, May 18, 1905
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
I. THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND THE POLK DOCTRINE 75
II. ANARCHISM 9
Yale University, June 23, 1903
PROBLEMS FLOWING FROM THE SPANISH WAR 1O7
"The Century Magazine," September, 1898
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION 127
Miami University, June 15, 1899
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES 1^9
Princeton University, October 21, 1899
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED ITS EDUCA-
TIONAL PROBLEM 201
Armitstead Lecture. Dundee, November 2, 1906
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES IN AMERICA 229
Leland Stanford Jr. University, April 19, 1901
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND 259
Associated Academic Principals of New York and the New York
State Teachers' Association. Syracuse, December 26, 1907
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN 289
Dedication of the new City Hall. Xenia, Ohio, February 16, 1881
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
NEITHER George Canning nor his king
called this New World into being, and
it was not called into being by anybody
for the purpose of redressing the balance of the
Old. As to its most significant, and, for a long time,
its leading settlements, it was called into being by
Charles I, when he pursued Separatists, non-Con-
formists, and others, in the professed interest of
the Church of England. Its growth was checked
by the rise of Oliver Cromwell; and while the
Protectorate lasted, the Puritan emigration ceased.
Charles II revived it, and he and his brother James,
by their treatment of the Puritans in England and
the Covenanters in Scotland, did more than any
other human power to make New England and
other large sections of the United States what they
are. Tudors and Stuarts alike, whatever their inten-
tions, were helpful to the infancy of the new na-
tion, and there is fitness in its possessing endur-
ing monuments to commemorate them Virginia,
Maryland, the Carolinas, Jamestown, and James
River.
At the beginning of this period, say at the open-
ing of the seventeenth century, and near the close
of Queen Elizabeth's long reign, all England was
much less than London is now. The total popula-
tion of England was a little over four millions,
and what is now far the greatest city in the world
had then possibly a quarter of one million within its
n 3 3
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
limits. A rapid increase was prevented, in fact, a
material decrease had been caused, by the enor-
mous death rate, due to epidemics which science
had not learned tocontrol,to unhealthful surround-
ings, to constant wars, and to a deplorable waste
of human life in the ordinary administration of
justice. Between 1592 and 1665, London had eight
visitations of the plague. The sweating sickness
and the smallpox were almost equally dreaded and
equally uncontrollable. The unsanitary habits of
the people were extraordinary. The very king for
whom the first settlement in Virginia was named,
according to the declaration of James Balfour, never
washed even his hands. Prisoners were tortured,
robbers were hanged, witches and religious men
whose orthodoxy was not our doxy were burned.
Fortrivial offences men and women were whipped
or set in the stocks, or nailed by their ears to the
pillory. Witchcraft was so firmly embedded in the
faith of the people that the greatest legal writer
of his time, Sir William Blackstone, said as late as
when the American colonies were on the point of
revolting, that every nation in the world had borne
testimony to it, and that to deny it was to deny the
revealed word of God.
This is, of course, not a fair picture of the Eng-
land from which the colonists went out, though
some of the noticeable features are accurately por-
trayed. We can faintly conceive the limitations of
the England of that day, how little it was like the
present world, when we add that it knew nothing
CO
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
of the circulation of the blood, of vaccination, of
gravitation, of the velocity of light, of illumination
by petroleum, gas, or electricity, of communica-
tion by fast or cheap mails, of the telegraph or the
telephone; that it had no newspapers, and that its
books were few and dear.
Yet this England had Magna Charta and par-
liamentary government; had greater and better
secured personal liberties than any other country
in Europe, and was more jealously watchful of
them ; had an inbred respect for law, and for its
officers, and, in spite of a degree of illiteracy that
seems now surprising, probably led Europe also
in diffused intelligence and in a reasoning devotion
to religion. In the gallery of England's immortals,
Milton was soon to be added to Shakespeare; and
the nation was rapidly approaching the great con-
test in which religious zeal and a passion for civil
liberty in an almost equal cooperation were to pre-
cipitate a revolution and execute a king.
Meantime, the land in which the new nation was
to spring up, a land of rivers and lakes and un-
broken forests beyond the Atlantic, lay palpitating
with wild life under summer suns or blanketed
under winter snows, practically unpeopled. The
first feeble colony arrived at Jamestown seven
years after the opening of the century ; the little
company borne by the " Mayflower" to Plymouth
Rock, thirteen years after that. The only inhabit-
ants at the beginning of the seventeenth century
were the mysterious aborigines, whose origin, Ian-
c 5 n
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
guages, and customs were alike unknown, whose
trails through the forests were the only roads,
whose patches of Indian corn were the only agri-
culture, whose clusters of wigwams were the only
cities. Between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, from
the Atlantic to the Alleghenies, there were in all
less than two hundred thousand of them, in limits
which now contain the second city in the world,
seventeen great states, and a total population of
over thirty millions.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century this
New World had started into full life among the
forests. Scattered and still feeble colonies, con-
trolled and mainly peopled by Great Britain, lay
in isolated settlements along the Atlantic coast,
from Massachusetts to the Gulf of Mexico, and at
several points were spreading westward toward
the Alleghenies. By this time they had come to
include a sprinkling of several northern races
soon to melt wonderfully into the Anglo-Saxon
mould and to renounce other allegiance in order
to seek the privileges of British subjects. There
were Dutch in New York in fact, for about half
a century, New York was a Dutch city. There
were Swedes in Delaware, and Germans in Penn-
sylvania, and to these were added the best France
had to give in a considerable influx of the per-
secuted and exiled Huguenots. There were many
sects, too, and these did not melt so readily into
one mould. There were Puritans in most of New
England, Baptists in Rhode Island, Episcopalians
CO
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
in New York and Virginia, Presbyterians in New
Jersey and the Carolinas, Quakers and Lutherans
in Pennsylvania, Roman Catholics in Maryland.
All of them insisted on freedom to enjoy their own
religion, many of them had come to an uninhab-
ited country for that purpose, but not all were
ready to tolerate other people's religion.
At times there had been efforts to impose upon
them the Established Church of England, but to
this they thought consent impossible. Religion and
education they fostered alike. The church and the
schoolhouse went with every fresh pioneer settle-
ment. But many of them left England to escape
bishops, others to escape the ruling classes, and in
their new homes they would submit neither to a
prelacy nor to a nobility. They demanded the right
of the English-born to participate in the govern-
ment, but they were not ready to let everybody
share it with them. In the early days of New Eng-
land none but church members could vote or hold
office. As late as 1679, hardly one grown man in
Massachusetts out of five could vote. Cotton de-
nounced democracy, thinking no doubt with Mon-
tesquieu, that liberty may be least safe under a rule
of the mere majority; nobody dreamed of letting
Indians or negroes vote ; till long after the Revo-
lution, a considerable property qualification was
required from every voter.
In one way or another they were ruled by offi-
cers from England; and they brought with them
the general body of English law. But they had or-
C7CJ
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
ganized parliamentary government in most of the
colonies, on the English pattern, with more exact
representation and under written constitutional ar-
rangements more precise than England had ever
employed. They looked to England for protection,
spoke of it habitually as home, and held themselves
under its authority; yet they already exercised a
large measure of local self-government, rightly
considered this a necessity of their remote situa-
tion and peculiar perils, and regarded any infringe-
ment upon it with even more than the historical
Anglo-Saxon jealousy.
The old ideas of blind loyalty to the throne had
been shaken, first by the Puritan revolt against
Charles, and later by the deposition of James. They
had twice seen Parliament set aside a king, and it
was only a step from this to the belief that not the
king, but the representatives chosen by the people,
must always be, in the end, the controlling power
of the state. From that again, the distant colonists
found it only a step farther to the belief that in
their remote isolation they should choose their
own representatives instead of submitting to a
rule by representatives chosen back in England
for English purposes. Thus early had the " Mother
of Parliaments" taught the sons of Great Britain
beyond seas to better her instructions.
And yet a personal sense of loyalty to the sov-
ereign remained down to the very outset of the
Revolution, often as strong in America as in Eng-
land, sometimes stronger, and generally more dis-
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
interested. Benjamin Franklin wrote privately, in
1 768, to his friends at home of George III as " the
best monarch any nation was ever blessed with."
In 1 769, when he had to report the refusal by the
House of Commons to repeal offensive customs
duties, he used even stronger language:
4 ' I hope nothing that has happened, or may happen, will
diminish in the least our loyalty to our sovereign or affec-
tion for this nation in general. I can scarcely conceive
a king of better dispositions, or more exemplary virtues,
or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his
subjects. The body of this people, too, is of a noble and
generous nature, loving and honouring the spirit of lib-
erty, and hating arbitrary power of all sorts. We have
many, very many friends among them."
Seven years later came the bitter arraignment of
the same sovereign in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, and the richest possession of the English
crown was lost forever.
From the outset the colonists were thrown on
their own resources, in a wild continent and among
savage people. The survival of the fittest made
them a picked body, a real corps d' elite. Their fac-
ulties were quickened by necessity,by danger, and
by climate. The lonely life and the necessity for
quick decisions, often without much opportunity
for consultation, led to a marked personal inde-
pendence, an ever-ready resourcefulness, and an
absolute freedom of individual initiative, which
speedily became general characteristics.
But at the beginning of the eighteenth century
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
their opinions and their traits had not worked out
to the logical conclusion. With all their personal in-
dependence, the colonists never dreamed of stand-
ing alone; with all their free personal initiative,
they still looked implicitly to the Mother Country
for guidance.
The growth of these colonies, which for a long
time was slow, painful, and intermittent, had of
late become more rapid. Their population was only
about 200,000 when James II was deposed and
William and Mary came to the throne. A quarter
of a century later, when the House of Hanover
came in with the accession of George I, the tables
compiled for the Board of Trade, giving in detail
the whites and negroes in the colonies, showed an
aggregate of 434,000. The number had thus more
than doubled. In the next half century this again
was trebled. By 1754, when the movements for
taxing America were about to begin, there were
1,165,000 whites and 253,000 negroes, say, in
round numbers nearly a million and a half.
The England which, after a variable but on the
whole not unmotherly care of the colonies, was
now to enter upon that unhappy experiment of
arbitrary taxation, presented almost as strong a
contrast to the England we have seen in the clos-
ing days of Elizabeth, as did the thirteen colonies
of 1754 to the New World before Jamestown and
Plymouth. In numbers it had grown from four mil-
lions to perhaps ten. In government it had passed
C 10 J
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
from Essex to Newcastle and Bute. Landmarks
on that long road were a civil war, a common-
wealth, a restoration, more discontent, a deposi-
tion,the choiceof a newsovereign from abroad, and
enormously increased power in Parliament. And
now at last another royalist reaction, with revival
of old prerogatives through parliamentary methods
by purchased majorities, was to precipitate a crisis
in the American possessions. Meantime, the nation
had enjoyed an enormous extension of commerce,
beginning with the revolution in 1688, had pros-
pered on colonial trade, had won glory in foreign
wars. Of its entire exports one-fourth was taken by
its colonies in America ; under the inspiring guid-
ance of Chatham, England was rapidly coming to
the front in both hemispheres; and this political
leadership among the nations was followed by a
sudden and enormous increase in national wealth.
But in the attempt now to begin for stretching
the power of the crown in the colonies, one thing
was forgotten. While the people that elected their
sovereign by Parliament had thus made their own
representatives supreme, few realized that Amer-
icans could learn the lesson. It scarcely entered
many English minds that those dependent poor
relations might in their turn demand an equal
authority for their representatives. Ministers at this
date were indeed curiously ignorant of the col-
onies. Distance, inattention, and misinformation
cooperated to produce political blindness. An acute
English historian, explaining how subservient and
c " n
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
prejudiced English officials in America misled their
sovereign, said that in fact "his own governors,
by their reports to him, wrote King George out of
America/' To them, and so easily enough to him,
it seemed a natural thing that the colonists should
be content to buy everything from England un-
reasonable that they should want to manufacture
things for themselves ; a matter of course that they
should accept interference from England in their
domestic concerns, and pay English taxes dis-
loyal and rebellious that they should hesitate.
And yet these uneasy colonists had given splen-
did proof of their devotion. Unaided, they had cap-
tured Louisburg, then the greatest French strong-
hold in America, for the British crown. They had
responded to Pitt's calls, involving both men and
money, far beyond reasonable expectations. Nearly
two-thirds of Abercrombie's force on Lake George
had been sent from New England, New York,
and New Jersey. Another year Connecticut had
five thousand men under arms to support the Brit-
ish campaign, and Massachusetts seven thousand.
When disasters came, the feeble colonists strained
afresh their resources. Massachusetts sent out one
in six of all its inhabitants capable of bearing arms,
and Connecticut an equal or even greater propor-
tion. While the war lasted that expelled the French
from the Great Lakes and from the Ohio, New
Jersey taxed herself at the rate of a pound per
head for every inhabitant. Massachusetts levied on
personal incomes at the rate of thirteen shillings
c I* n
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
and fourpence to the pound, besides land taxes,
poll taxes, and even colonial stamp taxes. Connect-
icut, though feebler in resources, was no whit be-
hind. With such warmth did the colonists support
the great sympathetic Minister of the crown, while
he rescued Tennessee, Michigan, and the country
of the Great Lakes, conquered the west, and con-
quered Canada. What might not have happened
had Chatham but remained in power?
At this period the colonies had been developing in
America for about a century and a half. England
might well have taken pride in the result, for the
race that had sprung up amid the trials of the west-
ern wilderness, though different from the race at
home, had lost few of its conspicuous virtues and
had found others. The colonists were, in the main,
curiously orderly and law abiding. They were
temperate, moral, generally religious. The world
had never seen such widely scattered rural com-
munities with a more general diffusion of intelli-
gence and a smaller percentageof illiteracy. Every-
body worked and enjoyed the fruits of his labor
there were no rich and comparatively few poor.
There was a nearer approach to equality of op-
portunity than older countries could show, and to
personal equality when the opportunity had been
wisely improved. There was no governing class;
all took part in the government, and the man who
had been called to the public service, at the end
of it dropped back naturally into his position, and
C 13 1
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
instead of making laws might again be making
shoes. There were no palaces, but ( away from the
frontier settlements ) there were very few hovels ;
and according to the standard of the times the
mass of the population was probably as comfort-
ably housed as in England, and with better sur-
roundings, though often in unpainted dwellings of
wood. The proportion of considerable landholders
to mere householders was naturally larger than
in older communities. Social life was everywhere
simple, but not without dignity, or, in the rising
cities, without grace. They had the English virtue
of hospitality, accompanied by the unusual free-
dom from reserve or constraint which came with
their environment. In a word, they were, in the
main, like the best type of English middle-class
rural population, but with the independence and
alertness bred of the never-ending conflict with the
wild country, wild beasts, and wild men. Chatham
and Burke were proud of their Americans; it would
have been well for Newcastle and Bute and men
higher still, if at least they had understood them.
These last left such comprehension instead to a
young Frenchman to whom the world a few years
later was glad to listen. "Vast regions of Amer-
ica ! " exclaimed Turgot, at the Sorbonne, in 1 750.
" Equality keeps them from both luxury and want,
and preserves to them purity and simplicity with
freedom. Europe herself will find there the per-
fection of her political societies and the surest
support of her well-being. But," Turgot added,
c no
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
in words that might have borne a profitable warn-
ing across the Channel, "colonies are like fruits,
which cling to the tree only till they ripen/'
How that predicted end was hastened with such
an English people as we have been describing,
by efforts to abridge or withdraw rights on which
all Englishmen insisted, may now be seen in the
events of the next twenty years. The tendency was
noticeable in the later ministries of George II;
the policy was pursued with continuity and ear-
nestness from the accession of George III.
In 1750 the construction of more iron mills in
the American colonies was forbidden, that there
might be more demand for the English product.
While the liberty to manufacture was thus ham-
pered, the liberty to import slaves, under the guise
of a right to trade between the Barbary Coast and
the Cape of Good Hope, was in the very same year
extended specifically " to all subjects of the King
of England." In 1753 a new governor was in-
structed to withhold from the New York Assembly
the right it had always exercised of considering
and voting annually the allowances for the sup-
port of the government and of examining the ac-
counts. This Englishman (Sir Danvers Osborne),
when he found these men of English blood and
parliamentary experience would not submit to
such orders, was so horror-stricken at the situa-
tion in which he was involved, that he went out and
hanged himself. The next year the colonies were
C 15 1
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
required to contribute to a general fund, and Hali-
fax, by the king's command, proposed an Ameri-
can union for that purpose, with a congress of
one commissioner from each colony to adjust the
quotas. Ominous suggestion! Franklin had already
favored the union, but with modifications. He
would have no taxation by Parliament, unless with
ample representation in that body, and legislation
on an equal basis for all.
A year later, in 1756, the British commander-
in-chief was reinforcing the recommendation of
various royal governors for an act of Parliament
levying a stamp duty, a poll tax, and an excise
tax on all the colonies for a general fund, and,
if any colony failed to pay promptly, providing
means for collecting by royal warrants of distraint
and imprisonment. He was succeeded the same
year by Loudoun, who, under a commission pre-
pared by Chancellor Hardwicke, was instructed to
make the Colonial Assemblies "distinctly and pre-
cisely understand" that the king required of them
" a general fund to be issued and applied as the
commander-in-chief should direct/' and likewise
to pay for the quarters of the soldiers. When an
attempt was made, under this, to billet officers of
the army upon New York City, the mayor ob-
jected that it was contrary to the laws of England,
the privileges of Englishmen, and common law.
" Free quarters are everywhere usual/' replied the
commander-in-chief; "I assert it on my honor,
which is the highest evidence you require. God
c 163
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
damn my blood, if you do not billet my officers
upon free quarters this day, 111 order here all the
troops in North America under my command, and
billet them all upon the city myself/' New York
submitted, unwillingly enough, and soon after
Philadelphia, under similar compulsion, did the
same. While the troops were thus quartered in the
principal cities, the frontiers were left open to the
Indians and the French.
With such conditions prevailing in America,
George III came to the throne in October, 1760.
It took scarcely fourteen years more to precipitate
the crisis. Early in 1 761 the restrictions in the Acts
of Trade were brought into court in Boston, and
James Otis appeared to resist the call upon all ex-
ecutive officers and subjects of the colony to assist
in their enforcement. His arguments were cogent,
but what startled alike the court and the commu-
nity was the defiant challenge he flung at the feet
of the judges. He would sacrifice everything, he
said, to "the sacred calls of his country, in opposi-
tion to a kind of power, the exercise of which cost
one King of England his head and another his
throne. "The court, quite staggered for the mo-
ment, postponed a decision, and the chief justice
wrote to England ! Meantime, the fiery orator was
elected to the Assembly, and next year we find
him declaring there that no taxes could be arbi-
trarily levied without the consent of the legislative
body. That was the advantage, he said, of being
an Englishman rather than a Frenchman ; and for
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
the colonists he held that the rights of a Colonial
Assembly were the same as were those of the
House of Commons for residents of England. To
such outspoken tones did the policy of the Minis-
ters carry the colonists in the first two years of
George the Third's reign.
By the first day of the next year ( 1 763 ) it was
admitted that the plans of the ministry included
the permanent quartering of twenty battalions on
the colonies after the peace in Europe, the colo-
nies themselves to bear the expense. It soon came
out that the scheme went even farther, contem-
plating the withdrawal of the colonial charters, and
the imposition of a uniform system of government
throughout the colonies. Two years were spent in
talking about this revolutionary scheme, while the
colonists vehemently protested the substance of
their language being that their charters were in-
violable, and that taxation by a Parliament in which
they were not represented was tyranny. At last,
the fateful Stamp Act was passed in February,
1 765 ; but could not be signed by the king, except
by commission. The pathetic fact was not known
at the time that his reason was already unsettled.
The patience of the colonists was now but nine
years from the breaking-point.
The first effect of the Stamp Act was an out-
burst of universal opposition in the colonies, and
a concerted movement to paralyze its enforcement
by extorting the resignation of every stamp officer.
The next and even more ominous effect was the
C 18 ]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
assemblage in New York of a Congress containing
duly authorized representatives of nearly all the
colonies. Against the opposition thus concentrated
the act was powerless. Scarcely a stamp was sold,
and after setting all America in a flame, the Stamp
Act was repealed, thirteen months after it had been
passed.
Then was the moment, perhaps the last moment,
when the hands of the clock could have been
turned back. But the goodwill aroused in America
by the repeal was wasted. Sixteen months later
( June, 1 767 ) , the hour had struck, and the Minis-
ters carried through Parliament the bill decreeing
the American Revolution. It was a bill reviving the
effort to tax the colonists by a distant Parliament
in which they were not represented, for purposes
about which they had not been consulted, and reviv-
ing it less than a year and a half after they thought
the mistake had been acknowledged and definitely
abandoned by the repeal of the Stamp Tax. The
new bill, as if nothing had happened, imposed cer-
tain duties on articles imported into America, in-
cluding a tax of three pence a pound on tea.
The colonists instantly prepared to resist. Otis
and other leaders counselled moderation, but sub-
mission wasim possible. By a common impulse they
decided on non-intercourse as the effective answer
to an attempt to collect taxes on goods they were
expected to buy. In New England, New York,
and Pennsylvania alone, that answer cost British
C 19 3
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
merchants a reduction of over two-thirds in their
sale of the taxed articles in a single year. The move-
ment spread till before 1770 it included all the
colonies, and as might have been foreseen, gave a
wonderful stimulus to home manufactures. Within
a year a single town in Massachusetts made eighty
thousand pairs of women's shoes and was selling
them throughout the colonies. The ministry resent-
fully talked of transporting leading men to Eng-
land to be tried for treason under an old statute
of Henry VIII. Then it sent more troops. Lord
North, speaking for the ministry and the king,
said: "America must fear you before she can love
you. I am against repealing the last Act of Parlia-
ment, securing to us a revenue out of America. I
will never think of repealing it until I see America
prostrate at my feet/'One of the songs of the day,
which were often doggerel, but sometimes poetry,
was soon sung freely in the streets of Boston. It
might have been taken as the colonists' response
to Lord North:
" Come, join hand in hand, brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
To die we can bear, but to serve we disdain;
For shame is to freedom more dreadful than pain.
In freedom we're born, in freedom we'll live;
Our purses are ready,
Steady, boys, steady,
Not as slaves , but as freemen , our money we ' 11 give . ' '
The government demanded that a Massachusetts
legislature should rescind its acts, and dissolved it
C 20 3
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
when it refused. The legislative functions of the
New York legislature had already been suspended.
As the tension increased and there was more talk
of using the troops, one colonist wrote: " We can-
not believe that they will draw the sword on their
own children, but if they do, our blood is more at
their service than our liberties."
There was, as the circumstances made certain,
constant friction in Boston between the troops and
the exasperated citizens. Affrays were not infre-
quent. At last came the inevitable petty officer who
loses his head in an emergency. One of this species
gave the word to fire too soon, and the people were
maddened by what was called the Boston massacre.
But in the spirit of conformity to law, as they under-
stood it, so characteristic of the colonists, they held
a town meeting, opened it with prayer, considered
the occurrence, and ordered that the soldiers con-
cerned be tried for their lives in the civil courts.
It was characteristic again that such popular lead-
ers as John Adams and Josiah Quincy, under a
conviction of their duty as lawyers, answered the
appeal of the officer in command, appeared in his
defence, and saved him. More friction following,
the troops were ordered to leave the town, and
were actually sent to the citadel. Conflicts occurred
in New York and elsewhere, with similar excite-
ment.
Once again the ministry wavered in a course that
threatened such storms, and in March, 1770, re-
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THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
pealed all its taxes on America, save that on tea.
The non-importation agreements relaxed. New
York, which had held to them more firmly than
any of the associate colonies, wearied of seeing its
imports fall off five parts out of six, while the oth-
ers profited by its abstinence, and so promoted a
joint movement for resuming trade in everything
but tea. By August, 1 770, London was rejoicing at
the return of American orders and somewhat
misconstruing them.
But, as if heaven had ordained that every oppor-
tunity should be thrown away, a month later the
fortress commanding Boston, built and maintained
by the colony to be garrisoned, as the charter guar-
anteed, by its militia under the command of its gov-
ernor, was taken over by the regular troops ; and
the harbor of Boston made the rendezvous of all
ships stationed in North America. The answer of
Massachusetts to martial law was a commission
to Benjamin Franklin to represent it in stating its
grievances to the ministry in London.
Events were now moving in too resistless a cur-
rent for that benignant messenger of peace to
check them. On a paltry question of exempting its
commissioners of customs from taxation on their
salaries, the governor came again in conflict with
the Massachusetts Assembly, and claimed for the
crown an unheard of power.
A few months later (January, 1772), South
Carolina was aggrieved at having been induced
C 22 D
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
to establish fixed salaries for the judges if made
permanent officials, only to have their own judges
forthwith removed, and an Irishman, a Scotch-
man, and a Welshman sent over to take these
permanent places.
Two or three months later still, Virginia felt
outraged at having its efforts to restrict the slave
trade thwarted by an instruction to the governor,
"upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent
to no law by which the importation of slaves
should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed/'
An appeal was taken to the throne, and reached
England just as Lord Mansfield had decided that
a slave becomes free the moment he touches Eng-
lish soil. But not even that could secure a hearing
for the Virginia appeal, or English consent to the
Virginia law to restrict the slave trade.
His Majesty's ship " Gaspee " needlessly exas-
perated the Rhode Islanders by seizing live stock,
detaining vessels, and making illegal seizures of
goods. The chief justice gave an opinion against
these acts. The admiral overruled the chief justice,
and said if the people of Newport attempted to
rescue any vessel, he would hang them as pirates.
Thereupon, when the "Gaspee," pursuing the
Providence packet, ran aground, a few men from
Providence and Bristol boarded her, overpowered
the offensive lieutenant and his crew, set them
ashore, and burned the vessel to the water's edge.
Commissioners were ordered to find the offend-
ers and send them to England for trial. The chief
C 23 3
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
justice refused to permit apprehensions for trans-
portation beyond seas. Then it was proposed to
take away the charter of the colony.
Thus every month seemed to add to the popu-
lar ferment, and to spread it from one colony to
another.
Meantime, what had it all been worth? During the
progress of the" Gaspee "business theStamp Office
found that it had spent twelve thousand pounds in
America to get a revenue of fifteen hundred, and
even this revenue came only from Canada and the
West Indies. That was what the Stamp Tax was
worth. Ships and soldiers employed to enforce the
law taxing tea had cost enormously, and the East
India Company had lost the sale of half a million
pounds' worth of tea per year, while the total rev-
enue from the tax on it amounted to eighty-five
pounds. That was what the Tea Tax was worth.
So at last the East India Company begged for
relief, and asked leave to export to America free of
all duties. Lord North preferred another way. He
held to the tax in America, but gave the Company
a drawback on such exports of all the import duties
it had paid. The Company was warned that this
meant trouble, but Lord North would listen to no
objections. He said he meant "to try the question
with America." So it was tried. The tea was sent
to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charles-
ton. Boston threw it into the harbor, December
16, 1773. New York was ready to do the same,
[ 24 3
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
but adverse winds kept the ship away. Philadel-
phia, through a town meeting of five thousand
men, " persuaded" the consignee to resign and the
captain to take his ship and cargo back to London.
Charleston "persuaded" the consignee to resign,
there was nobody to pay the duty or sell the tea,
and it rotted in the cellars where it was stored. And,
finally, when a tea ship at last reached New York
(April 19, 1774), four months after the Boston
occurrence, it was sent back the next day, while
eighteen chests of tea found in another vessel were
merely thrown into the bay. Lord North's experi-
ment was complete ! Also the substantial union of
the colonies was revealed.
Franklin had been furnished with certain letters by
the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of Mas-
sachusetts, quite at variance with their public pro-
fessions, and evidently designed to foment exist-
ing difficulties and secretly provoke the ministry to
take yet more stringent measures against the col-
ony. He thought it right to send those letters to
the Speaker of the Assembly. Ultimately, though
contrary to his expectation, they became public,
and naturally aroused fierce resentment against the
American-born officers, who were thus found de-
ceiving andunderhandedly conspiring against their
countrymen, and bringing the military occupation
upon them. The Assembly petitioned the king for
the removal of the exposed governor and lieuten-
ant-governor, and Franklin was instructed to pre-
C ^ 1
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
sent the petition. Lord Dartmouth received it with
his usual courtesy ; but when it was referred to the
Privy Council for a hearing, the whole case went
off, not on the obvious guilt of the double-dealing
officials, but on the alleged misconduct of Franklin
in exposing them by showing their letters. Frank-
lin, now venerable and distinguished throughout
Europe, was kept standing at the bar while Wed-
derburne, the solicitor-general, insulted and lam-
pooned him for stealing or betraying private
correspondence and this from a ministry that
habitually violated the seal of every letter it cared
for and could intercept in the mails ! The Lords in
Council roared with delight. The petition which all
men knew to be true was dismissed as "ground-
less, vexatious, and scandalous/' But years after-
wards, when Wedderburne died, the king he had
thus served said : " He has not left a greater knave
behind him in my dominions/' The king he had
opposed could not say that of Franklin, the faithful
servant of his own country, the idol of France, and
the admiration of the world.
The work to which every step of the ministry had
for years been tending was nearly finished. In
March, 1774, Lord North carried through Parlia-
ment a bill closing the port of Boston till the tea
was paid for, and till the king should be satisfied of
the good conduct of the city for the future. Burke
and Fox made the debate memorable and splen-
did, and Lord Dartmouth showed signs of the de-
C sO
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
sire to conciliate, always gratefully remembered
in his relation to the colonies. But the same Lord
Mansfield who had decided that a slave could not
exist on English soil, while the ministry he sup-
ported was refusing to let Virginia limit the slave
trade, now encouraged that ministry to the utter-
most, exclaiming, "The sword is drawn, and you
must throw away the scabbard. Pass this act, and
you will be across the Rubicon." He told the truth,
more exactly than he knew.
General Gage, military commander-in-chief for
all North America,and now made civil governor of
Massachusetts also, was sent out with four more
regiments toclose the port of Boston, quartertroops
in the town, bring the ringleaders in the late dis-
turbances to punishment for high treason, abolish
town meetings, except for selecting town officers,
appoint and remove sheriffs at pleasure, and give
sheriffs so appointed the selection of juries. If the
colony had been already conquered, harder usage
could scarcely have been proposed. But General
Gage thought the conquest easy. He had assured
the king that the people of Massachusetts "will
be lyons whilst we are lambs, but if we take the
resolute part, they will undoubtedly prove very
weak/'
This time the answer of America was a Con-
tinental Congress. New York proposed it through
her "Sons of Liberty/' Virginia Burgesses, after
being dissolved by the governor, held a meeting
elsewhere, adopted it, and asked Massachusetts
C 27 ]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
to appoint the time and place of meeting. The
Massachusetts Assembly engaged in that busi-
ness, when General Gage, hearing what was on
foot, sent to dissolve them, but found the door
locked. It was not opened until five delegates had
been appointed to attend a Continental Congress
in Philadelphia on September i , 1 774 about five
months after Parliament had passed the Boston
Port Bill!
A convention of towns in Suffolk County, Massa-
chusetts, resolved that a king who violates the
chartered rights of his people forfeits their alle-
giance, and it therefore refused obedience to the
recent act. One of the first things the Continental
Congress did was to send Paul Revere to bear to
Boston their warm approval of the Suffolk County
resolutions. General Gage now undertook to ar-
rest Adams and Hancock, as conspicuous leaders
in this policy, and transport them to England for
trial. He sent a body of regular troops to do it
under cover of night. Warren started Paul Revere
on a midnight ride, ahead of the British troops, to
give the alarm. At Lexington these troops came
upon a body of minute men commanded by the
grandfather of Theodore Parker, ordered them to
disperse,and as they still stood, grim but undemon-
strative, fired upon them. Eight fell and ten more
were wounded. Concord followed an hour or two
later, the embattled farmers fired the shot heard
round the world, and the war was begun. Frank-
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
lin, seeing that there was no more hope in London,
was already upon the ocean, returning to take his
place with his own people.
I have finished the story. What remains is merely
the fighting the ghastly civil war between Great
Britain and her sons.
But the contest was not really between the
British people and their colonizing sons, and as a
matter of fact both profited by the result. Even
the fighting was largely between Americans and
Hessians. The ministry hired soldiers to carry on
its war, because Great Britain did not readily fur-
nish them. The actual contest was between what
are now universally recognized as Anglo-Saxon
principles of government and a movement under
the king of the day that would have set England
back to the times of Charles I. The colonists were
inspired by the Protestant Reformation and by
Magna Charta. The intellectual emancipation that
came from the one and the fervor for personal
rights that came from the other reached their
natural development easier and quicker amid the
untrammelled surroundings of a new world. Their
triumph checked a reaction in England, and the
British government of the nineteenth century was
distinctly more advantageous to the people, more
glorious for the nation, and a greater beneficence
to Europe and the world, because of this strug-
gle with the colonists in the last quarter of the
eighteenth.
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THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
It used to be said that American histories of that
period were unfriendly and unfair to Great Britain.
Perhaps they were. At the close of this civil war
with the Mother Country, Americans may have
been somewhat in the temper of the Puritans after
the Parliamentary wars, or of the Royalists after
the Restoration. Certainly they had not reached
that stage in the evolution of free government
which enabled them, eighty years later, to close
another civil war without a single execution and
with a speedy return to the defeated side of all its
political privileges. It has even been said that our
histories now tend to perpetuate an old unfairness
and bitterness. If that were ever true, I hope and
believe it is true no longer. At any rate, Americans,
while not always agreeing, accept in the main with
pleasure the work upon that period of recent Eng-
lish historians like the lamented Lecky. They are
satisfied with the admirable history of " The Amer-
ican Revolution/' on which the Right Hon. Sir
George Otto Trevelyan is still engaged. And they
are likewise content with the complimentary re-
port of what that Revolution led to in the luminous
pages of "The American Commonwealth," by the
Right Hon. James Bryce. I may take the liberty of
here adding and adopting the lines of the great
Victorian poet, with which one of these English-
men introduces his work:
"O thou, that sendest out the man
To rule by land and sea,
C 30 I]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
Strong mother of a Lion-line,
Be proud of those strong sons of thine
Who wrench'd their rights from thee."
When the war began, Edmund Burke estimated
the population of the colonies at from one-fifth to
one-fourth that of Great Britain. White and black,
it scarcely reached two and three-quarter mil-
lions. When the war closed, there were 2,389,000
whites, and probably in all little short of three mil-
lions. Seven years later, at the first periodical cen-
sus in 1790, there were nearly four millions. The
war had cost the colonists one hundred and forty
millions of dollars. Eighty years later they had
another civil war, which left them with a debt of
12,844,649,^26, and with a population of thirty-
five millions; and to-day their debt is reduced more
than one-half (to #1,2 84, 46 1,4 13), and their pop-
ulation has increased to over eighty millions, to say
nothing of the population of island dependen-
cies. Then they formed a narrow fringe along the
Atlantic coast, with a few frontier settlements
breaking through the gaps in the Allegheny range
to the fertile valleys on its western slopes ; to-day
they overspread a continent, and swarm in the
islands of the sea.
To follow the effects of this rise of the United
States farther now is beside my present purpose.
That its echo was first heard amid the crashing
of old institutions in the French Revolution cannot
be doubted. It was certainly a factor in the subse-
quent rapid extension of popular rights through-
C 31 I]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
out Europe, the broadening of citizenship, the freer
participation of the people in their governments.
As it stimulated liberty by its political develop-
ment, so it stimulated material welfare by its inven-
tions, its products, and its opportunities. We can
scarcely conceive now of a world without Ameri-
can food and American cotton, without the Ameri-
can applications of steam and electricity, or with-
out the American outlet for superfluous energy
and superfluous population.
The people of the new nation held, as firmly
as they had while colonists, that there should be
no taxation without representation, and they were
some time in doubt as to whether there should
be any representation without taxation. In several
states ownership of a freehold of fifty acres or a
town lot was necessary; in scarcely any could the
suffrage be exercised without a return of consider-
able taxable property, real or personal. A reason-
able degree of intelligence was also exacted and
the illiterate were excluded. Far fewer offices than
now were elective. The judges were generally
appointed, sometimes for seven years, sometimes
during good behavior. Even the delegates to the
Continental Congress were chosen not by the
people but by the legislatures.
There was no hindrance in learning trades ; no
limit to the hours of labor; no power to keep a
man from working if he wanted to work and found
work. The colonists would have accepted unre-
: 32 :
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
servedly those golden words with which Clemen-
ceau lately thrilled the French Chamber of Depu-
ties, but while accepting them would have won-
dered why he thought it necessary to say so ob-
vious a thing in so solemn a way: "J'estime que
tout homme, qui a besoin de travailler et qui trouve
du travail, a le droit de travailler; J'estime que la
societe et les pouvoirs publics out le devoir de lui as-
surer Vexercice de ce droit."
The result of it all is the marvel of modern his-
tory. It was an English prelate and scholar who
said of it, "Time's noblest offspring is the last/'
What in the final analysis made the success? for
who shall say the splendid growth will survive, if
what made it be lost ?
Well, first of all, it was made, as most successes
are, by character. America in the making was in-
telligent, moral, religious, and religiously devoted
to the education of children. It was desperately
earnest. It was alert and industrious almost with-
out a class that only amuses itself. It was pas-
sionately attached to its personal rights. It had an
inborn respect for authority and reverence for law.
Its ancestors had been used to representative insti-
tutions for centuries, and it was thoroughly trained
in parliamentary government.
And next the success was made by circumstance.
The inefficient were sifted out those left were
a picked class. They were alone, in a wild but fer-
tile and, as it seemed, boundless land. Opportunities
C 33 ]
THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES
opened on every hand; the time, like the climate,
was electric, and there was an absolute freedom
for individual initiative.
It is not sure that such a success could be won
now ; it is not sure that such a government as they
founded could be carried on now, if that character
were materially changed. Is it even sure that the
success could be maintained if those circumstances
were materially altered, and particularly if that
fecund freedom of individual initiative should be
destroyed, by the collectivist or socialist tendencies
of the times?
But such a catastrophe is not to be thought of.
Whatever may be the wild speculations of the
hour, whatever the temporary variations from the
historic course, no vessel that carries the English-
speaking races has lost its chart, on none has the
compass gone hopelessly astray. The old head-
lights still burn. Inspired by the same traditions,
led by the same instincts, these races in either
hemisphere, in whatever zone, on whatever con-
tinent or island, will surely in the end hold fast
to those ancient characteristics of a strong, free
people, and so keep secure their place in the van
of human progress.
c 34 3
ORGANIZATION IN AMERICAN LIFE
ORGANIZATION IN AMERICAN LIFE
WE all believe in our form of government.
In fact, we are intolerant believers in it.
Every child learns to think that it is the best in the
world, not only for us but for all men. Every dema-
gogue learns to bellow first from the cart tail his
unlimited, unquestioning certainty of that superi-
ority and universal applicability.
I shall not dispute thebelief but I wishtodefine
the facts about it. If our form of government is the
best, it cannot be so because it is the cheapest. On
the contrary, it is one of the most expensive in the
world ; with more paid lawmakers than any other,
higher salaries generally for subordinates, though
with very unworthy scrimping in some of the most
important places, like the judiciary, higher pay on
government con tracts, more lavish appropriation
for internal improvements, and the costliest army
in proportion to number and work. Our form of
government cannot be the best because it is the
most efficient. On the contrary, it is one of the slow-
est in the world; the most complicated, cumbrous,
and limited. Our foreign representatives have been
again and again humiliated by appeals from citi-
zens abroad whom we could not or did not protect
against impressment, with our passports in their
hands, into the military service of other countries.
Every few years we are all humiliated before the
world because of riotous outrages on Italians, or on
Chinese, or on other foreigners, which some state
37 1
ORGANIZATION IN
has not suppressed or atoned for, and the nation has
no adequate control of. So recently as 1902 there
could be found for five months no power in the
Stateof Pennsylvania or in the United States to stop
disorder and riot in the coal mines, and finally that
imperative work had to be done by voluntary effort
outside the constitutional processes or authority of
the high office that successfully intervened.
Even within the spheres in which it will work,
our form of government is not the easiest to man-
age. On the contrary, it requires, to keep it running
successfully, more public spirit, more study about
candidates, more time for multitudinous elections,
local, state, and national; more watchfulness of
public officials, and a higher averageof intelligence
than any other in the world ; and no one has ever
shown that without this alert and devoted public
spirit, this unremitting attention, and this high aver-
age of intelligence, it could have achieved its best
successes or could now maintain them. Some of
our states repudiated their public obligations, and
it took vehement and long-continued effort to get
the disgraceful action reversed. The whole country
was convulsed for years in the struggle to prevent
payment of the national debt in a depreciated me-
dium at half price. The greatest city on the con-
tinent fell under the almost absolute domination
of a vulgar thief. We had to have years of strenu-
ous exertion by the city's best men of all parties,
thousands of speeches and ten thousands of col-
umns of newspaper exposure in fact, the whole
C 38 3
AMERICAN LIFE
community had to be laboriously worked up to a
state of excitement bordering on hysteria or epi-
lepsy to get that thief put in jail and his gang
turned out of office. Even then, how long did the
gang stay out?
The men who formed this complicated and deli-
cately balanced government had no notion of the
conceit prevailing nowadays about its universal
applicability, or even about universal participation
here in its conduct. In their day the idea that it
could be applied to the so-called inferior races was
foreign not only to their convictions, but even their
speculations. They simply did not think of the
notion or fancy it worth talking about. They never
dreamed of applying our form of government to
the native races of America; and as to the blacks,
they did n't imagine it needful to mention them as
an exception so unthinkable was it to the major-
ity that the blacks should be included when they
solemnly declared that all men were born free and
equal, and then went on calmly buying and selling
slavesand enacting fugitive slave laws just as usual.
Not until 1865 was it even established throughout
the United States that every man, black or white,
has the right to sell his own labor; and in 1902, in
Pennsylvania and New York, there were still found
a great many persons, including a pitiful number
of exceptionally ignorant or emotional clergymen,
and some people called statesmen, who considered
such a right on the part of some white men so
doubtful that they were not ashamed to urge, for
C 39 3
ORGANIZATION IN
the sake of peace and coal, that it should be sub-
mitted to arbitration.
Well, in spite of these defects and limitations,
this government of ours has, after all, accom-
plished in its short career a very respectable work
in the world. The magnitude and myriad-sided
development of this work have been recited by
many an eloquent voice and pen, at home and
abroad, though nowhere more persuasively and
effectively than by an old citizen of Pittsburg, in
a book called "Triumphant Democracy." That
clear eye saw and proclaimed the triumph in 1886.
Since then the whole world has come to recognize
the young Republic as the very Samson among
the nations which Mr. Carnegie then depicted. But
if the things we have been saying are so, if they
have any foundation whatever, if our government
does in any measure have these defects, then the
old question of the Philistines comes up with insist-
ent force "Wherein lies its great strength?"
To the answer to that question and the reasons
for the answer I think it timely to ask considera-
tion. If our form of government is unusually ex-
pensive and dilatory and liable to go wrong with-
out eternal vigilance and perpetual agitation; if it
is often found so much worse than other forms in
executive efficiency, in economy, in promptness of
action, and in continuity of policy, what makes it
better?
The answer has become a truism. Its strength
lies in the quality of man it develops. The real
C40 ]
AMERICAN LIFE
merit is not in the machinery, but in the skilled
intelligence absolutely required to frame and to
work it; in the combination of respect for author-
ity on the one hand with training in individual ini-
tiative on the other, which this work brings out and
which the government has thus far scrupulously
and religiously guarded.
We brought the respect for authority from the
birthplace of the common law ; and in proportion
as harshness from its officers was resented in the
old home, in like proportion the law itself was
instinctively elevated into a pillar of cloud by day
and of fire by night in the wilderness of the New
World. We found the initiative in the necessities
of an untamed continent; we were driven to it,
shut up to it at every turn in the imperative be-
ginning of orderly self-government at a thousand
isolated spots in the long protracted struggle with
wild lands, wild beasts, and wild men, till it be-
came the inheritance of the race ; till under its stim-
ulus men found their solitary way through track-
less woods to make lonely clearings or start fron-
tier settlements across the Alleghenies, through
trackless prairies to possess the Mississippi Val-
ley, through alkali deserts to wrest their gold from
the mountains, and at last through the Sierras to
scatter up and down the enchanted shore of the
Pacific. To such a continental conquest of nature
and of men have those two traits of the Fathers
brought us their respect for authority and their
widest freedom of individual initiative. These, with
ORGANIZATION IN
the original vigor of the stock, have made Ameri-
cans what they are; and by consequence have
made this blessed country of ours the joy and
pride and hope of our lives. To harm either is crim-
inal whether to breakdown respect for author-
ity by unlawful combinations, tricky evasions, and
open defiance of order, or to cramp the widest
freedom of the individual in any lawful enterprise
or labor anywhere. Whoever or whatever now
dares to interfere with the permanent union of
these two traits and their continued development
in the American life is an enemy to the Republic
whether known as Political Boss, or as Trust,
or as Trades Union.
But let me not be misunderstood. Nobody can
doubt the need in politics of appliances for finding
and enforcing the will of the party majority. No-
body can question the economies and public bene-
fits in business from great consolidations of capital.
Nobody can deny the right of labor to combine for
higher wages and shorter hours and healthful con-
ditions of work. I mean no arraignment of organ-
ization itself, either in politics or finance or labor
only of that tyrannical organization, that unre-
publican organization, that abandonment of the un-
derlying essentials of democratic success and that
reversion to the principles of an absolute monar-
chy or a military despotism , which refuses to recog-
nize that it has reached the limits of its own right
when it invades the rights of others, and so saps the
very springs that have lifted us to this floodtide of
C 42 3
AMERICAN LIFE
national prosperity. Indeed, instead of opposing I
appeal for organization, but only for organization
of the kind which a distinguished ex-President of
the United States once commended in a persuasive
address 1 the organization which seeks coopera-
tion instead of the one that suppresses individual
judgment and demands exclusive control; the or-
ganization which aims at the helpful union of men
of like minds and interests, or the needful strength
to meet competition, not at monopoly ; which minds
its own business, and is willing that whoever is
not with it should have equal liberty, in this land of
liberty, to do the same.
Such an organization does not exclude young
lawyers from references unless they have made
their peace with the men whonominatedthejudges.
It does not keep all rising young men out of the
public service unless pledged to support the bills
the boss wants, or to protect or punish the corpo-
rations as he may direct. It does not evade state
laws, circumvent national boards, and conceal its
operations alike from the state that charters and
the stockholders that support it, in efforts to mo-
nopolize business or to crush competition. It does
not declare that nobody shall labor or sell the prod-
ucts of lawful labor save on its terms or under its
orders. It is cooperative and beneficent, not restric-
tive and monopolistic; it protects its own rights
without harm to the rights of others, and instead
1 Hon. Grover Cleveland, on Founder's Day, Carnegie Institute, Pitts-
burg, November 7, 1901.
ORGANIZATION IN
of narrowing the doors to young men and checking
aspiration, it maintains the old glory of the land,
the freest opportunity for all, with hope of the
richest rewards for the worthiest.
Such organization knows the spirit of this people
and has learned the secret of their triumphs. It
stimulates instead of checking the alertness, the
ingenuity, the self-reliance, the independence, the
courageous and indomitable ambition, which from
the very beginning in this land have created and
compelled that individual initiative of which we
have been speaking. In politics it does not crush,
on the contrary, it welcomes the democratic spirit
in party councils and the freest debate as the surest
road to political harmony. In business it does not
dread, on the contrary, it expects and prepares for
competition ; it does not resist and bewail, on the
contrary, it rejoices in the power of growing capi-
tal which is the offspring of intelligence and thrift,
and the begetter of public prosperity. In the in-
dustrial world it does not degrade labor into a dull,
mechanical level of limited and uniform production;
on the contrary, it inspires the individual work-
man with the certainty of rewards in proportion
to his skill and his right living. It preserves for
all, in public life or in private, in the ranks of capi-
tal or of labor, the theory of our government from
the beginning not against classes, as the dema-
gogues tell you, but against fixed classes ; it main-
tains, as the priceless distinction of our social state,
the fluidity and easy transfusion of classes, giving
C 44 H
AMERICAN LIFE
constantly to the intelligent and industrious in any
one the hope of rising by their intelligence and
industry to any other.
Years ago a laboring man on strike said to me:
"There is no use any longer in talking to us about
saving and rising out of our class; about ever
becoming an employer and one's own master.
That stage of the world has passed. I and my fel-
lows must be day laborers to the end. We must fix
our eyes solely on one thing, the day's wages, and
make common cause, so that the slowest or poor-
est workman may be put to no disadvantage by
the skill or industry of his fellows, in getting bread
for his children." It is the most dangerous delusion
of the times, undermining the foundations alike of
industrial progress and of public honesty; and its
only logical outcome is either a permanent and
unrepublican fixity of classes or the hopeless Dead
Sea of Socialism.
The same declaration about the impossibility of
rising under existing conditions was heard in New
York when a young boatman named Cornelius
Vanderbilt was beginning to run a little ferry to
Staten Island. It was heard in Washington when a
young portrait painter named Morse was develop-
ing the telegraph. It was heard in my own calling
when Bennett and Greeley and Raymond started,
and heard again when they died. It was heard in
Pittsburg when Andrew Carnegie was a messen-
ger boy, and it was heard again when he retired to
begin giving away his three or four hundred mil-
ORGANIZATION IN AMERICAN LIFE
lions. But after Vanderbilt came Scott and Cassatt,
Huntlngton, Morgan, Hill, and Harriman; after
Morse came Cyrus Field and Edison and West-
inghouse and Bell and Marconi. The development
of the newspapers did not stop with Bennett and
Greeley and Raymond; the development of the
iron industry has not been closed by the organiza-
tion of the United States Steel, and Schwab is not
the last day laborer to rise from the iron mills. The
chances for the young man are and must be kept
as good to-day as they ever were ; in fact, they are
and must be made as much better as the scale
on which this Western World is moving grows
yearly and monthly more colossal. But now, as in
all past times, with political managers or in spite
of them, with the trusts or in spite of them, with
trades unions or in spite of them, the chances are
to him that can see and seize them, the tools
are to him who can use them. "A man 's a man for
a' that."
[46
THE DANGER-POINT IN IMMIGRATION
THE DANGER-POINT IN IMMIGRATION
EVERYBODY knows the old, old story about
the resolutions at the first town meeting in
New England: "Whereas, The earth is the Lord's,
and whereas, We are the Lord's people; there-
fore, Resolved/' etc. We could pass that resolution
to-day in any town meeting in the country, nem.
con. What is more, the conquest of nature and of
man achieved from one side of this continent to
the other since the "Mayflower" landed, and the
happy deliverance thus far out of all our perils,
give the American people warrant for believing in
that resolution ; and they do believe in it, exactly
as they believe in sunrise or in the star-spangled
banner. Well, then, if we are a new chosen people
in this new land of promise, is there any danger
that we, too, may be outnumbered and led astray,
as were the chosen people of old? The Puritan
conquered the land from the Indians. His sons
conquered it from the French and the Dutch.
His grandsons conquered it from the English. His
great-grandsons conquered it from slavery. Can
their descendants conquer it from itself?
Before we make any hasty answer on that ques-
tion, let us remember that those descendants are
now in a minority in the land conquered and pre-
served by their ancestors. They are in a minority,
even if we reinforce them with all later immigra-
tion from the same stock. This is no longer a Puri-
tan people. It is no longer a combination even of
THE DANGER-POINT
Puritan and Cavalier, as in the days of the Revolu-
tion. The proof is not clear that it is any longer an
Anglo-Saxon people. We must take in the whole
Indo-Germanic family to be sure of a mere major-
ity now in the new world which we still think of as
simply the outgrowth of the seed piously planted
by British pioneers at Plymouth and at Jamestown.
We have accustomed ourselves to consider im-
migration as a sure index of national power and
guarantee of national prosperity, and I heartily
join in every word of grateful recognition for the
marvellous results it has brought and is still bring-
ing us. But have we adequately considered the ex-
traordinary change in the character of our immi-
gration? Have we noted, for example, where our
greatest accession came from in 1902, or in the
year preceding? The largest immigration into all
the ports of the United States in both years was
from Sicily, Sardinia, and in lesser degree from
other parts of Italy ; and in 1903 there were fifty-
two thousand more of them than the year before.
And the next largest immigration? The second on
the list for both years were the Croats, Slavs, and
other races of Austria-Hungary, and there were
thirty-four thousand more of them in 1903 than
the year before. And whence came the third largest
number, pressing hard on the heels of the Sicilians
and the Croats? From the Empire of Russia, and
there were nearly twenty-nine thousand more of
them in 1 903 than the year before. China and Japan
sent us as many as England and Scotland in 1902.
C 50 H
IN IMMIGRATION
This change in the sources is not due to any dim-
inution in the volume of the human stream per-
petually pouring upon our shores. It is not that the
reservoir is low and that so we are draining dregs.
On the contrary, our total immigration for 1903
was over a hundred thousand greater than for any
other year ever recorded in our history, and more
than two-thirds of all the steerage immigrants
came from the three countries first named Italy,
Austria-Hungary, and Russia. As compared with
either of these the German immigration was but
a fifth as great and that of Ireland still less. Little
Greece sent us between a third and a half as many
as Ireland.
Look at another aspect of it. In 1 900 the total
white population of the United States of any stock
that had been in this country more than one gen-
eration was not quite forty-one millions. Not only
were the representatives of the Pilgrims com-
pletely submerged, but even when reinforced by
all the whites of any race or origin that had been
in the country for more than one generation, they
came within six millions of being still outnumbered
by the later comers and the negroes. In New York
City the actual foreign-born population is 37 per
cent, to say nothing of the greater number born
of foreign parents. When this is sometimes flip-
pantly dismissed with the remark that New York
is only a foreign city on the fringe of the country
anyway, we should remember that the tendency
is the same everywhere. All the cities of twenty-
C 51 3
THE DANGER-POINT
five thousand inhabitants or over throughout the
United States contain less than one-fifth of our
native-born population, while they have nearly
one-half the whole foreign-born population
more than half of the Italians, Poles, Russians, and
Irish.
For seventeen years there has been a steady
decline in immigration from the lands of our an-
cestors and of their kinsfolk that is to say, from
England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany,
Denmark, and Switzerland. During the same pe-
riod there has been a steady and progressive in-
crease from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Spain,
Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Roumania, etc. And,
finally, to give an analysis by races rather than
mere nationalities, 28 per cent of the whole immi-
gration in 1902 was Italian, 1 1 per cent of it was
Polish, 9 per cent was Hebrew, and 15 per cent
was Slovak, Croatian, Slavonian, and Magyar
these races thus making practically two-thirds of
the whole immigration.
We have emphatically and even vociferously
made everybody else, from all over the world, at
home in our Father's house. But as we look around
at the variegated throng, do we always feel just as
much at home ourselves? I will yield to none in
reverence for our ancestors and pride in the work
they did. But perhaps even these ancestors, view r -
ing now from above, as we love to think, these
scenes of their glorious achievements, might be
better pleased with imitation than with praise, and
C 52 3
IN IMMIGRATION
might think it as important for us to preserve their
work as to glorify it. And so I venture to take the
past for granted. The men who made New Eng-
land hold securely and forever a page resplen-
dent as any in the world's history. The govern-
ment they were perhaps the most potent factors
in founding has developed into the greatest and
most powerful agency in modern civilization. Let
us leave it at that.
I ask, then, consideration of something different
and more pressing. Are we, their sons, managing
this heritage of our Fathers so as to further their
ends? How are we likely to leave it to our sons?
Will it still fulfil the purpose of those great men
who, according to the eulogium of Mr. Gladstone,
struck out at one blow the most perfect form of
government yet devised by human intelligence?
A common notion seems to be that their real
purpose in starting this government was a mis-
sionary one. They wanted, as our stump orators
declaim with unction, "to make America spell
Opportunity/' So interpreting the purpose of the
Fathers, we have developed a continent in order
that, first of all, it might bestow the benefit of
their and our labors, in the shape of Opportunity,
on the just and unjust, on the fit and unfit, of every
class and race and nativity under the sun.
We did n't stop at trifles; all comers were long
welcomed not merely those who sought a land
where they might worship God according to the
dictates of their conscience, or those others whose
c 53 :
THE DANGER-POINT
necessity and courage led them to the struggles
of a new world where they hoped to build homes
and a community of freemen trained under Magna
Charta, like the land and the homes they had left.
These, to be sure, were gladly received; but so
also were the ignorant, the depraved, the law-
breaker, and the pauper, the man who proclaimed
that property was robbery and the man who pro-
claimed that government was tyranny, the social-
ist, the communist, and the anarchist our spa-
cious doors swung in ward with an equal hospitality
for all.
Far less altruistic was the homely purpose of
the plain, unrhetorical founders of the Republic
themselves. "To form a more perfect union, estab-
lish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide
for the common defence, promote the general wel-
fare and secure the blessings of liberty to our-
selves and our posterity, we do ordain and establish
this constitution." Who says we took the only or
the wisest course to fulfil this high purpose, to
discharge with fidelity this sacred duty, when we
flung down the bars to men who knew nothing
of liberty or of justice or of domestic tranquillity?
"To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our posterity/' Have we scrupulously re-
membered that purpose since we took from our
Fathers this most complicated and delicately bal-
anced government ever set up by the wit of man?
It was designed specifically for the wants, and it
taxed in its conduct the ability, of a race second
54
IN IMMIGRATION
at least to none in the world, a race trained to free
institutions, to the widest individual initiative, and
to ordered liberty under law ever since Runny-
mede. We invited almost without discrimination
every immigrant just escaped from generations of
government by others, and in turn every negro
just escaped from generations of slavery, to the
same power with ourselves in guiding that com-
plicated and delicately balanced machine. We neg-
lected the safeguards of the Republic held essen-
tial by the Fathers, and threw away one after an-
other almost every requirement they had main-
tained in the thirteen colonies or elsewhere, for
either intelligence or character or thrift among
those permitted to have equal voice with us in
framing our laws, in levying our taxes, and in de-
termining our expenditures and our general policy.
"To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our posterity/' Did we do that, when under
such guidance we gradually forgot the old order
of march, followed as faithfully by our Fathers as
the Israelites followed the pillar of cloud by day
and the pillar of fire by night, the Puritan order
of march,in which every advance was fortified first
by the meeting-house and then by a school-house,
while next and only next the garrison, fresh from
meeting-house and school-house, went into town
meeting?
Well, we shall never grind with the water that
has passed the mill. This free people will never
take away the welcome we have given to the
55
THE DANGER-POINT
pauper and the illiterate, to the communist and
the anarchist, from abroad whom we have already
made at home among us ; will never withdraw the
suffrage from the man who now has it, but cannot
read his ballot; from the man that votes without
ever paying taxes, or from the man that has been
convicted of crime, but has been pardoned out just
before his term expired in order that he may again
render us his help in securing the blessings of
liberty for ourselves and for our posterity. What
is done is beyond recall ; and with all its faults the
achievement is colossal and of world-wide benefi-
cence. But if, in the onward rush of this magnifi-
cent development, no great harm has yet resulted
if, indeed, good has come because of, or in spite
of, our having so largely lost sight for the time of
the purpose declared in the Constitution is it wise
to continue indefinitely on the changed course?
Grant that thus far, as we cast our drag-net
over all lands and classes and races, and make
haste to divide with them on equal terms the rule
in our Father's house, we have still been able to
leaven the lump not wholly, but measurably and
beyond expectation. Nevertheless, are we sure
that as the lump grows larger the leaven from
our relatively diminishing numbers will still hold
out? Can the nation deal so much better than Wall
Street with huge masses of undigested securities?
Or is the time approaching when, instead of con-
tinuing, with the amazing success of the past, to
assimilate these incongruous and heterogeneous
C 56]
IN IMMIGRATION
additions to our body politic, we may find that they
are beginning to assimilate us?
Are we then really taking a safe course to pre-
serve the blessings of liberty for ourselves and for
our posterity when we hesitate now to sift out of
our immigration not merely the pauper and anar-
chist and the poor Chinaman, but, with less invidi-
ous discrimination, more of the notoriously unde-
sirable elements ; or when we hesitate to exclude
peremptorily from the suffrage national, state,
or municipal any newcomer who cannot read
the laws before he votes for lawmakers, and who
does not pay taxes himself when he votes taxes
upon others?
Shall we find that safe course by roaming the
oceans to drag in semi-tropical and revolutionary
communities, to be made states in the American
Union, equal from the start with ourselves, with
sometimes, perhaps, a balance of power that may
enable them to govern us and the land of our
Fathers? Such questions have burst upon us too
suddenly out of recent expansion to justify at the
outset harsh criticism of any rash or ill-considered
proposals that may rise to the surface in the first
froth of public discussion. But I venture to predict
that the time will come within the lives of many
of us, when the man who shall propose the incor-
poration as a state into this government of the
United States of America of any island of the sea,
the Philippines, the Sandwich Islands, or Porto
Rico, or Cuba, will be hunted from political life as
C 57 n
THE DANGER-POINT
a public enemy, whether he be animated merely
by lingering reminiscences of the filibusters and
the slavery propaganda, or whether he represents
a sugar trust in Wall Street or a sagebrush trust
in the United States Senate.
Are we finding that safe course when we hold
public meetings for an immigrant detained and
about to be deported, to protest against the en-
forcement of the law in his case, since the poor
man was merely under contract for preaching an-
archy ( or, to give an explanation lately made by
some of his friends, was merely an anarchist under
contract to visit trades unions ) ; while we have
not one word of protest against the arrest and
deportation of a laborer when he is guilty the
wretch ! of coming under a contract to earn an
honest living by honest toil? Away with the hon-
est workman ! we exclaim ; his stay might help to
free white labor and to weaken the padlocks on
the close shops ; but as for the preacher of anarchy,
how dare you in this free country interfere with
his liberty of opinion ?
Are we taking that safe course to preserve the
blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity
if, after fighting four years to free negro labor at
the South, we now, under this new guidance, per-
mit organizations unknown to the law to enslave
white labor in every building and manufacturing
centre at the North? Are we following that safe
course if a workman, however intelligent or indus-
trious or competent and deserving, is deprived of
c 58 n
IN IMMIGRATION
the right to earn his living on terms mutually sat-
isfactory to himself and to his employers ? Are we
following that safe course if an honest artisan can
be driven from his employment and denied work
anywhere at his trade because he obeyed the call
of the governor of his state, on the militia of the
state, to maintain order in the state?
Well, we have seen no occasion, our Fathers
have seen no occasion, in which in the end some
inspiration did not bring the American people to
a sober and sane second thought. We will not
doubt that somehow in some time these dangers,
too, will be successfully met. But neither will we
doubt that if we still refuse to sift our immigration ;
if we still refuse to require from newcomers some
intelligence and some character and thrift before
we ask them to help us conduct our own govern-
ment; if we neglect to hinder the plan of politi-
cians for gathering in new states in the American
Union from the Caribbean Sea, from the Chinese
Sea, or from Polynesia; if we refuse to protect
individual initiative and fail to keep white labor
free at home; if we persist in making this land an
asylum for the anarchist and outcasts from every
other civilized land in the world, the common
sewer for Christendom, if we still persist in all
this, then, to the imperfect vision of the human
eye, the path of our unexampled progress seems
likely some day to lead into hopeless entangle-
ments and end in an impasse, from which advance
is improbable.
C 59 n
THE DANGER-POINT IN IMMIGRATION
Yet so the dwellers in the sun, whom some fan-
ciful astronomers have been lately imagining, must
be hopeless as they see the huge spots which from
time to time roll over and envelop it, and must
conclude, when buried in these sinister shadows,
that the end of all things is approaching. At that
moment of deepest gloom, from our more distant
point of view, such shadows become trivial and
transient, and out of them all shines forth again
the resplendent orb of day, effulgent, benignant,
without a cloud to dim its glory and radiant with
the hope of the world and the ages.
Spots may seem to dim the lustre of our Puritan
prospect now, clouds may roll about the national
path, but where to us it sometimes appears to
narrow into pitfalls or impassable morasses, the
serene vision of the men of the " Mayflower,"
from their cerulean heights, may already perceive
it broadening again into a highway, the true
highway of the God of our Fathers, along which
He led a people He really chose, from Plymouth
thus far, and, if they but hearken, will lead them
still.
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
i
NO politics can be known in the embassy.
Democrats or Republicans, Independents,
Prohibitionists, Populists, Woman Suffragists, or
miscellaneous reformers, foreign voters or native,
candidates defeated or candidates elected, all are
American citizens, all support the President and
the government the embassy represents, and all
are alike in their right to regard the American
ambassador as their public servant.
When William Jennings Bryan expressed his
thanks for treatment at our embassies which was
plainly due to a man whom nearly half the Ameri-
can people had more than once approved for their
highest office, and when the President responded
that, if any ambassador had failed to extend such
treatment in such a case, his shrift would have
been short, there was a fit recognition of what has
been the uniform policy of our government and
what it should always remain. No ambassador has
the right to carry his politics on the outward voy-
age beyond Sandy Hook. From that moment he
represents the President and the government of
the whole American people, and the service he is
sent to render is due alike to all.
I may venture to suggest that the converse ought
to be true, that there ought to be no politics at
home in dealing with the embassy's work. It is of
course a matter of plain national interest, not to
C 63 1
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
speak of national self-respect, that a diplomatic
officer, like his colleagues of the army and navy,
while engaged in active service is entitled to sup-
port from home, and should be held secure from
attacks in the rear. Is it not just as plain that his
work should be passed upon solely on national
grounds, and held equally secure from mere par-
tisan attack?
There are other kinds of attack^ attacks from
the front and by friends which a diplomat may
have to encounter. Here is a great London news-
paper, describing in detail the trials of "A Perse-
cuted Ambassador." " Why/' it frankly asks,
4 Why are we so brutal to the American ambassador ?
We turn him into a sort of lecturer and demand from
him at every turn speeches and yet more speeches, ver-
satility and yet more versatility. We launch him on an
oratorical tour from Land's End to John o' Groats, in
placid forgetfulness that he may after all have some busi-
ness of his own or his country's to attend to. One can
imagine Whitelaw Reid at this moment, frantically pre-
paring himself for the fray by re-reading all the standard
authors he has forgotten, composing character sketches
of famous Americans by the bushel, working up local
color, and dicta ting not less than one address a day ! Only
by thus arming beforehand will he be able, when he has
settled down among us, to feel himself a free man."
Now please to observe under what sort of a cross-
fire the hapless ambassador is placed. There are
the demands, and yet all these expected speeches
are in violation of the fixed and long-standing rule
[ 64 ]
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
of our own State Department! Here, if I may ven-
ture on the indiscretion of quoting it, here are
its precise terms:
' ' It is forbidden to diplomatic officers to participate in
any manner in the political concerns of the country of
their residence ; and they are directed especially to refrain
from public expressions of opinion upon local political'
or other questions arising within their jurisdiction. It is
deemed advisable to extend a similar prohibition against
public addresses, unless upon exceptional festal occasions,
in the country of official residence. Even upon such oc-
casions any reference to political issues, pending in the
United States or elsewhere, should be carefully avoided. ' '
Really, however much appearances may some-
times tend to a contrary view, the work of speech-
making is not the chief duty for which the country
sends out its ambassador. There are graver tasks,
and by the record as to them the final judgment
is made up. We have long been admirably served
in London. Nevertheless, Reverdy Johnson, and
James Russell Lowell, and Edward J. Phelps, and
Robert T. Lincoln, and Thomas F. Bayard, and
then the man who passed from the ambassador-
ship to the front rank of modern secretaries, John
Hay, and the laurelled and radiant Choate, not to
speak of others, all, more or less in spite of them-
selves, drifted into becoming known as occasional
and always successful speech-makers.
Yet the brilliancy of the whole distinguished
array has not dimmed the fame of the silent Benja-
min Franklin, agent in London for the colonies, or
C 65 3
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
those earlier Ministers for the Republic, John Jay
and Charles Francis Adams, the one of whom by
a great and unpopular act of statesmanship helped
the tottering infant nation to its feet, while the other
guarded it with austere fidelity and splendid suc-
cess throughout as great dangers as it has encoun-
tered since Valley Forge. And now, can any one
recall a notable public speech either of them ever
made in the whole course of his diplomatic career?
Verily I say unto you, an ambassador cannot live
on speeches alone!
At one of the Gridiron Club dinners in Wash-
ington a newspaper man was placed under hyp-
notic influence, told that he was the American Am-
bassador to the Court of St. James, and instructed
to make an after-dinner speech for a London ban-
quet. He promptly began: " Gentlemen, blood is
thicker than water. Oh, how we love our kinsfolk
in the land of our ancestors. Hands across the sea.
Common language, common blood, common liter-
ature, the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race. We
are brothers all. Three cheers for the king/'
Well, those are good phrases. We have heard
them before. They were right and there is no harm
in using them again. But as means for persuading
the people of the two countries to mutual good-
will, they have served their purpose, and have
ceased to-day to be a part of the working-tools of
diplomacy on either side of the Atlantic. There was
a time in our own history when some of us thought
a Philadelphia arm in arm Convention a useful
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
object-lesson. In that day and under those circum-
stances it did serve its purpose. But nobody thinks
it needful now to see South Carolina and Massa-
chusetts delegates walking arm in arm into a na-
tional assemblage, in order to be convinced that
they feel and know they belong to the same undis-
solved and indissoluble Union. So nobody needs
now to be told of clasping hands across the sea,
or of common blood, or a common literature, to
know that Great Britain and the United States, in
the nature of things, do inevitably sustain peculiar
relations to each other not held by either with
any other nation, that they are now on very good
terms, better than for over a century, and that from
this time on, the better they know each other, and
the more frequent and intimate their intercourse,
the better and more durable will be their good
understanding.
Some one spoke the other day of the duty of
our embassy as consisting merely in "jollying the
English." In so far as this means that, whenever
an ambassador has to say anything, he should say a
friendly thing if he can, the remark is well enough.
Surely the meanest disposition in the world is that
which grudges uttering the truth because it may
be pleasant to others to hear it.
But there is a duty of an ambassador more im-
portant even than promoting goodwill highly
important as we all consider that to be. The very
people and government to whom he is accred-
ited would recognize the superior and imperative
67 3
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
nature of this other duty. An ambassador is sent
to look after the interests of his own country. Happy
his lot if the interests of the country that sends him
and those of the country to which he is sent are not
conflicting. That is an ideal state, but it is not to be
counted on anywhere definitely as a permanence.
If unhappily these interests are ever found to con-
flict, the most injurious and the most treacherous
fault an ambassador can commit is to sacrifice or
imperil the interests of his own country, whether
merely through a judgment warped by the subtle
influence of his foreign associations, or in the de-
liberate and sordid hope of remaining persona grata
in the country in which he temporarily resides.
We are sometimes liable to a curious self-decep-
tion in such matters. We assume that a man is ne-
cessarily succeeding when the country to which he
is sent praises him. It is, of course, most agree-
able to us to hear such praise; yet we never base
our estimate of any other agent's success in the
agreements we send him to make for us entirely
on the pleasure the opposite side shows about his
work. Long ago I have heard of diplomatic ser-
vants enshrined in the popular regard at home be-
cause of a foreign approval which found no echo
in the secret records of our State Department. We
can never afford to lose sight of two facts about
the real business of our ambassadors: that their
first duty is to look after the interests of their own
country, and that the greatest of these interests is,
now and always, peace the peace of justice.
C 68 3
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
With all our modern improvements, our diplo-
macy has no better standards yet than those set
by John Jay and Charles Francis Adams. Neither
was exactly a "jollier," and perhaps neither was
at the moment exuberantly popular in the capital
to which he was accredited. But they retired with
the sincere respect of both countries, deserve to
be honorably remembered in the annals of both,
and are sure at least of lasting names and the
gratitude of coming generations in the land they
served.
It was a happy and illuminating phrase of our
great Secretary of State when in a humorous vein
he told us that our foreign policy consists chiefly
in the Golden Rule and the Monroe Doctrine. It
requires but another word, in fact, to make it com-
pletely comprehensive. To the Golden Rule and
the Monroe Doctrine we need only add the Dix
Doctrine to sum up the whole body of State De-
partment instructions for our dealings with foreign
nations. No one, no New Yorker, no American,
ever forgets the Dix Doctrine " If any man hauls
down the American flag, shoot him on the spot."
Neither that nor the Monroe Doctrine is interna-
tional law,but both are sure to remain fundamental
parts of American international policy, and when
you illumine both by the Golden Rule, you have
set forth what I firmly believe is the sincere and
devout wish of the United States with regard to all
its foreign relations and the work of all its repre-
sentatives in the diplomatic service. Our use for
C 69 I)
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
the big stick is much the same as that of the quiet
citizen, to keep off footpads and the dogs. We covet
no nation's lands or other possessions. We seek
only to preserve and protect our own. We have
a passionate preference, manifested on all suitable
occasions through more than half a century, for
doing this whenever practicable by international
arbitration rather than by war. We sincerely wish
the prosperity and advancing freedom of all ; and
I fully believe we are to-day, from Atlantic to
Pacific and from President to humblest citizen, as
peace-loving a nation as exists in the world.
ii
No one, I trust, will ever find me unmindful of the
rights and just claims of the profession I honor
most in the world and am the proudest to have
served. No man can have spent his life in news-
paper work without being led by all his habits and
instincts to sympathy with newspaper workers and
a readiness to facilitate their efforts. And yet may
I hint that there might, in fact there must, come
a time when it is the duty of a diplomatic officer
to report first and exclusively to the government
instead of reporting to the newspapers !
It is perfectly true that an open course is the
best; that a free people wish to know from day to
day what is being done in their name and by their
authority; that our government is not adapted to
secrecy and does not like to make a mystery of
its movements and its policy.
c 70 n
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
But the Japanese have been showing on a great
scale that there is a duty in war which under any
sagacious government must come before the duty
of furnishing bulletins for the daily press. Diplo-
macy, if it is to be sagacious or successful, even
the diplomacy of a Republic, must be somewhat
in the same class. Neither can always be advan-
tageously conducted coram publico.
There is another phase of our newspaper activ-
ities that merits more serious consideration from
all of us than we generally give it. The free Press
largely rules a free country. It may make peace
or war; it has done both. But it is quite capable
of fomenting very grave difficulties which it never
desired or intended or even thought of. In our
great distances, and isolation between two oceans,
and general feeling of remoteness and elbow-room
and independence, it has sometimes been apt in
moments of excitement to measure its words as
little in dealing with a high-spirited and sensitive
nation as with a candidate for town constable or
the board of aldermen. Is it not time for the Press,
when it exercises the power, to recognize also
the obligations of rule, consideration, moder-
ation, and a scrupulous regard both for the rights
and the susceptibilities of others ?
We have ourselves resented at times with
unwonted asperity the slightest foreign interfer-
ence in our own domestic discussions. More than
once those of us of maturer years have seen this
country lashed into a fury almost belligerent
C 71 n
THE DIPLOMATIC POINT OF VIEW
merely by the critical or carping references in
foreign newspapers. It might be well now, in
some quiet hour, to consider the other side, and
reflect how they may feel over our free-spoken
comments on their affairs. Have we not, in fact,
taken sides and led our people to take sides, ha-
bitually and even vehemently, on almost every
foreign question that comes to our notice ? Would
it not comport better sometimes with our position
now if we were a little less dogmatic in laying
down the duty of this or that nation in its own do-
mestic affairs, and a little less partisan in our view
of the unhappy conflict between contending na-
tions ? Do not misunderstand me. I am arraigning
no one, and making no criticisms of others which
I do not take to myself also. But has not the time
come in the development of this country and in the
increased intimacy and importance of its relations
to other countries, when we may advantageously
practice a little more reserve in commenting upon
other people's affairs, a little more impartiality
between countries at war, and a friendlier tone to
each when we are on good terms with both, and
have every interest to remain so ? What is good
policy for individuals in the disagreements of their
neighbors might sometimes in these international
cases be pretty good policy for newspapers too and
for the people at large, an attitude of friendly
neutrality, while meantime diligently minding
their own business and letting that of other people
alone.
[ 72 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
i
THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND THE POLK DOCTRINE
* I V) the average American the Monroe Doc-
JL trine seems so natural and necessary that he
is always surprised at the surprise with which the
pretension is regarded by Europe. Not one of our
citizens out of a thousand has any doubt of its pro-
priety or of our duty to maintain it. The slightest
show of foreign opposition would call a practically
unanimous country to its defence.
At the same time there is no very intimate
familiarity with the circumstances of its origin,
or the varying scope we have given it, and little
attention has been paid to the changed conditions
that must now affect its application. Considered at
present merely in the old light, as a barrier against
the reactionary designs of the Holy Alliance upon
the new republics we had just recognized in the
American continents at the close of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, its condi-
tion somewhat resembles that of a long-neglected
barrel around which has accumulated the debris of
years. The hoops, the thing that made it a barrel,
have dropped away ; only the pressure of the de-
bris outside holds the staves together. Remove that
and the barrel would tumble to pieces. Keep up the
outside pressure and it may last indefinitely.
I do not say that the illustration exactly fits the
C 75 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
case, or that the Monroe Doctrine would disap-
pear if Europe ceased to oppose it. I do say that
under a show of European opposition it would be
likely to last indefinitely; and that in a long ab-
sence of such opposition it may hold together less
tenaciously. The things that made the Monroe
Doctrine have disappeared, the danger that the
infant republics should be strangled by their cruel
stepmother and her allies ; that the Holy Alliance
should check the spread of republican institutions
or overturn them in any place where they de-
serve to exist; or that Europeans should attempt
now, under the shadow of the United States of the
twentieth century, to colonize alleged unoccupied
lands in America. Under such circumstances it may
be easy, after a while, for us to look over the Mon-
roe Doctrine again in the light of the present situ-
ation of the American continents and of our pres-
ent necessities. We will certainly not abandon it;
but we may find, if nobody is opposing us, that
perhaps its extension, quite so far beyond the ori-
ginal purpose of Mr. Monroe and Mr. Adams as
the fervor of our patriots has carried it, may prove
to be attended with wholly unnecessary inconven-
ience to ourselves.
For the sake of precision it may be well at the be-
ginning to restate a few facts about it, not always
remembered. The doctrine is not international law.
It is not American law. It consists merely of decla-
rations of policy by Presidents and Secretaries of
c 76 n
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
State, and these are not uniform. There is a Mon-
roe Doctrine, suggested in part by Mr. Canning,
extended and formulated by Mr. John Quincy
Adams, and adopted by Mr. Monroe, in his mes-
sage to Congress of December 2, 1823. There is
a Polk Doctrine, starting in disputes about our
northwestern frontier and in an intrigue of the
slave power for the seizure and annexation of Yu-
catan, collaborated by Mr. James Buchanan and his
chief, and adopted by Mr. Polk, in his messages to
Congress of December 2 , 1 845 , and April 29,1 848 .
The Monroe Doctrine held that ( i ) " the Ameri-
can continents, by the free and independent condi-
tion which they have assumed and maintained, are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for fu-
ture colonization by any European power ; "and ( 2 )
that, as " the political system of the allied powers
is essentially different . . . from that of America
. . . with the existing colonies or dependencies of
any European power ( in America ) we have not in-
terfered and shall not interfere ; but with the gov-
ernments who have declared their independence
and maintained it ... we could not view any inter-
position for the purpose of oppressing them or
controlling in any other manner their destiny by
any European power, in any other light than as the
manifestation of an unfriendly disposition tow r ard
the United States." The second of these proposi-
tions was the one suggested and cordially wel-
comed by Great Britain ; the first was met by in-
stant dissent. Both, though resting wholly on the
c 77 n
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
Presidential declaration, without a statute or reso-
lution of Congress to sustain them, have become
incorporated into the general American faith. But
neither of them declares against any but republi-
can institutions for the future in this hemisphere ;
in fact, about the same time we were recognizing
two emperors, Iturbide in Mexico and Dom Pedro
in Brazil. Neither of them objects to transfer of
dominion to Europeans by cession, purchase, or
the voluntary act of the inhabitants; and neither
of them gives any pledge to any South American
state that we would interfere in its behalf against
the use of force for the collection of debts or the
redress of injuries, or indeed against any European
attack.
The Polk Doctrine, starting from Mr. Monroe's
statement about colonization, says: ( i ) "It should
be distinctly announced to the world as our settled
policy that no future European colony or dominion
shall, with our consent, be planted or established on
any part of the North American continent;" and
again, quoting Mr. Monroe as opposing the exten-
sion of the European system to this hemisphere,
Mr. Polk says: (2) "While it is not my purpose
to recommend . . . the acquisition of the dominion
and sovereignty over Yucatan, yet ... we could
not consent to a transfer of this dominion and sov-
ereignty to either Spain , Great Britain , or any other
European power." Thus, professing only to re-
affirm the Monroe Doctrine, the Polk Doctrine ex-
tends it to forbid' specifically the establishment or
C 78 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
acquisition of dominion anywhere in North Amer-
ica, and inferentially anywhere in this hemisphere,
by any European power. 1 Not merely are they for-
bidden to claim unsettled lands and colonize them,
or to interfere with the liberties of the Spanish-
American Republics we had just recognized ; but
they must never take dominion, by cession, by pur-
chase, by voluntary appeal of inhabitants, or other-
wise. Under the Polk Doctrine no American nation
could part with any of its territory to Europeans
to secure any advantage for itself; nor could its
people determine their own destiny at their own
will. Under that doctrine Germany could not buy
a coaling station off the coast of Chili, or on the
1 General Grant restated the Polk Doctrine even more specifically (with-
out reference, however, to Mr. Polk) in his letter to the Senate of May 31,
1870, concerning his plan for annexing San Domingo, as follows : "The
Doctrine promulgated by President Monroe has been adhered to by all polit-
ical parties, and I now deem it proper to assert the equally important prin-
ciple that hereafter no territory on this continent shall be regarded as sub-
ject of transfer to a European power."
Mr. Cleveland carried it so far in the Venezuela matter, in his special
message of December 17, 1895, as to propose appointing a commission
to determine the boundary between Great Britain and Venezuela, and re-
sisting by every means in our power " the appropriation by Great Britain
of any lands, or the exercise of governmental jurisdiction over any terri-
tory which ... we have determined . . . belongs to Venezuela."
Both these utterances are quite outside the original scope of the Monroe
Doctrine, and are either variations or extensions of the Polk Doctrine.
The representatives of the United States at the Hague Peace Conference
(obviously with this body of executive declarations in mind) only signed
its agreements on condition that "Nothing contained in this Convention
shall be so construed as to require the United States of America to depart
from its traditional policy of not intruding upon, interfering with, or en-
tangling itself in the political questions or internal administration of any
foreign state ; nor shall anything contained in the said Convention be so
construed as to require the relinquishment by the United States of America
of its traditional attitude toward purely American questions."
C 79 ]
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
confines of Patagonia, not even if the recog-
nized sovereigns agreed to sell it and the inhabit-
ants earnestly desired the transfer ; nor could Vene-
zuela pay its European debts by ceding possibly
even by leasing the little island of Marguerita
off its coast.
I suppose the logical basis of our original as-
sertion of the Monroe Doctrine to have been our
own national interests; and the only ground for
any recognition or toleration of it by other nations
to have been the national right, generally claimed,
to hold our own interests paramount within the
natural and legitimate sphere of our influence.
Such a claim is known in international practice.
What other nations cannot so clearly understand
is why Patagonia, close to the Antarctic Circle and
the southern frigid zone, should be in our sphere
of influence any more than theirs; or, if it is, why
the Azores and Morocco, less than a third as far
away from us, are not also within our sphere of
influence.
It is always an advantage, in any effort to see
all around a subject, to find the other man's point
of view. Perhaps we may get a clearer insight
into the action of the European mind on this sub-
ject if we should try to work out some European
Monroe Doctrine, and especially some European
Polk Doctrine.
China, or at any rate China and Russia com-
bined, hold a position in Asia far more command-
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
ing than that of the United States in the three
Americas. In both cases, at the outbreak of the
Spanish- American War, the governments were as
absolutely committed to the despotic as we are to
the republican idea ; and there was no obvious proof
that the overwhelming majority of their people did
not believe in their system as much as the corre-
sponding majority of our people believe in ours.
Suppose China, or China and Russia together, had
taken ground that the Asiatic continent, being en-
tirely occupied by the existing governments which
were mostly in form and principle like their own,
was no longer a field for colonization or conquest
by any American power; and on that ground had
warned us off Manila and the Philippines?
Great Britain, entrenched at the north and at
the south of Africa, and reaching thence in each
direction yet farther and farther toward the point
where her two lines of settlement must meet,
holds a position on the continent of Africa compar-
able at least to that of the United States on the con-
tinents of America. In connection with the minor
colonies by other governments of like tendencies
toward constitutional monarchy with England
herself, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany, she has
the immensely preponderating influence. Suppose
Great Britain, with the concurrence of the rest,
had said to the United States that Africa, having
already had governments under their control and
committed mainly to the ideas of the constitutional
monarchy set up over her whole extent ( so far as
C 81 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
it is accessible excepting through their territory ) ,
is no longer a field for colonization by Republics,
and so had warned us off, say, from Liberia?
Would the United States have cheerfully ac-
cepted that doctrine in Asia, or even in Africa?
Suppose it had been announced when Dewey was
compelled to leave Hong Kong, and had his choice
between falling upon the national enemy at Manila
or turning his back upon the Spaniard and steam-
ing home across the Pacific? Or suppose that after
the war China and Russia had called upon us to
give up what we had conquered and restore the
Philippines to Spain?
With our mental vision possibly a little clarified
by this glimpse of how the boot might look on
the other leg, it may be useful now to consider
dispassionately the present advantage to us of
the two doctrines, and particularly the doctrine
of Mr. Polk ; and to count from the only point of
view a representative government on its own ini-
tiative has any right to take, that of the interest
of its citizens, whether it is now worth to them
what it might cost.
What would be our present precise motive for
aggressively asserting against the world the two
doctrines, as to countries farther away from us
than half Europe and Africa are ? One obvious ad-
vantage, from the point of view of our naval and
mercantile marine, must always be remembered,
and never undervalued, that of making naval
and coaling stations scarce for our commercial
C 82 ]
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
rivals and possible enemies. And yet our position
would seem a little curious, spending hundreds of
millions on a Panama canal, so as to open to all the
world on equal terms the trade on the Pacific, in
which, until a canal is dug, we have such an enor-
mous natural advantage ourselves, and then say-
ing, "Nevertheless, by our Polk Doctrine we can
still delay you or hamper you a little about coaling
stations!" But as to the old grounds of the Mon-
roe Doctrine, are we afraid now of peril to our own
institutions? Have we any interest in forcing the
maintenance of similar institutions elsewhere be-
yond the legitimate sphere of our influence, unless
at least they give promise of bringing to others
something akin to what they have brought to us?
If it be true that in considerable parts of the re-
gions to the south of us they have resulted, through
the three-quarters of a century since the doctrine
was announced, in tumult, lack of development,
disaster, and chronic re volution, what is the precise
real advantage for our citizens which the United
States derives from meddling, and aggressively
insisting that the world must continue to witness
this result of so-called republican institutions on
so colossal a scale?
In the short period since the escape of Mexico
from her colonial government, in 1821, a statisti-
cal historian has counted three hundred revolu-
tions, successful or abortive. There is one particu-
lar South American state, in which, for one reason
or another, and in one way or another, we have
C 83 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
of late greatly interested ourselves. The table of
Venezuela's revolutions, forcible removals of chief
magistrates, and civil wars, with dates and dura-
tion of each, has a melancholy significance. From
1811, when it proclaimed its independence, till
1903, it has had, under dictators, supreme chiefs,
self-proclaimed presidents, and otherwise, over
thirty changes, has spent over twenty-five years
under three dictatorships, each violently over-
thrown, and has had civil war for twenty-nine
years. No doubt as to this government, too, which
has sustained its independence, and, to use the
stately language of Mr. Monroe, whose indepen-
dence, on great consideration and on just princi-
ples, we acknowledge, we could not view any inter-
position for the purpose of oppressing it or control-
ling in any manner its destiny by any European
power except as a manifestation of an unfriendly
disposition toward the United States. It is directly
within the sphere of our influence, as Cuba was,
and if there should ever arise an imperative neces-
sity for the restoration of order from the outside,
the task would be ours rather than that of any Eu-
ropean nation. But would that task be quite so im-
perative or exclusive if, instead of overhanging the
Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, this nation
were double as far away from us as half Africa is ?
Such turbulent and revolutionary governments
commit offences against foreigners; sometimes in-
jure foreign residents, sometimes affront or injure
foreign vessels in their waters, sometimes run in
[ 84 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
debt and fail to pay. What then ? Is the Monroe
Doctrine, or, still more, the Polk Doctrine, to be
construed into an international bankruptcy act, to
be enforced by the United States for the benefit
of any American Republic against all European
creditors ? Or, on the other hand, is it to degenerate
into an international collection agency, maintained
by the United States for the benefit of European
powers which may have just claims against Ameri-
can Republics? In a recent conspicuous case the
President has very properly and wisely given a
practical negative to both these questions; while
under his guidance the Secretary of State, with
consummate skill, has secured the precedent that
European powers first procure our consent before
attempting to collect debts by force on these con-
tinents, and then only on their promise not to take
territory. Perhaps it is also a useful precedent, se-
cured at the same time, that under such conditions
the game does not prove worth the candle.
But what then? What alternative is left? Shall
we simply say to any European creditor that, as to
any debt of any American Republic, the only rule
is Caveat emptor? Must the lender under any cir-
cumstances be merely told that he should have con-
sidered the risks before he made the loan, and that
now he has no remedy? When the debtor country
has no assets save its custom-houses and its lands,
must the United States, a power aiming to stand
at the head of the world's civilization, say for all
time, " You shall not touch the only assets of your
85
SOiME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
debtor, because it is an American Republic'' ? And,
assuming that to be just, and our determination,
are we ready to carry that doctrine, in case of
need, as far afield as to Uruguay and Paraguay
and Patagonia and then to fight for it?
That is the vital point in the whole subject, as
Mr. Loomis indicated in a sagacious address. It is
better to consider the question before a case springs
up and the patriotic tern per of the people is aroused.
Obviously, we shall either modify the present ex-
treme extensions of the old doctrine, which carry
it far beyond any national interest it now serves,
or some day or another we shall have to fight for
it and ought to, unless we mean to play the part
of a vulgar braggart, and loudly assert what we
are not ready to maintain. How far would it really
have concerned our interests in the case of the
Argentine troubles, which prostrated the Barings
and brought on a great financial crash in London,
if Great Britain had found it necessary for the pro-
tection of the rights of her people to take steps in
that remote country, twice as far from New York
as London itself is, which would seem to infringe
upon the extreme extensions of the Monroe Doc-
trine by Polk and Buchanan? Happily the case did
not arise. But some day and with some nation it
is reasonably sure to. We may better now, in a
time of profound calm, and when there is no threat
to affect our dignity or disturb the serenity of our
judgment, give serious consideration ourselves to
this question : " How far south do we mean now, in
c se n
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
the twentieth century, to push the Monroe Doc-
trine and the Polk Doctrine, and hold ourselves
ready at any challenge to fight for them?"
I am not seeking to prejudge the question or
even to influence the answer. I am only present-
ing the subject in a light in which it has never yet
had from the American people at large that seri-
ous and solemn consideration which should always
precede acts of war.
In this day, in the light of the last hundred years
and with the present unassailable strength of rep-
resentative government on this continent, it is for
us to say if there is any ground of justice or right
on which we rest the Monroe Doctrine, save that
of our proper predominance, in our own interest,
and in the interest of republican institutions gen-
erally, within the legitimate sphere of our national
influence. Unless we stop there, we cannot stop
logically short of a similar care over republican
institutions wherever they exist on the surface of
the globe. For in an age of fast steamers and
wireless telegraphy, the American continents can
no longer be treated as shut up to themselves and
measurably isolated from the rest of the world.
Oceans do not now separate; they unite. Buenos
Ayres is actually nearer in miles to Cadiz and
Madrid than to New York, and so is more than
half of all South America.
Under such considerations, if no foreign interfer-
ence arises suddenly to affect the national judg-
C 87 ]
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ment, it is at least among the possibilities that we
may find two changes taking place in the national
view of the ideas grouped under the popular term
of the Monroe Doctrine. We may see a consider-
able increase in the stringency of their application,
where our interest clearly calls for them, within the
natural sphere of our influence. We may see them
slowly moderated as to remote countries, which
under changed modern conditions are no longer
exclusively within that sphere. No one denies that
the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the
waters of both oceans about the Isthmus are within
that sphere. They must be forever dominated by
the great Republic. It cannot tolerate a nuisance
at its doors, and the races that people those shores
must keep the peace and preserve order as to us,
and conform to ordinary international obligations
toward the world. To this the moral duty of our
strength points and our material interest binds us.
It was on this ground our action toward Cuba was
justified; and reasons of equal strength would no
doubt be found to conduct us again to similar action
in any similar emergency throughout that whole
region, on the continent, in the islands, or on the
other ocean, at least from Los Angeles to Lima.
Toward the rest of the American continents it
may some day prove more convenient for us to
assume less responsibility. We shall certainly
never cease to manifest our friendly interest in
those countries. We do have a relation toward
them which the rest of the world can never have,
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SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
and we shall hope that the progress of the century
may make it closer. A railroad through the three
Americas will draw us more intimately together.
The currents of trade will change. The legitimate
sphere of our influence will thus widen through-
out those nations with the years ; and it might be
increased rather than diminished by a moderation
of our extreme claim to interfere now with any
exercise of their own sovereignty as to territory,
government, or otherwise, to which their calm
judgment of their own best interests may bring
them.
C 89 H
II
ANARCHISM
NOT long ago a man without an enemy was as-
sassinated in New York State in the presence of
a multitude of friends. There was absolutely no
cause save a political one he was at the head of
the government. It was either a political offence
or the act of a lunatic. The assassin was promptly
arrested, absence of lunacy was established, and,
to the credit of the progress in the administra-
tion of American justice since previous Presiden-
tial assassinations, he was fairly but much more
promptly tried and more promptly executed.
The crime was committed within a few miles
of the Canadian frontier. Suppose the assassin had
been able to escape to Canada. Could any British
authorities have hesitated under any circumstances
to give up a man who had sought on their soil after
such an act the asylum their treaties have invari-
ably granted for a political offence !
Bear in mind that the latest and only provi-
sion in any treaty of extradition between Great
Britain and the United States that could apply to
the case at all, that of March 11, 1890, expressly
stipulates that fugitives from justice shall neither
be surrendered nor punished for crimes of a po-
litical character; and further that on the question
whether a crime is of a political character the de-
cision of the government in whose jurisdiction the
criminal is found must be final. It is pertinent also
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to recall that after the attempted assassination of
the third Napoleon in Paris by Orsini, by which
a large number of victims were killed and many
more maimed, the French government suggested
to Great Britain the surrender or further provi-
sion for the punishment of participants in this or
kindred plots who had found asylum in London,
and were in fact believed to have there originated
and perfected their conspiracies ; that the British
government did not comply; and that the Prime
Minister who attempted to comply, Lord Palmer-
ston, was thereby driven from office. It is equally
pertinent to remember that never, with the excep-
tions of Belgium, Russia, and Luxemburg, until
some time after this assassination at Buffalo
never in fact until June 14, 1902, did the United
States have a treaty for such surrender with any
other nation, that its Ministers had more than once
been cautioned against encouraging requests for
such a clause in negotiations for any treaty, and
that the only additional countries it has such treat-
ies with to-day are Brazil and Denmark. At the
time, therefore, although we had already suffered
from two previous Presidential assassinations, we
had not only made no agreement with Great Brit-
ain, but we had never made an agreement with
any nation of the first rank ( save one ) to return
such a prisoner ourselves, and were in no position
to demand as a right more than we had stipulated
to concede ; while Great Britain was in some sort
committed against such return in the conspicuous
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case I have named. On the other hand, let us al-
ways gratefully remember that when there was
thought to be some reason for imagining that the
assassin of Abraham Lincoln might seek an asylum
in England, our representative then at the Court
of St. James, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, was able
to report promptness and goodwill at the Foreign
Office in facilitating any application that might be
made for his surrender. It is also most gratifying
to remember, as that accomplished student of in-
ternational law, Professor John Bassett Moore, of
Columbia, reminded us in his " Case of the Salva-
dorean Refugees," that in June, 1894, a third of a
century after the Orsini case, the Court of Queen's
Bench delivered up to France a fugitive charged
with the explosion at the Cafe Very, holding that
"in order to constitute an offence of a political
character, there must be two or more parties in the
state, each seeking to impose the government of
their own choice on the other/' and that the offence
must be "committed by one side or the other, in
pursuance of that object."
Of course this last decision makes the extreme
case, as I have stated it, of a possible refusal to
surrender the assassin of McKinley quite beyond
all probabilities. Without a reasonable doubt he
would have been surrendered at the earliest mo-
ment at which the requisite formalities could have
been concluded. But it would have been an act of
sympathy and international comity, due to thegood-
will of the British government of the day and its
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abhorrence of an atrocious crime, and not to the
established law and practice of nations, or consis-
tent with any uniform practice of its own.
The state, then, of international law at the time
of our last Presidential assassination, the record of
some foreign governments and the tenderfooted-
ness of a part of our own treaty-making power
on the subject of extradition are such that it may
be useful to seize the occasion for reviewing our
own actual attitude toward the most startling and,
in view of certain tendencies of the age, the most
dangerous of modern crimes.
At the outset we may take it for granted, I think,
that it is not consistent with the dignity of the
United States to be dependent on mere interna-
tional comity or on isolated decisions, or on national
sympathies or political currents at the moment in
the country from which it may seek to reclaim
such a criminal. As little is it consistent with the
justice of the United States that it should leave its
own attitude toward a foreign call on it for the sur-
render of such a criminal, to depend on the effect
similar circumstances might produce upon the dis-
position of its Administration then in power. Lex
scripta manet. This is too serious a business to be
left to good understandings and prevailing po-
litical currents. It surely ought to be embodied, for
any two lands between which such a case can arise,
in a written and solemn engagement which shall
be for both of them the supreme law, in fair
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weather or in foul, in times of cordiality or in times
of alienation.
It was only in 1882 that the Chief Secretary for
Ireland, the real ruler of that land under the Brit-
ish sovereign, was assassinated in Phoenix Park.
Suppose one of the men implicated in the plot had
sought asylum in the United States ? as one of
those thought to be involved in a subsequent plot
did the person known for a time as "No. i '
and afterward as Tynan. Who does not know
what would have been the temper, not merely of
large classes of our population, but of many lead-
ers in both political parties, in view of the feeling
about Irish affairs then existing among us, toward
any attempt at his extradition? Who does not see
that the best intentions of the party in power here
might have had a chance at least to end, in such
a case, just as the best intentions of Lord Palmer-
ston did, in nothing but political disaster? Can we
afford to leave, or encourage other nations to leave,
at the mercy of such fluctuating circumstances the
punishment of a crime which strikes at the foun-
dation of organized government itself?
The exact state of our own treaty law on the
subject is this :
Practically every extradition treaty the United
States now has in force contains a clause which
stipulates that " the provisions of the present con-
vention shall not be applied in any manner to
any crime or offence of a political character/' Triv-
ial variations in phraseology occur in several of
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the treaties, but nothing materially restricting the
meaning till we come to those already alluded to
with Belgium in 1882 and with Luxemburg in
1 883. There, for the first time, appeared an agree-
ment that" an attempt against the life of the head
of a foreign government, or ... any member of
his family, . . . comprising . . . murder, assassina-
tion, or poisoning, shall not be considered a politi-
cal offence."
It took the second Presidential assassination to
bring us to that. Even then we were disposed to
draw back, and requests for a similar agreement
were set aside in the case of larger and more
important nations. It took the third Presidential
assassination to bring us, late and reluctant, to the
present conventions with Brazil and Denmark.
That with Denmark is of similar purport with the
Belgian treaty. That with Brazil adds also to its
exemption of heads of government the govern-
ors of states. With England, France, Germany,
Austria, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Chili, the Argentine
Republic with most of the world, in fact, we have
no such agreement, but stand where we were.
And our Department from the outset has held
that "as a general rule there can be no extradition
to a foreign state without treaty/'
Statesmen have not hesitated to defend the old
position, according to their lights. Thus Mr. Jef-
ferson, as Secretary of State, wrote in 1792 to our
Ministers :
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Most codes extend their definition of treason to acts
not really against one's country. They do not distinguish
between acts against the government and acts against
the oppressions of the government. The latter are vir-
tues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner
than the former. . . . The unsuccessful strugglers against
tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in
all countries. . . . Treasons, then, taking the simulated
with the real, are sufficiently punished by exile."
Under that doctrine, strained to the limit, sus-
tained by existing treaty protection for political
offences, and unrelieved by the general human
abhorrence of monstrous crime, Czolgosz might
have been sufficiently punished by exile.
Mr. President Tyler, in construing the treaty
with Great Britain, said, in a document no doubt
from the pen of his Secretary of State, Daniel
Webster:
"In this . . . enumeration of crimes the object has been
to exclude all political offences, or criminal charges, aris-
ing from wars or intestine commotions. Treason, mis-
prision of treason . . . and other offences of similar char-
acter are excluded."
In quite recent years, men whose views controlled
treaties have been known to object successfully
to an agreement that the murderer of a king or
a czar should be distinctly excluded from the pro-
tection accorded to "political criminals/'
Great Britain has at times eagerly sought what
she has not always been willing to grant. She de-
manded from Denmark and the Low Countries the
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delivery of the regicides, and secured it. Again, in
1799, she secured from Hamburg the return of
Napper Tandy and other Irish insurgents. On that
occasion Napoleon Bonaparte addressed to the
Senate of Hamburg this vehement reproach:
' 'Your letter does not justify your conduct. Virtue and
courage are the support of states ; servility and baseness
their ruin. You have violated the laws of hospitality in
a manner which would bring the blush of shame to the
wandering tribes of the desert."
It was an irony of fate that his nephew, the third
Napoleon, should be found demanding in a graver
case a like violation of the laws of hospitality, and
should meet a refusal from the very nation that
had profited by the act of the Senate of Hamburg.
"Ought English legislation/' exclaimed Count
Walewski, his Minister for Foreign Affairs, "to
give hospitality to assassins, contribute to favor
their designs, and shelter persons who by their fla-
grant acts put themselves outside the pale of com-
mon rights and under the ban of humanity?" But
his eloquence was in vain, and the only remedy
was the outburst from officers of the French army,
formally and fervently declaring their eagerness
for a settlement " with the foul land which contains
the haunts of these monsters who are sheltered
by its laws." Nor is the United States able to claim
that it is clearly and beyond possibility of ques-
tion above the like reproach. If the assassin of that
spotless President of the French Republic, M. Sadi
C 97 3
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
Carnot, had escaped to our shores, we should surely
have returned him as a voluntary act; but we had
not, and we have not to this day, a treaty with
France that would have required our surrendering
him to justice.
The progress we have made since the assassi-
nation of McKinley starts us on the road to re-
move such reproaches. But for two exceptions the
treaty with Brazil might be taken as embody-
ing what in these days must be held the obvious
duty of any civilized nation in the premises. It
fails, however, to include all those who in either
country stand in the line of succession, and it un-
happily limits its exclusion of these crimes from
the category of political offences rigidly to the case
when they are " unconnected with political move-
ments." Through the meshes of that last clause
half the assassins in question could claim a right
to escape. But with the precedents already estab-
lished and with the present temper of the Senate,
there seems to be no reason now why we might
not promptly conclude treaties with all nations
on the basis of that with Russia, merely extend-
ing it so as to include those in either country in
the direct line of succession to the headship of the
government, and perhaps adding also in some
form the protection of the Brazilian treaty for gov-
ernors of states.
The commonplaces of international law and of our
own practice on the subject are no doubt too famil-
C98 ]
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iar to require more than the briefest statement.
Our government sprang from a revolution, and
naturally cannot hold revolt against unjust rule a
crime. No nation can be required to enforce within
its own boundaries another nation's laws. The easi-
est and proper place to try for a crime is where it
was committed. No nation can be expected to send
back for such trial persons accused of acts which
it does not hold criminal. It may even admit their
criminality, and yet, before returning them, stipu-
late against a punishment greater than it thinks
warranted by the nature of the crime. In propor-
tion to the liberality of its own institutions, a nation
will be predisposed to as lenient a view as possi-
ble of political offences arising out of efforts to lib-
eralize to a similar point the institutions of other
nations. The general exemption of political of-
fences from the operation of extradition treaties
among the more advanced nations thus has its
origin in the nature of things. It cannot be pre-
vented, and it ought not to be.
But since we began this exemption, enormous
changes in the conditions affecting many revolts
against established authority have occurred, with-
out leading to any corresponding change in our
policy. The movement from which many recent
political offences spring is one not against an op-
pressive authority in favor of a more just one, but
against any authority. Sometimes its advocates
dream of an entire change in the principles of gov-
ernment, by which it shall cease to protect indi-
99
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
vidual rights in property, and materially modify
individual rights of the person. If they do not thus
stop short at communism, they go on to the over-
throw of all existing government, the destruction
of all authority.
These are principles that have nothing in com-
mon with the liberal institutions to which we are
devoted, and struggles for which by others we
have been unwilling to punish. They are principles
as antagonistic to our welfare as to that of any
monarchy or any autocracy. There is no reason in
our views or our interests why we should protect
fugitives guilty of crimes in the promotion of such
principles, and no reason in the nature of things
why any organized government of any sort should.
They are necessary outlaws in all nations. The
most vital question which every successful effort
of theirs raises for us, and for all the world, is
not, What form of government shall we favor?
but, Shall we have any form of government ? Their
methods are those of the conspirator rather than
the revolutionist, and their weapons the dynamite
bomb, the revolver, and the dagger. It is not to be
tolerated that the fame of our Republic should be
sullied by the slightest shade of sympathy in its
international policy with these enemies of mankind
who may seek shelter under our historic favor for
political prisoners.
If this summary of what I have termed the com-
monplaces of the subject has not outrun approval,
we will then be ready to regard it as imperative on
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the United States, as a first step and at an early
day, to free every extradition treaty it has with
any other nation from their present quasi protection
under the guise of mere political offenders for the
assassins of heads of government. We will be apt,
I think, to go farther and approach at least the
views jointly expressed to us in the December fol-
lowing the assassination of President McKinley by
the governments of Germany and Russia. They
thought this, with previous anarchistic crimes and
attempts upon the lives of chief magistrates, ren-
dered it terribly evident that a struggle against the
menace of anarchy is an urgent necessity for all
governments. They accordingly proposed concert
of action in measures to check the anarchistic move-
ment, the strengthening of the penal code against
anarchists, and particularly the expulsion of anar-
chists from countries of which they are not sub-
jects.
The President had already recommended to
Congress measures for keeping them out of the
country, for deporting them if found here, or for
their punishment; as well as an agreement by
treaties making anarchy an offence against the
law of nations. The response of Congress was a law
merely forbidding the future admission of anar-
chists, or the naturalization of such as may be here.
Meantime nothing is done to limit their present
asylum here, and little to restrain their open pro-
pagandism.
At the same time the bill for protecting the life
SOME INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS
of the President failed, because certain Senators
held that the head of the government was entitled
to no greater protection before the law than its
humblest or most worthless and vicious citizen.
Their motives are beyond reproach, but to me at
least their logic and law seem to belong not to
the America of which we are so proud, but to the
sans-culotte period in France.
The efforts to overturn established govern-
ments or to throw all governments into chaos
by the assassination of chief magistrates seem to
have grown steadily more frequent and monstrous
through the past century. The resulting situation
is as bad now as at any period in the world's
history more recent than the Roman Empire in
the days of its decadent Caesars. In forty years we
have ourselves lost three noble Presidents by as-
sassination, besides having a distinguished Secre-
tary of State and his son murderously assaulted
and the former maimed for life. In an imperfect
list of assassinations, successful or attempted, on
sovereigns or other chief magistrates during the
last century, I have counted up over forty, more
than one in three years, nearly one every other
year! And among them were the emancipating
Czar of Russia, the emancipating President of the
United States, the humane King of Italy, and the
blameless and progressive President of France.
To these might be fairly added that most pitiful
figure of all, the sad and suffering Empress of
Austria. The men who committed some of these
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crimes are said to have enjoyed our hospitality
and to have been chosen by lot for their infamous
work at meetings under our protection. In at least
one case a public meeting has been held to rejoice
over the assassination of one of the most liberal
and liberty-loving of modern kings, if not to claim
a share of the credit.
Is this our loftiest conception of law and of hu-
man rights? I present that foreign suggestion for
surveillance of the anarchists and for their expul-
sion from all countries of which they are not sub-
jects or citizens; and I ask whether the represen-
tatives of the Emperor and the Czar in that crisis
came nearer than the American Congress to the
demands of the highest Christian civilization?
103 3
PROBLEMS FLOWING FROM THE
SPANISH WAR
PROBLEMS FLOWING FROM THE
SPANISH WAR
MEN are everywhere asking what should be
our course about the territory conquered
in this war. Some inquire merely if it is good pol-
icy for the United States to abandon its continental
limitations, and extend its rule over semi-tropical
countries with mixed populations. Others ask if it
would not be the wisest policy to give them away
after conquering them, or abandon them. They
say it would be ruinous to admit them as states to
equal rights with ourselves, and contrary to the
Constitution to hold them permanently as terri-
tories. It would be bad policy, they argue, to lower
the standard of our population by taking in hordes
of West Indians and Asiatics; bad policy to run
any chance of allowing these people to become
some day joint arbiters with ourselves of the na-
tional destinies; bad policy to abandon the prin-
ciples of Washington's "Farewell Address/' to
which we have adhered for a century, and involve
ourselves in the Eastern question, or in the entan-
glements of European politics.
The men who raise these questions are sincere
and patriotic. They are now all loyally support-
ing the government in the prosecution of the war
which some of them were active in bringing on,
and others to the last deprecated and resisted. Their
doubts and difficulties deserve the fairest consider-
ation, and are of pressing importance.
C 107 J
PROBLEMS FLOWING
But is there not another question, more impor-
tant, which first demands consideration? Have
we the right to decide whether we shall hold or
abandon the conquered territory, solely or even
mainly as a matter of national policy? Are we not
bound by our own acts, and by the responsibility
we have voluntarily assumed before Spain, before
Europe, and before the civilized world, to consider
it first in the light of national duty ?
For that consideration it is not needful now to
raise the question whether we were in every par-
ticular justifiable for our share in the transactions
leading to the war. However men's opinions on
that point may differ, the nation is now at war for
a good cause, and has in a vigorous prosecution of
it the loyal and zealous support of all good citizens.
The President intervened, with our army and
navy, under the direct command of Congress, to
put down Spanish rule in Cuba, on the distinct
ground that it was a rule too bad to be longer en-
dured. Are we not, then, bound in honor and mor-
als to see to it that the government which replaces
Spanish rule is better? Are we not morally culpa-
ble and disgraced before the civilized world if we
leave it as bad or worse ? Can any consideration of
mere policy, of our own interests, or our own ease
and comfort, free us from that solemn responsi-
bility which we have voluntarily assumed, and for
which we have lavishly spilled American and Span-
ish blood?
Most people now realize from what a mistake
C 108 ]
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
Congress was kept by the firm attitude of the
President in opposing a recognition of the so-called
Cuban Republic of Cubitas. It is now generally un-
derstood that virtually there was no Cuban Repub-
lic, or any Cuban government save that of wan-
dering bands of guerrilla insurgents, probably less
numerous and influential than had been repre-
sented. There seems reason to believe that how-
ever bad Spanish government may have been, the
rule of these people, where they had the power,
was as bad ; and still greater reason to apprehend
that if they had full power, their sense of past
wrongs and their unrestrained tropical thirst for
vengeance might lead to something worse. Is it
for that pitiful result that a civilized and Christian
people is giving up its sons and pouring out blood
and treasure in Cuba?
In commanding the war, Congress pledged us
to continue our action until the pacification of the
island should be secured. When that happy time
has arrived, if it shall then be found that the Cuban
insurgents and their late enemies are able to unite
in maintaining a settled and peaceable government
in Cuba, distinctly free from the faults which now
lead the United States to destroy the old one, we
shall have discharged our responsibility, and will
be at liberty to end our interference. But if not,
the responsibility of the United States continues. It
is morally bound to secure to Cuba such a govern-
ment, even if forced by circumstances to furnish it
itself.
C 109 ]
PROBLEMS FLOWING
At this point, however, we are checked by a re-
minder of the further action of Congress, " assert-
ing its determination, when the pacification of Cuba
has been accomplished, to leave the government
and control of the island to its people/'
Now, the secondary provisions of any great
measure must be construed in the light of its main
purpose; and where they conflict, we are led to
presume that they would not have been adopted
but for ignorance of the actual conditions. Is it not
evident that such was the case here? We now know
how far Congress was misled as to the organiza-
tion and power of the alleged Cuban government,
the strength of the revolt, and the character of
the war the insurgents were waging. We have seen
how little dependence could be placed upon the
lavish promises of support from great armies of
insurgents in the war we have undertaken ; and we
are beginning to realize the difference between
our idea of a humane and civilized " pacification"
and that apparently entertained up to this time by
the insurgents. It is certainly true that when the
war began neither Congress nor the people of
the United States cherished an intention to hold
Cuba permanently, or had any further thought than
to pacify it and turn it over to its own people. But
they must pacify it before they turn it over; and,
from present indications, to do that thoroughly
may be the work of years. Even then they are still
responsible to the world for the establishment of
a better government than the one they destroy. If
C 3
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
the last state of the island should be worse than the
first, the fault and the crime must be solely that of
the United States. We were not actually forced to
involve ourselves ; we might have passed by on the
other side. When, instead, we insisted on interfer-
ing, we made ourselves responsible for improv-
ing the situation ; and, no matter what Congress
"disclaimed," or what intention it "asserted/* we
cannot leave Cuba till that is done without national
dishonor and blood-guiltiness.
The situation is curiously like that of England
in Egypt. She intervened too, under far less provo-
cation, it must be admitted, and for a cause rather
more commercial than humanitarian. But when
some thought that her work was ended and that it
was time for her to go, Lord Granville, on behalf
of Mr. Gladstone's government, addressed the
other great European Powers in a note on the out-
come of which Congress might have reflected with
profit before framing its resolutions. "Although
for the present/' he said, " a British force remains
in Egypt for the preservation of public tranquillity,
Her Majesty's government are desirous of with-
drawing it as soon as the state of the country and
the organization of proper means for the mainte-
nance of the Khedive's authority will admit of it. In
the meantime the position in which Her Majesty's
government are placed toward His Highness im-
poses upon them the duty of giving advice, with
the object of securing that the order of things to
be established shall be of a satisfactory character
: "i 3
PROBLEMS FLOWING
and possess the elements of stability and prog-
ress/' As time went on this declaration did not
seem quite explicit enough; and accordingly, just
a year later, Lord Granville instructed the present
Lord Cromer, then Sir Evelyn Baring, that it should
be made clear to the Egyptian ministers and gov-
ernors of provinces that " the responsibility which
for the time rests on England obliges Her Maj-
esty's government to insist on the adoption of the
policy which they recommend, and that it will be
necessary that those ministers and governors who
do not follow this course should cease to hold their
offices/'
That was in 1884 a year after the defeat of
Arabi, and the " pacification/' The English are still
there, and the Egyptian ministers and governors
now understand quite well that they must cease
to hold their offices if they do not adopt the policy
recommended by the British diplomatic agent. If it
should be found that we cannot with honor and self-
respect begin to abandon our self-imposed task of
Cuban "pacification" with any greater speed, the
impetuous Congressmen, as they read over their
own inconsiderate resolutions years hence, can hide
their blushes behind a copy of Lord Granville's let-
ter. They may explain, if they like, with the clas-
sical excuse of Benedick, "When I said I would die
a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were
married. " Or if this seem s too frivolous for their seri-
ous plight, let them recall the position of Mr. Jeffer-
son , who originally declared that the purchase of for-
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
eign territory would make waste paper of the Con-
stitution, and subsequently appealed to Congress
for the money to pay for his purchase of Louisiana.
When he held such an acquisition unconstitutional,
he had not thought he would live to want Louisiana.
As to Cuba, it may be fairly concluded that only
these points are actually clear: ( i ) We had made
ourselves, in a sense, responsible for Spain's rule in
that island by our consistent declaration, through
three-quarters of a century, that no other Euro-
pean nation should replace her Daniel Webster,
as Secretary of State, even seeking to guard her
hold as against Great Britain. ( 2 ) We are now at
war because we say Spanish rule is intolerable ; and
we cannot withdraw our hand till it is replaced by
a rule for which we are willing to be responsible.
( 3 ) We are also pledged to remain till the pacifi-
cation is complete.
In the other territories in question the condi-
tions are different. We are not taking possession of
them as we are of Cuba, with the avowed purpose
of giving them a better government. We are con-
quering them because we are at war with Spain,
which has been holding and governing them very
much as she has Cuba; and we must strike Spain
wherever and as hard as we can. But it must at
once be recognized that as to Porto Rico at least,
to hold it would be the natural course and what all
the world would expect. Both Cuba and Porto Rico,
like Hawaii, are within the acknowledged sphere
of our influence, and ours must necessarily be the
n us 3
PROBLEMS FLOWING
first voice in deciding their destiny. Our national
position with regard to them is historic. It has been
officially declared and known to every civilized
nation for three-quarters of a century. To abandon
it now, that we may refuse greatness through a
sudden craven fear of being great, would be so as-
tonishing a reversal of a policy steadfastly main-
tained by the whole line of our responsible states-
men since 1823 as to be grotesque.
John Quincy Adams, writing in April of that
year, as Secretary of State, to our Minister to Spain,
pointed out that the dominion of Spain upon the
American continents, north and south, was irrev-
ocably gone, but warned him that Cuba and Porto
Rico still remained nominally dependent upon her,
and that she might attempt to transfer them. That
could not be permitted, as they were "natural
appendages to the North American continent/'
Subsequent statements turned more upon what
Mr. Adams called "the transcendent importance
of Cuba to the United States ; " but from that day to
this I do not recall a line in our state papers to show
that the claim of the United States to control the
future of Porto Rico as well as of Cuba was ever
waived. As to Cuba, Mr. Adams predicted that
within half a century its annexation would be indis-
pensable. "There are laws of political as well as of
physical gravitation," he said ; and " Cuba, forcibly
disjointed from its own unnatural connection with
Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate
only towards the North American Union, which,
[ 114 ]
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from
its bosom." If Cuba is incapable of self-support,
and could not therefore be left, in the cheerful lan-
guage of Congress, to her own people, how much
less could little Porto Rico stand alone?
There remains the alternative of giving Porto
Rico back to Spain at the end of the war. But if we
are warranted now in making war because the
character of Spanish rule in Cuba was intolerable,
how could we justify ourselves in handing back
Porto Rico to the same rule, after having once
emancipated her from it? The subject need not be
pursued. To return Porto Rico to Spain, after she
is once in our possession, is as much beyond the
power of the President and of Congress as it was
to preserve the peace with Spain after the destruc-
tion of the "Maine " in the harbor of Havana. From
that moment the American people resolved that
the flag under which this calamity was possible
should disappear forever from the western hemi-
sphere, and they will sanction no peace that per-
mits it to remain.
The question of the Philippines is different and
more difficult. They are not within what the di-
plomatists of the world would recognize as the le-
gitimate sphere of American influence. Our rela-
tion to them is purely the accident of recent war.
We are not in honor bound to hold them, if we
can honorably dispose of them. But we know that
their grievances differ only in kind, not in degree,
from those of Cuba, and having once freed them
C "5 3
PROBLEMS FLOWING
from the Spanish yoke, we cannot honorably re-
quire them to go back under it again. That would
be to put us in an attitude of nauseating national
hypocrisy ; to give the lie to all our professions of
humanity in our interference in Cuba, if not also
to prove that our real motive was conquest. What
humanity forbade us to tolerate in the West In-
dies, it would not justify us in reestablishing in
the Philippines.
What, then, can we do with them ? Shall we
trade them for something nearer home ? Doubt-
less that would be permissible, if we were sure
of thus securing them a better government than
that of Spain, and if it could be done without pre-
cipitating fresh international difficulties. But we
cannot give them to our friend and their neigh-
bor Japan without instantly provoking the hostil-
ity of Russia, which recently interfered to prevent
a far smaller Japanese aggrandizement. We can-
not give them to Russia without a greater injus-
tice to Japan ; or to Germany or to France or to
England without raising far more trouble than we
allay. England would like us to keep them ; the
Continental nations would like that better than any
other control excepting Spain's or their own; and
the Philippines would prefer it to anything save
the absolute independence which they are incapa-
ble of maintaining. Having been led into their pos-
session by the course of a war undertaken for the
sake of humanity, shall we draw a geographical
limit to our humanity, and say we cannot continue
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
to be governed by it in Asiatic waters because it
is too much trouble and is too disagreeable and,
besides, there may be no profit in it?
Both war and diplomacy have many surprises ;
and it is quite possible that some way out of our
embarrassing possession may yet be found. The
fact is clear that many of our people do not much
want it ; but if a way of relinquishing it is proposed,
the one thing we are bound to insist on is that it
shall be consistent with our attitude in the war,
and with our honorable obligations to the islands
we have conquered and to civilization.
The chief aversion to the vast accessions of ter-
ritory with which we are threatened springs from
the fear that ultimately they must be admitted into
the Union as states. No public duty is more urgent
at this moment than to resist from the very out-
set the concession of such a possibility. In no cir-
cumstances likely to exist within a century should
they be admitted as states of the Union. The loose,
disunited, and unrelated federation of independent
states to which this would inevitably lead, stretch-
ing from the Indian Archipelago to the Caribbean
Sea, embracing all climes, all religions, all races,
black, yellow, white, and their mixtures, all
conditions, from pagan ignorance and the verge
of cannibalism to the best product of centuries
of civilization, education, and self-government, all
with equal rights in our Senate and representation
according to population in our House, with an equal
voice in shaping our national destinies thatwould,
C H7 ]
PROBLEMS FLOWING
at least in this stage of the world, be humanita-
rianism run mad, a degeneration and degradation
of the homogeneous, continental Republic of our
pride, too preposterous for the contemplation of
serious and intelligent men. Quite as well might
Great Britain now invite the swarming millions
of India to send rajas and members of the Lower
House, in proportion to population, to swamp the
Lords and Commons and rule the English people.
If it had been supposed that even Hawaii, with
its overwhelming preponderance of Kanakas and
Asiatics, would have become a state, she could
not have been annexed. If the territories we are
conquering must become states, we might better
renounce them at once and place them under the
protectorate of some humane and friendly Euro-
pean power with less nonsense in its blood.
This is not to deny them the freest and most
liberal institutions they are capable of sustaining.
The people of Sitka and the Aleutian Islands en-
joy the blessings of ordered liberty and free insti-
tutions, but nobody dreams of admitting them to
statehood. New Mexico has belonged to us for half
a century, not only without oppression, but with
all the local self-government for which she was
prepared ; yet, though an integral part of our con-
tinent, surrounded by states, and with an adequate
population, she is still not admitted to statehood.
Why should not the people on the island of Porto
Rico, or even of Cuba, prosper and be happy for
the next century under a rule similar in the main
C "8 I!
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
to that under which their kinsmen of New Mexico
have prospered for the last half century?
With some necessary modifications, the terri-
torial form of government which we have tried so
successfully from the beginning of the Union is
well adapted to the best of such communities. It
secures local self-government, equality before the
law, upright courts, ample power for order and
defence, and such control by Congress as gives
security against the mistakes or excesses of people
new to the exercise of these rights.
But such a system, we are told, is contrary to
our Constitution and to the spirit of our institutions.
Why? We have had just that system ever since
the Constitution was framed. It is true that a large
part of the territory thus governed has now been
admitted into the Union in the form of new states.
But it is not true that this was recognized at the be-
ginning as a right, or even generally contemplated
as a probability ; nor is it true that it has been the
purpose or expectation of those who annexed for-
eign territory to the United States, like the Lou-
isiana or the Gadsden Purchase, that it would all
be carved into states. That feature of themarvellous
development of the continent has come as a sur-
prise to this generation and the last, and would have
been absolutely incredible to the men of Thomas
Jefferson's time. Obviously, then, it could not have
been the purpose for which, before that date, our
territorial system was devised. It is not clear that
the founders of the government expected even all
PROBLEMS FLOWING
the territory we possessed at the outset to be made
into states. Much of it was supposed to be worth-
less and uninhabitable. But it is certain that they
planned for outside accessions. Even in the Articles
of Confederation they provided for the admission
of Canada and of British colonies which included
Jamaica as well as Nova Scotia. Madison, in refer-
ring to this, construes it as meaning that they con-
templated only the admission of these colonies as
colonies, not the eventual establishment of new
states ( " Federalist/' No. 43 ) . About the same time
Hamilton was dwelling on the alarms of those who
thought the country already too large, and argu-
ing that great size was a safeguard against ambi-
tious rulers.
Nevertheless, the objectors still argue, the Con-
stitution gives no positive warrant for a permanent
territorial policy. But it does! Ordinarily it may
be assumed that what the framers of the Constitu-
tion immediately proceeded to do under it was
intended by them to be warranted by it; and we
have seen that they immediately devised and main-
tained a territorial system for the government of
territory which they had no expectation of ever
converting into states. The case, however, is even
plainer than that. The sole reference in the Con-
stitution to the territories of the United States is
in Article iv, Section 3 : " The Congress shall have
power to dispose of and make all needful rules
and regulations respecting the territory or other
property belonging to the United States." Jefferson
C 120 ]
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
revised his first views far enough to find warrant
for acquiring territory ; but here is explicit, unmis-
takable authority conferred for dealing with it,
and with other "property," precisely as Congress
chooses. The territory was not a present or pro-
spective party in interest in the Union created under
this organic act. It was " property," to be disposed
of or ruled and regulated as Congress might de-
termine. The inhabitants of the territory were not
consulted ; there was no provision that they should
even be guaranteed a republican form of govern-
ment like the states ; they were secured no right
of representation and given no vote. So, too, when
it came to acquiring new territory, there was no
thought of consulting the inhabitants. Mr. Jefferson
did not ask the citizens of Louisiana to consent to
their annexation, nor did Mr. Monroe submit such
a question to the Spaniards of Florida, nor Mr.
Polk to the Mexicans of California, nor Mr. Pierce
to the New Mexicans, nor Mr. Johnson to the Rus-
sians and Aleuts of Alaska. The power of the gov-
ernment to deal with territory, foreign or domes-
tic, precisely as it chooses was understood from
the beginning to be absolute; and at no stage in
our whole history have we hesitated to exercise it.
The question of permanently holding the Philip-
pines or any other conquered territory as territory
is not, and cannot be made, one of constitutional
right; it is one solely of national duty and of na-
tional policy.
As a last resort, it is maintained that even if the
C 121 3
PROBLEMS FLOWING
Constitution does not forbid, the Monroe Doctrine
does. But the famous declaration of Mr. Monroe
on which reliance is placed does not warrant this
conclusion. After holding that " the American con-
tinents, by the free and independent condition
which they have assumed and maintained, are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for
future colonization by any European Power/' Mr.
Monroe continued: "We should consider any at-
tempt on their part to extend their system to any
part of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace
and safety. With the existing colonies or depend-
encies of any European Power we have not inter-
fered, and shall not interfere." The context makes
it clear that this assurance applies solely to the
existing colonies and dependencies they still had
in this hemisphere; and that even this was quali-
fied by the previous warning that while we took
no part "in the wars of European Powers, in mat-
ters relating to themselves/' we resented injuries
and defended our rights. It will thus be seen that
Mr. Monroe gave no pledge that we would never
interfere with any dependency or colony of Euro-
pean Powers anywhere. He simply declared our
general policy not to interfere with existing colo-
nies still remaining to them on our coast, so long
as they left the countries alone which had already
gained their independence, and so long as they
did not injure us or invade our rights. And even
this statement of the scope of Mr. Monroe's decla-
ration must be construed in the light of the fact
C 122 3
FROM THE SPANISH WAR
that the same Administration which promulgated
the Monroe Doctrine had already issued from the
State Department Mr. Adams's prediction, above
referred to, that "the annexation of Cuba will yet
be found indispensable/' Perhaps Mr. Monroe's
language might have been properly understood as
a general assurance that we would not meddle in
Europe so long as they gave us no further trouble
in America; but certainly it did not also abandon
to their exclusive jurisdiction Asia and Africa and
the islands of the sea.
The candid conclusions seem inevitable that, not
as a matter of policy, but as a necessity of the posi-
tion in which we find ourselves and as a matter of
national duty, we must hold Cuba, at least for a
time and till a permanent government is well estab-
lished for which we can afford to be responsible;
we must hold Porto Rico; and we may have to
hold the Philippines.
The war is a great sorrow, and to many these
results of it will seem still more mournful. They
cannot be contemplated with unmixed confidence
by any ; and to all who think, they must be a source
of some grave apprehensions. Plainly, this unwel-
come war is leading us by ways we have not trod
to an end we cannot surely forecast. On the other
hand, there are some good things coming from it
that we can already see. It will make an end for-
ever of Spain in this hemisphere. It will certainly
secure to Cuba and Porto Rico better government.
It will furnish an enormous outlet for the energy
C 123 ]
PROBLEMS FROM THE SPANISH WAR
of our citizens, and give another example of the
rapid development to which our system leads. It
has already brought North and South together as
nothing could but a foreign war in which both
offered their blood for the cause of their reunited
country a result of incalculable advantage both
at home and abroad. It has brought England and
the United States together another result of mo-
mentous importance in the progress of civilization
and Christianity. Europe will know us better hence-
forth; even Spain will know us better; and this
knowledge should tend powerfully hereafter to
keep the peace of the world. The war should abate
the swaggering, swashbuckler tendency of many
of our public men, since it has shown our incredible
unreadiness at the outset for meeting even a third-
rate Power; and it must secure us henceforth an
army and navy less ridiculously inadequate to our
exposure. It insures us a mercantile marine. It in-
sures the Nicaragua Canal, a Pacific cable, great
development on our Pacific coast, and the mercan-
tile control of the Pacific Ocean. It imposes new
and very serious business on our public men, which
ought to dignify and elevate the public service.
Finally, it has shown such splendid courage and
skill in the army and navy, such sympathy at home
for our men at the front, and such devoted eager-
ness, especially among women, to alleviate suffer-
ing and humanize the struggle, as to thrill every
patriotic heart and make us all prouder than ever
of our country and its matchless people.
C
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
PARTISANSHIP stops at the guard-line. "In
the face of an enemy we are all Frenchmen,"
said an eloquent imperialist once in my hearing,
in rallying his followers to support a foreign mea-
sure of the French Republic. At this moment our
soldiers are facing a barbarous or semi-civilized
foe, who treacherously attacked them in a distant
land, where our flag had been sent, in friendship
with them, for the defence of our own shores. Was
it creditable or seemly that it was lately left to a
Bonaparte on our own soil to teach some Ameri-
can leaders that, at such a time, patriotic men at
home do not discourage those soldiers or weaken
the government that directs them? 1
For good or ill, the war was fought. Its results
1 MY DEAR SIR : I have received your letter of the 23d inst., notifying me
of my election as a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League. I recog-
nize the compliment implied in this election, and appreciate it the more
by reason of my respect for the gentlemen identified with the league, but
I do not think I can appropriately or consistently accept the position,
especially since I learn through the press that the league adopted at its
recent meeting certain resolutions to which I cannot assent. ... I may
add that, while I fully recognize the injustice and even absurdity of those
charges of "disloyalty" which have been of late freely made against some
members of the league, and also that many honorable and patriotic men
do not feel as I do on this subject, I am personally unwilling to take part
in an agitation which may have some tendency to cause a public enemy to
persist in armed resistance, or may be, at least, plausibly represented as
having this tendency. There can be no doubt that, as a matter of feet, the
country is at war with Aguinaldo and his followers. I profoundly regret
this fact ; . . . but it is a fact, nevertheless, and, as such, must weigh in
determining my conduct as a citizen. . . .
CHARLES JEROME BONAPARTE.
Baltimore, May 25, 1899.
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
are upon us. With the ratification of the Peace of
Paris, our Continental Republic has stretched its
wings over the West Indies and the East. It is a
fact and not a theory that confronts us. We are
actually and now responsible, not merely to the
inhabitants and to our own people, but, in interna-
tional law, to the commerce, the travel, the civil-
ization of the world, for the preservation of order
and the protection of life and property in Cuba, in
Porto Rico, in Guam, and in the Philippine Archi-
pelago, including that recent haunt of piracy, the
Sulus. Shall we quit ourselves like men in the dis-
charge of this immediate duty; or shall we fall to
quarrelling with each other like boys as to whether
such a duty is a good or a bad thing for the coun-
try, and as to who got it fastened upon us? There
may have been a time for disputes about the wis-
dom of resisting the Stamp Tax, but it was not just
after Bunker Hill. There may have been a time for
hot debate about some mistakes in the antislavery
agitation, but not just after Sumter and Bull Run.
Furthermore, it is as well to remember that you
can never grind with the water that has passed the
mill. Nothing in human power can ever restore the
United States to the position it occupied the day be-
fore Congress plunged us into the war with Spain,
or enable us to escape what that war entailed. No
matter what we wish, the old continental isolation
is gone forever. Whithersoever we turn now, we
must do it with the burden of our late acts to carry,
the responsibility of our new position to assume.
128
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
When the sovereignty which Spain had exer-
cised with the assent of all nations over vast and
distant regions for three hundred years was sol-
emnly transferred under the eye of the civilized
world to the United States, our first responsibility
became the restoration of order. Till that is secured,
any hindrance to the effort is bad citizenship as
bad as resistance to the police ; as much worse, in
fact, as its consequences may be more bloody and
disastrous. " You have a wolf by the ears/' said
an accomplished ex-Minister of the United States
to a departing Peace Commissioner last autumn.
" You cannot let go of him with either dignity or
safety, and he will not be easy to tame."
But when the task is accomplished, when the
Stars and Stripes at last bring the order and peace-
ful security they typify, instead of wanton disor-
der, with all the concomitants of savage warfare
over which they now wave, we shall then be
confronted with the necessity of a policy for the
future of these distant regions. It is a problem that
calls for our soberest, most dispassionate, and most
patriotic thought. The colleges, and the educated
classes generally, should make it a matter of con-
science painstakingly considered on all its sides,
with reference to international law, the burdens
of sovereignty, the rights and the interests of na-
tive tribes, and the legitimate demands of civili-
zation to find first our national duty and then
our national interest, which it is also a duty for our
statesmen to protect. On such a subject we have
C 129 ]
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
a right to look to our colleges for the help they
should be so well equipped to give. From those still
regions of cloistered thought may well come the
white light of pure reason, not the wild, whirling
words of the special pleader, or of the partisan,
giving loose rein to his hasty first impressions. It
would be an ill day for some colleges if crude and
hot-tempered incursions into current public affairs,
like a few unhappily witnessed of late, should lead
even their friends to fear lest they have been so
long accustomed to dogmatize to boys that they
have lost the faculty of reasoning with men.
When the first duty is done, when order is re-
stored in those commercial centres and on that
commercial highway, somebody must then be re-
sponsible for maintaining it either ourselves or
some Power whom we persuade to take them off
our hands. Does anybody doubt what the Ameri-
can people in their present temper would say to
the latter alternative? the same people, who were
ready to break off their Joint Commission with
Great Britain and take the chances, rather than
give up a few square miles of worthless land and
a harbor of which a year previously they scarcely
knew the name on the remote coast of Alaska.
Plainly it is idle now, in a government so purely
dependent on the popular will, to scheme or hope
for giving the Philippine task over to other hands
as soon as order is restored. We must, then, be pre-
pared with a policy for maintaining it ourselves.
Of late years men have unthinkingly assumed
C
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
that new territory is, in the very nature of our gov-
ernment, merely and necessarily the raw mate-
rial for future states in the Union. Colonies and
dependencies, it is now said, are essentially incon-
sistent with our system. But if any ever entertained
the wild dream that the instrument whose pre-
amble says it is ordained for the United States of
America could be stretched to the China Sea, the
first Tagal guns fired at friendly soldiers of the
Union, and the first mutilation of American dead
that ensued, ended the nightmare of states from
Asia admitted to the American Union. For that
relief, at least, we must thank the uprising of the
Tagals. It was a Continental Union of independent
sovereign states our Fathers planned. Whosoever
proposes to debase it with the admixtures of states
made up from the islands of the sea, in any archi-
pelago, east or west, is a bad friend to the Re-
public. We may guide, protect, elevate them, and
even teach them some day to stand alone; but if
we ever invite them into our Senate and House,
to help to rule us, we are the most imbecile of all
the offspring of time.
Yet we must face the fact that able and con-
scientious men believe the United States has no
constitutional power to hold territory that is not to
be erected into states in the Union, or to govern
people that are not to be made citizens. They are
able to cite great names in support of their con-
tention ; and it would be an ill omen for the freest
and most successful constitutional government in
3
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
the world if a constitutional objection thus fortified
should be carelessly considered or hastily over-
ridden. This objection rests mainly on the assump-
tion that the name " United States/' as used in the
Constitution, necessarily includes all territory the
nation owns, and on the historic fact that large
parts of this territory, on acquiring sufficient pop-
ulation, have already been admitted as states, and
have generally considered such admission to be
a right. Now, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall than
whom no constitutional authority carries greater
weight certainly did declare that the question,
what was designated by the term " United States/'
in the clause of the Constitution giving powers
to levy duties on imposts " admitted of but one
answer." It "designated the whole of the Ameri-
can empire, composed of States and Territories. "If
that be accepted as final, then the tariff must be
applied in Manila precisely as in New York, and
goods from Manila must enter the New York cus-
tom-house as freely as goods from New Orleans.
Sixty millions would disappear instantly and annu-
ally from the treasury, and our revenue system
would be revolutionized, by the free admission of
sugar and other tropical products from the United
States of Asia and the Caribbean Sea ; while, on the
other hand, the Philippines themselves would be
fatally handicapped by a tariff wholly unnatural
to their locality and circumstances. More. If that
be final, the term " United States" should have the
same comprehensive meaning in the clause as to
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
citizenship. Then Aguinaldo is to-day a citizen of
the United States, and may yet run for the Presi-
dency. Still more. The Asiatics south of the China
Sea are given that free admission to the country
which we so strenuously deny to Asiatics from the
north side of the same sea. Their goods, produced
on wages of a few cents a day, come into free com-
petition in all our home markets with the products
of American labor, and the cheap laborers them-
selves are free to follow if ever our higher wages
attract them. More yet. If that be final, the Ta-
gals and other tribes of Luzon, the Visayans of
Negros and Cebu, and the Mohammedan Malays
of Mindanao and the Sulus, having each far more
than the requisite population, may demand admis-
sion next winter into the Union as free and inde-
pendent states, with representatives in Senate and
House, and may plausibly claim that they can show
a better title to admission than Nevada ever did,
or Utah, or Idaho.
Nor does the great name of Marshall stand alone
in support of such conclusions. The converse theory
that these territories are not necessarily included
in the constitutional term "the United States"
makes them our subject dependencies, and at once
the figure of Jefferson himself is evoked, with all
the signers of the immortal Declaration grouped
about him, renewing the old war-cry that govern-
ment derives its just powers from the consent of
the governed. At different periods in our history
eminent statesmen have made protests on grounds
133
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
of that sort. Even the first bill for Mr. Jefferson's
own purchase of Louisiana was denounced by Mr.
Macon as " establishing a species of government
unknown to the United States;" by Mr. Lucas as
"establishing elementary principles never previ-
ously introduced in the government of any terri-
tory of the United States;" and by Mr. Campbell
as "really establishing a complete despotism/' In
1823 Chancellor Kent said, with reference to Co-
lumbia River settlements, that " a government by
Congress as absolute sovereign, over colonies,
absolute dependents, was not congenial to the
free and independent spirit of American institu-
tions." In 1848 John C. Calhoun declared that
" the conquest and retention of Mexico as a prov-
ince would be a departure from the settled policy
of the government, in conflict with its character
and genius, and in the end subversive of our free
institutions. In 185? Mr. Chief Justice Taney said
that "a power to rule territory without restriction
as a colony or dependent province would be incon-
sistent with the nature of our government." And
now folio wing warily in this line, the eminent and
trusted advocate of similar opinions to-day, Mr.
Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, says: "The mak-
ing of new states and providing national defence
are constitutional ends, so that we may acquire and
hold territory for those purposes. The governing
of subject peoples is not a constitutional end, and
there is therefore no constitutional warrant for
acquiring and holding territory for that purpose."
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
We have now, as is believed, presented with
entire fairness a summary of the more important
aspects in which the constitutional objections men-
tioned have been urged. I would not underrate a
hair's breadth the authority of these great names,
the weight of these continuous reassertions of
principle, the sanction even of the precedent and
general practice through a century. And yet I ven-
ture to think that no candid and competent man
can thoroughly investigate the subject, in the light
of the actual provisions of the Constitution, the
avowed purpose of its framers, their own prac-
tice and the practice of their successors, without
being absolutely convinced that this whole fabric
of opposition on constitutional grounds is as flimsy
as a cobweb. This country of our love and pride
is no malformed, congenital cripple of a nation,
incapable of undertaking duties that have been
found within the powers of every other nation
that ever existed since governments among civil-
ized men began. Neither by chains forged in the
Constitution nor by chains of precedent, neither
by the dead hand we all revere, that of the Fa-
ther of his Country, nor under the most author-
itative exponents of our organic act and of our
history, are we so bound that we cannot under-
take any duty that devolves or exercise any power
which the emergency demands. Our Constitu-
tion has entrapped us in no impasse, where retreat
is disgrace and advance is impossible. The duty
w r hich the hand of Providence, rather than any
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purpose of man, has laid upon us, is within our
constitutional powers. Let me invoke your patience
for a rather minute and perhaps wearisome detail
of the proof.
The notion that the United States is an inferior
sort of nation, constitutionally without power for
such public duties as other nations habitually as-
sume, may perhaps be dismissed with a single
citation from the Supreme Court. Said Mr. Justice
Bradley, in the Legal Tender Cases: "As a Gov-
ernment it the United States^] was invested with
all the attributes of sovereignty. ... It seems to
be a self-evident proposition that it is invested with
all those inherent and implied powers which, at
the time of adopting the Constitution, were gen-
erally considered to belong to every government
as such, and as being essential to the exercise of
its functions" (12 Wall. 554).
Every one recalls this constitutional provision:
"The Congress shall have power to dispose of
and make all needful rules and regulations re-
specting the territory or other property of the
United States." That grant is absolute, and the
only qualification is the one to be drawn from the
general spirit of the government the Constitution
was framed to organize. Is it consistent with that
spirit to hold territory permanently, or for long
periods of time, without admitting it to the Union?
Let the man who wrote the very clause in ques-
tion answer. That man was Gouverneur Morris
of New York, and you will find his answer on
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page 192 of the third volume of his writings, given
only fifteen years after, in reply to a direct ques-
tion as to the exact meaning of the clause: "I al-
ways thought, when we should acquire Canada and
Louisiana, it would be proper to govern them as
provinces, and allow them no voice in our coun-
cils. In wording the third section of the fourth
article, I went as far as circumstances would per-
mit to establish the exclusion." This framer of the
Constitution desired then, and intended definitely
and permanently, to keep Louisiana out! And yet
there are men who tell us the provision he drew
would not even permit us to keep the Philippines
out! To be more papist than the Pope will cease
to be a thing exciting wonder if every day modern
men, in the consideration of practical and pressing
problems, are to be more narrowly constitutional
than the men that wrote the Constitution !
Is it said that, at any rate, our practice under
this clause of the Constitution has been against
the view of the man that wrote it, and in favor of
that quoted from Mr. Chief Justice Marshall? Does
anybody seriously think, then, that though we
have held New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma
as territory, organized or unorganized, part of it
nearly a century and all of it half a century, our
representatives believed all the while they had
no constitutional right to do so? Who imagines
that when the third of a century during which we
have already held Alaska is rounded out to a full
century, that unorganized territory will even then
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have any greater prospect than at present of
admission as a state? or who believes our grand-
children will be violating the Constitution in keep-
ing it out? Who imagines that under the Constitu-
tion ordained on this continent specifically " for the
United States of America" we will ever permit the
Kanakas, Chinese, and Japanese, who make up a
majority of the population in the Sandwich Islands,
to set up a government of their own and claim ad-
mission as an independent and sovereign state of
our American Union ? Finally, let me add that con-
clusive proof relating not only to practice under the
Constitution, but to the precise construction of
the constitutional language as to the territories by
the highest authority, in the light of long previous
practice, is to be found in another part of the in-
strument itself, deliberately added three-quarters
of a century later. Article xin provides that "nei-
ther slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist
within the United States, or any place subject to
their jurisdiction" If the term "the United States,"
as used in the Constitution, really includes the
territories as an integral part, as Mr. Chief Justice
Marshall said, what, then, does the Constitution
mean by the additional words, "or any place sub-
ject to their jurisdiction"? Is it not too plain for
argument that the Constitution here refers to ter-
ritory not a part of the United States, but subject
to its jurisdiction territory, for example, like the
Sandwich Islands or the Philippines ?
What, then, shall we say to the opinion of the
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great Chief Justice? for, after all, his is not a
name to be dealt with lightly. Well, first, it was
a dictum, not a decision of the court. Next, in
another and later case, before the same eminent
jurist, came a constitutional expounder as eminent
and as generally accepted, none other than
Daniel Webster, who took precisely the opposite
view. He was discussing the condition of certain
territory on this continent which we had recently
acquired. Said Mr. Webster: "What is Florida?
It is no part of the United States. How can it be?
Florida is to be governed by Congress as it thinks
proper. Congress might have done anything
might have refused a trial by jury, and refused
a legislature/' After this flat contradiction of the
court's former dictum, what happened? Mr. Web-
ster won his case, and the Chief Justice made not
the slightest reference to his own previous and
directly conflicting opinion ! Need we give it more
attention now than Marshall did then ?
Mr. Webster maintained the same position long
afterward, in the Senate of the United States, in
opposition to Mr. John C. Calhoun, and his view
has been continuously sustained since by the courts
and by congressional action. In the debate with Mr.
Calhoun, in February, 1849, Mr. Webster said:
"What is the Constitution of the United States?
Is not its very first principle that all within its in-
fluence and comprehension shall be represented
in the legislature which it establishes, with not only
a right of debate and a right to vote in both Houses
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TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
of Congress, but a right to partake in the choice
of President and Vice-President ? . . . The Presi-
dent of the United States shall govern this ter-
ritory as he sees fit till Congress makes further
provision. . . . We have never had a territory gov-
erned as the United States is governed. ... I do
not say that while we sit here to make laws for
these territories, we are not bound by every one
of those great principles which are intended as
general securities for public liberty. But they do
not exist in territories till introduced by the author-
ity of Congress. . . . Our history is uniform in its
course. It began with the acquisition of Louisiana.
It went on after Florida became a part of the
Union. In all cases, under all circumstances, by
every proceeding of Congress on the subject, and
by all judicature on the subject, it has been held
that territories belonging to the United States were
to be governed by a constitution of their own, . . .
and in approving that constitution the legislation
of Congress was not necessarily confined to those
principles that bind it when it is exercised in pass-
ing laws for the United States itself. "Mr. Calhoun,
in the course of the debate, asked Mr. Webster
for judicial opinion sustaining these views, and
Mr. Webster said that "the same thing has been
decided by the United States courts over and over
again for the last thirty years."
I may add that it has been so held over and
over again during the subsequent fifty. Mr. Chief
Justice Waite, giving the opinion of the Supreme
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TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
Court of the United States ( in National Bank v.
County of Yankton, 101 U.S. 129-132), said : "It
is certainly now too late to doubt the power of
Congress to govern the territories. Congress is
supreme, and, for all the purposes of this depart-
ment, has all the powers of the people of the
United States, except such as have been expressly
or by implication reserved in the prohibitions of
the Constitution."
Mr. Justice Stanley Matthews of the United
States Supreme Court stated the same view with
even greater clearness in one of the Utah polyg-
amy cases ( Murphy v. Ramsey, 1 14 U. S. 44, 45 ):
" It rests with Congress to say whether in a given
case any of the people resident in the territory
shall participate in the election of its officers or
the making of its laws. It may take from them
any right of suffrage it may previously have
conferred, or at any time modify or abridge it, as
it may deem expedient. . . . Their political rights
are franchises which they hold as privileges, in
the legislative discretion of the United States."
The very latest judicial utterance on the sub-
ject is in harmony with all the rest. Mr. Justice
Morrow of the United States Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit, in February, 1898, held
( 57 U. S. Appeals, 6 ) : " The now well-established
doctrine is] that the territories of the United States
are entirely subject to the legislative authority of
Congress. They are not organized under the Con-
stitution nor subject to its complex distribution of
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the powers of government. The United States,
having rightfully acquired the territories, and be-
ing the only government which can impose laws
upon them, has the entire dominion and sover-
eignty, national and municipal, federal and state."
In the light of such expositions of our consti-
tutional power and our uniform national practice,
it is difficult to deal patiently with the remaining
objections to the acquisition of territory, purport-
ing to be based on constitutional grounds. One is
that to govern the Philippines without their con-
sent or against the opposition of Aguinaldo is to
violate the principle only formulated, to be sure,
in the Declaration of Independence, but, as they
say, underlying the whole Constitution that gov-
ernment derives its just powers from the consent
of the governed. In the Sulu group piracy pre-
vailed for centuries. How could a government that
put it down rest on the consent of Sulu? Would it
be without just powers because the pirates did not
vote in its favor? In other parts of the archipelago,
what has been stigmatized as a species of slavery
prevails. Would a government that stopped that
be without just powers till the slaveholders had
conferred them at a popular election ? In another
part head-hunting is, at certain seasons of the year,
a recognized tribal custom. Would a government
that interfered with that practice be open to de-
nunciation as an usurpation, without just powers,
and flagrantly violating the Constitution of the
United States, unless it waited at the polls for the
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TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
consent of the head-hunters ? The truth is, all intel-
ligent men know and few even in America, ex-
cept obvious demagogues, hesitate to admit that
there are cases where a good government does
not and ought not to rest on the consent of the
governed. If men will not govern themselves with
respect for civilization and its agencies, then when
they get in the way they must be governed
always have been, whenever the world was not
retrograding, and always will be. The notion that
such government is a revival of slavery, and that
the United States by doing its share of such work
in behalf of civilization would therefore become
infamous, though put forward with apparent grav-
ity in some eminently respectable quarters, is too
fantastic for serious consideration.
Mr. Jefferson may be supposed to have known
the meaning of the words he wrote. Instead of
vindicating a righteous rebellion in the Decla-
ration, he was called, after a time, to exercise a
righteous government under the Constitution. Did
he himself, then, carry his own words to such ex-
tremes as these professed disciples now demand?
Was he guilty of subverting the principles of the
government in buying some hundreds of thou-
sands of Spaniards, Frenchmen, Creoles, and In-
dians, "like sheep in the shambles/' as the critics
untruthfully say we did in the Philippines ? We
bought nobody there. We held the Philippines first
by the same right by which we held our own
original thirteen states, the oldest and firmest
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of all rights, the right by which nearly every great
nation holds the bulk of its territory the right of
conquest. We held them again as a rightful indem-
nity, and a low one, for a war in which the van-
quished could give no other. We bought nothing ;
and the twenty millions that accompanied the
transfer just balanced the Philippine debt.
But Jefferson did, if you choose to accept the
hypercritical interpretation of these latter-day Jef-
fersonians, Jefferson did buy the Louisianians,
even "like sheep in the shambles/' if you care so
to describe it; and did proceed to govern them
without the consent of the governed. Monroe
bought the Floridians without their consent. Polk
conquered the Californians, and Pierce bought
the New Mexicans. Seward bought the Russians
and Alaskans, and we have governed them ever
since, without their consent. Is it easy, in the face
of such facts, to preserve your respect for an ob-
jection so obviously captious as that based on the
phrase from the Declaration of Independence?
Nor is the turn Senator Hoar gives the consti-
tutional objection much more weighty. He wishes
to take account of motives, and pry into the pur-
pose of those concerned in any acquisition of ter-
ritory, before the tribunals can decide whether it
is constitutional or not. If acquired either for the
national defence or to be made a state, the act is
constitutional; otherwise not. If, then, Jefferson
intended to make a state out of Idaho, his act in
acquiring that part of the Louisiana Purchase was
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all right. Otherwise he violated the Constitution he
had helped to make and sworn to uphold. And
yet, poor man, he hardly knew of the existence
of that part of the territory, and certainly never
dreamed that it would ever become a state, any
more than Daniel Webster dreamed, to quote his
own language in the Senate, that " California would
ever be worth a dollar." Is Gouverneur Morris to
be arraigned as false to the Constitution he helped
to frame because he wanted to acquire Louisiana
and Canada, and keep them both out of the Union?
Did Mr. Seward betray the Constitution and vio-
late his oath in buying Alaska without the purpose
of making it a state? It seems let it be said with
all respect that we have reached the reductio ad
absurdum, and that the constitutional argument in
any of its phases need not be further pursued.
If I have wearied you with these detailed proofs
of a doctrine which Mr. Justice Morrow rightly
says is now well established, and these replies to
its assailants, the apology must be found in the
persistence with which the utter lack of constitu-
tional power to deal with our new possessions has
been vociferously urged from the outset by the
large class of our people whom I venture to des-
ignate as the Little Americans, using that term
not in the least in disparagement, but solely as
distinctive and convenient. From the beginning of
the century, at every epoch in our history we have
had these Little Americans. They opposed Jeffer-
son as to getting Louisiana. They opposed Mon-
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roe as to Florida. They were vehement against
Texas, against California, against organizing Ore-
gon and Washington, against the Gadsden Pur-
chase, against Alaska, and against the Sandwich
Islands. At nearly every stage in that long story
of expansion the Little Americans have either de-
nied the constitutional authority to acquire and
govern, or denounced the acquisitions as worth-
less and dangerous. At one stage, indeed, they
went further. When state after state was pass-
ing ordinances of secession, they raised the cry,
erroneously attributed to my distinguished pre-
decessor and friend, Horace Greeley, but really
uttered by Winfield Scott, "Wayward Sisters,
depart in peace! " Happily, this form, too, of Little
Americanism failed. We are all glad now my dis-
tinguished classmate at Miami/who wore the gray
and invaded Ohio with Morgan, as glad as myself,
we all rejoice that these doctrines were then
opposed and overborne. It was seen then, and I
venture to think it may be seen now, that it is a
fundamental principle with the American people
and a duty imposed upon all who represent them,
to maintain the Continental Union of American
Independent States in all the purity of the Fathers'
conception ; to hold what belongs to it, and get what
it is entitled to, and, finally, that wherever its flag
has been rightfully advanced, there it is to be kept.
If that be imperialism, make the most of it!
lr The Hon. Albert S. Berry, M.C. from the Covington, Kentucky, Dis-
trict.
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It was no vulgar lust of power that inspired the
statesmen and soldiers of the Republic when they
resisted the halting counsel of the Little Ameri-
cans in the past. Nor is it now. Far other is the spirit
we invoke:
4 ' Stern daughter of the Voice of God,
O Duty! If that name thou love "
in that name we beg for a study of what the new
situation that is upon us, the new world opening
around us, now demand at our hands.
The people of the United States will not refuse
an appeal in that name. They never have. They
had been so occupied, since the Civil War, first in
repairing its ravages, and then in occupying and
possessing their own continent, they had been so
little accustomed, in this generation or the last, to
even the thought of foreign war, that one readily
understands why at the outset they hardly real-
ized how absolute is the duty of an honorable con-
queror to accept and discharge the responsibilities
of his conquest. But this is no longer a child-nation,
irresponsible in its nonage and incapable of com-
prehending or assuming the responsibilities of its
acts. A child that breaks a pane of glass or sets fire
to a house may indeed escape. Are we to plead the
baby act, and claim that we can flounce around
the world, breaking international china and burn-
ing property, and yet repudiate the bill because
we have not come of age? Who dare say that a
self-respecting Power could have sailed away from
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Manila and repudiated the responsibilities of its
victorious belligerency ? After going into a war for
humanity, were we so craven that we should seek
freedom from further trouble at the expense of
civilization?
If we did not want those responsibilities, we
ought not to have gone to war,and I, for one, would
have been content. But having chosen to go to
war,andhaving been speedily and overwhelmingly
successful, we should be ashamed even to think
of running away from what inexorably followed.
Mark what the successive steps were, and how link
by link the chain that binds us now was forged.
The moment war was foreseen, the fleet we
usually have in Chinese waters became indispensa-
ble, not merely, as before, to protect our trade and
our missionaries in China, but to checkmate the
Spanish fleet, which otherwise held San Francisco
and the whole Pacific coast at its mercy. When war
was declared, our fleet was necessarily ordered
out of neutral ports. Then it had to go to Manila
or go home. If it went home, it left the whole Pa-
cific coast unguarded, save at the particular point
it touched, and we should have been at once in a
fever of apprehension, chartering hastily another
fleet of the fastest ocean-going steamers we could
find in the world, to patrol the Pacific from San
Diego to Sitka, as we did have to patrol the At-
lantic from Key West to Bar Harbor. Palpably
this was to go the longest way around to do a task
that had to be done in any event, as well as to de-
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moralize our forces at the opening of the war with
a manoeuvre in which our navy has never been
expert that of avoiding a contest and sailing
away from the enemy ! The alternative was prop-
erly taken. Dewey went to Manila and sank the
Spanish fleet. We thus broke down Spanish means
for controlling the Philippines, and were left with
the Spanish responsibility for maintaining order
there responsibility to all the world, German,
English, Japanese, Russian, and the rest in one
of the great centres and highways of the world's
commerce.
But why not turn over that commercial centre
and the island on which it is situated to the Tagals ?
To be sure ! Under three hundred years of Span-
ish rule barbarism on Luzon had so far disappeared
that this commercial metropolis, as large as San
Francisco or Cincinnati, had sprung up and come to
be thronged by traders and travellers of all nations.
Now it is calmly suggested that we might have
turned it over to one semi-civilized tribe, abso-
lutely without experience in governing even itself,
much less a great community of foreigners, prob-
ably in a minority on the island, and at war with
its other inhabitants, a tribe which has given the
measure of its fitness for being charged with the
rights of foreigners and the care of a commercial
metropolis by the violation of flags of truce, treach-
ery to the living, and mutilation of the dead, which
have marked its recent wanton rising against the
Power that was trying to help it!
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If running away from troublesome responsibil-
ity and duty is our role, why did we not long ago
take the opportunity, in our early feebleness, to
turn over Tallahassee and St. Augustine to the
Seminoles, instead of sending Andrew Jackson to
protect the settlements and subdue the savages?
Why, at the first Apache outbreak after the Gads-
den Purchase, did we not hasten to turn over New
Mexico and Arizona to their inhabitants? Or why,
in years within the memory of most of us, when
the Sioux and Chippewas rose on our northwest-
ern frontier, did we not invite them to retain pos-
session of St. Cloud, and even come down, if they
liked, to St. Paul and Minneapolis?
Unless I am mistaken in regarding all these
suggestions as too unworthy to be entertained by
self-respecting citizens of a powerful and self-
respecting nation, we have now reached two con-
clusions that ought to clear the air and simplify
the problem that remains: First, we have ample
constitutional power to acquire and govern new
territory absolutely at will, according to our sense
of right and duty, whether as dependencies, as
colonies, or as a protectorate. Secondly, as the legit-
imate and necessary consequence of our own pre-
vious acts, it has become our national and inter-
national duty to do it.
How shall we set about it? What shall be the
policy with which, when order has been inexora-
bly restored, we begin our dealings with the new
wards of the nation? Certainly we must mark our
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disapproval of the treachery and barbarities of the
present contest. As certainly the oppression of other
tribes by the Tagals must be ended, or the oppres-
sion of any tribe by any other within the sphere
of our active control. Wars between the tribes must
be discouraged and prevented. We must seek to
suppress crimes of violence and private vengeance,
secure individual liberty, protect individual prop-
erty, and promote the study of the arts of peace.
Above all, we must give and enforce justice; and
for the rest, as far as possible, leave them alone.
By all means let us avoid a fussy meddling with
their customs, manners, prejudices, and beliefs.
Give them order and justice, and trust to these
to win them in other regards to our ways. All
this points directly to utilizing existing agencies
as much as possible, developing native initiative
and control in local matters as fast and as far as
we can, and ultimately giving them the greatest
degree of self-government for which they prove
themselves fitted.
Under any conditions that exist now, or have
existed for three hundred years, a homogeneous
native government over the whole archipelago is
obviously impossible. Its relations to the outside
world must necessarily be assumed by us. We
must preserve order in Philippine waters, regulate
the harbors, fix and collect the duties, apportion
the revenue, and supervise the expenditure. We
must enforce sanitary measures. We must retain
such a control of the superior courts as shall make
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justice certainly attainable, and such control of
the police as shall insure its enforcement. But in
all this, after the absolute authority has been estab-
lished, the further the natives can themselves be
used to carry out the details, the better.
Such a system might not be unwise even for a
colony to which we had reason to expect a con-
siderable emigration of our own people. If expe-
rience of a kindred nation in dealing with similar
problems counts for anything, it is certainly wise
for a distant dependency, always to be populated
mainly, save in the great cities, by native races,
and little likely ever to be quite able to stand alone,
while, nevertheless, we wish to help it just as much
as possible to that end.
Certainly this is no bed of flowery ease in the
dreamy Orient to which we are led. No doubt these
first glimpses of the task that lies before us, as
well as the warfare with distant tribes into which
we have been unexpectedly plunged, will pro-
voke for the time a certain discontent with our new
possessions. But on a far-reaching question of na-
tional policy the wise public man is not so greatly
disturbed by what people say in momentary dis-
couragement under the first temporary check.
That which really concerns him is what people at
a later day, or even in a later generation, might
say of men trusted with great duties for their
country, who proved unequal to their opportuni-
ties, and through some short-sighted timidity of
the moment lost the chance of centuries.
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It is quite true, as reported in what seemed an
authoritative way from Washington, that the Peace
Commissioners were not entirely of one mind at
the outset, and equally true that the final conclu-
sion at Washington was apparently reached on the
Commission's recommendation from Paris. As the
cold fit, in the language of one of our censors, has
followed the hot fit in the popular temper, I read-
ily take the time which hostile critics consider un-
favorable, for accepting my own share of responsi-
bility, and for avowing for myself that I declared
my belief in the duty and policy of holding the
whole Philippine Archipelago in the very first con-
ference of the Commissioners in the President's
room at the White House, in advance of any in-
structions of any sort. If vindication for it is needed,
I confidently await the future.
What is the duty of a public servant as to pro-
fiting by opportunities to secure for his country
what all the rest of the world considers material
advantages? Even if he could persuade himself
that rejecting them is morally and internationally
admissible, is he at liberty to commit his country
irrevocably to their rejection, because they do not
wholly please his individual fancy? At a former
negotiation of our own in Paris, the great desire of
the United States representative, as well as of his
government, had been mainly to secure the set-
tled or partly settled country adjoining us on the
south, stretching from the Floridas to the city of
New Orleans. The possession of the vast unsettled
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and unknown Louisiana territory, west of the
Mississippi, was neither sought nor thought of.
Suddenly, on an eventful morning in April, 1803,
Talleyrand astonished Livingston by offering, on
behalf of Napoleon, to sell to the United States,
not the Floridas at all, but merely Louisiana, "a
raw little semi-tropical frontier town and an unex-
plored wilderness/'
Suppose Livingston had rejected the offer? Or
suppose Gadsden had not exceeded his instructions
in Mexico and boldly grasped the opportunity that
offered to rectify and make secure our southwest-
ern frontier? Would this generation judge that
they had been equal to their opportunities or their
duties?
The difficulties which at present discourage us
are largely of our own creation. It is not for any of
us to think of attempting to apportion the blame.
The only thing we are sure of is that it was for no
lack of authority that we hesitated and drifted till
the Tagals were convinced we were afraid of them,
and could be driven out before reinforcements
arrived. That was the very thing our officers had
warned us against, the least sign of hesitation or
uncertainty, the very danger every European
with knowledge of the situation had dinned in
our ears. Everybody declared that difficulties were
sure to grow on our hands in geometrical propor-
tion to our delays; and it was perfectly known to
the respective branches of our government pri-
marily concerned that while the delay went on it
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
was in neglect of a duty we had voluntarily as-
sumed.
For the American Commissioners, with due au-
thority, distinctly offered to assume responsibil-
ity, pending the ratification of the treaty, for the
protection of life and property and the preserva-
tion of order throughout the whole archipelago.
The Spanish Commissioners, after consultation
with their government, refused this, but agreed
that each Power should be charged, pending the
ratification, with the maintenance of order in the
places where it was established. The American
assent to that left absolutely no question as to the
diminished but still grave responsibility thus de-
volved. 1 That responsibility was avoided from the
hour the treaty was signed till the hour when the
Tagal chieftain, at the head of an army he had
been deliberately organizing, took things in his
own hand and made the attack he had so long
threatened. Disorder, forced loans, impressment,
confiscation, seizure of waterworks, contemptuous
violations of our guard-lines, and even the prac-
tical siege of the city of Manila, had meantime
1 Protocol No. 19 of the Paris Commission, Conference of December 5,
1898 : "The President of the Spanish Commission having agreed, at the
last session, to consult his government regarding the proposal of the Amer-
ican Commissioners that the United States should maintain public order
over the whole Philippine Archipelago pending the exchange of ratifica-
tions of the treaty of peace, stated that the answer of his government was
that the authorities of each of the two nations shall be charged with the
maintenance of order in the places where they may be established, those
authorities agreeing among themselves to this end whenever they may deem
it necessary."
C 155 3
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
been going on within gunshot of troops held there
inactive by the nation which had volunteered re-
sponsibility for order throughout the archipelago,
and had been distinctly left with responsibility for
order in the island on which it was established.
If the bitterest enemy of the United States had
sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest
trouble in the shortest time, he could have devised
for that end no policy more successful than the one
we actually pursued. There may have been con-
trolling reasons for it. An opposite course might
perhaps have cost more elsewhere than it saved in
Luzon. On that point the public cannot now form
even an opinion. But as to the effect in Luzon there
is no doubt; and because of it we have the right to
ask a delay in judgment about results there until
the present evil can be undone.
Mean time, in accordance with a well-known and
probably unchangeable law of human nature, this
is the carnival and very heyday of the objectors.
The air is filled with their discouragement.
Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of
colonizing or of managing colonies; that there is
something in our national character or institutions
that wholly disqualifies us for the work. Yet the
most successful colonies in the whole world were
the thirteen original colonies on our Atlantic coast;
and the most successful colonists were our own
grandfathers! Have the grandsons so degener-
ated that they are incapable of colonizing at all, or
of managing colonies ? Who says so? Is it any one
[ 156 ] '
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
with the glorious history of this continental coloni-
zation bred in his bone and leaping in his blood?
Or is it some refugee from a foreign country he
was discontented with, who now finds pleasure
in disparaging the capacity of the new country he
came to, while he has neither caught its spirit nor
grasped the meaning of its history?
Some bewail the alleged fact that, at any rate,
our system has little adaptability to the control
of colonies or dependencies. Has our system been
found weaker, then, than other forms of govern-
ment, less adaptable to emergencies, and with
people less fit to cope with them ? Is the difficulty
inherent, or is it possible that the emergency may
show, as emergencies have shown before, that
whatever task intelligence, energy, and courage
can surmount, the American people and their gov-
ernment can rise to?
It is said the conditions in our new possessions
are wholly different from any we have previously
encountered. This is true; and there is little doubt
the new circumstances will bring great modifi-
cations in methods. That is an excellent reason,
among others, for some doubt at the outset as to
whether we know all about it, but not for despair-
ing of our capacity to learn. It might be remem-
bered that we have encountered some varieties of
conditions already. The work in Florida was dif-
ferent from that at Plymouth Rock ; Louisiana and
Texas showed again new sets of conditions ; Cali-
fornia others ; Puget Sound and Alaska still others ;
C 157 ]
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
and we did not always have unbroken success and
plain sailing from the outset in any of them.
It is said we cannot colonize the tropics, because
our people cannot labor there. Perhaps not, espe-
cially if they refuse to obey the prudent precau-
tions which centuries of experience have enjoined
upon others. But what, then, are we going to do
with Porto Rico? How soon are our people going
to flee from Arizona? And why is life impossible
to Americans in Manila and Cebu and Iloilo, but
attractive to the throngs of Europeans who have
built up those cities? Can we mine all over the
world, from South Africa to the Klondike, but not
in Palawan ? Can we grow tobacco in Cuba, but not
in Cebu? or rice in Louisiana, but not in Luzon?
An alarm is raised that our laboring classes
are endangered by competition with cheap tropi-
cal labor or its products. How? The interpretation
of the Constitution which would permit that is the
interpretation which has been repudiated in an un-
broken line of decisions for over half a century.
Only one possibility of danger to American labor
exists in our new possessions the lunacy, or
worse, of the dreamers who want to prepare for
the admission of some of them as states in the
American Union. Till then we can make any law
we like to prevent the immigration of their labor-
ers, and any tariff we like to regulate the admis-
sion of their products.
It is said we are pursuing a fine method for re-
storing order, by prolonging the war we began
[ 158 ]
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
for humanity in order to force liberty and justice
on an unwilling people at the point of the bayonet.
The sneer is cheap. How else have these blessings
been generally diffused ? How often in the history
of the world has barbarism been replaced by civ-
ilization without bloodshed? How were our own
liberty and justice established and diffused on this
continent? Would the process have been less
bloody if a part of our own people had noisily taken
the side of the English, the Mexican, or the sav-
age, and protested against "extreme measures"?
Some say a war to extend freedom in Cuba or
elsewhere is right, and therefore a duty ; but the
war in the Philippines now is purely selfish, and
therefore a crime. The premise is inaccurate ; it is
a war we are in duty bound to wage at any rate
till order is restored but let that pass. Suppose
it to be merely a war in defence of our own just
rights and interests. Since when did such a war
become wrong ? Is our national motto to be, " Quix-
otic on the one hand, Chinese on the other?"
How much better it would have been, say oth-
ers, to mind our own business ! No doubt ; but if we
were to begin crying over spilt milk in that way,
the place to begin was where the milk was spilled
in the Congress that resolved upon war with Spain.
Since that congressional action we have been
minding what is made our own business quite dili-
gently, and an essential part of our business now is
the responsibility for our own past acts, whether in
Havana or Manila.
159
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
Some say that since we began the war for hu-
manity, we are disgraced by coming out of it with
increased territory. Then a penalty must always be
imposed upon a victorious nation for presuming to
do a good act. The only nation to be exempt from
such a penalty upon success is to be the nation that
was in the wrong ! It is to have a premium, whether
successful or not ; for it is thus relieved, even in de-
feat, from the penalty which modern practice in the
interest of civilization requires the payment of an
indemnity for the cost of an unjust war. Further-
more, the representatives of the nation that does
a good act are thus bound to reject any opportu-
nity for lightening the national load it entails. They
must leave the full burden upon their country, to
be dealt with in due time by the individual tax-
payer!
Again , we have superfine discussion s of what the
United States "stands for. "It does not stand, we are
told, for foreign conquest, or for colonies ordepend-
encies, or other extensions of its power and influ-
ence. It stands solely for the development of the
individual man. There is a germ of a great truth in
this, but the development of the truth is lost sight
of. Individual initiative is a good thing, and our
institutions do develop it and its consequences!
There is a species of individualism, too, about a
bulldog. When he takes hold he holds on. It may
as well be noticed by the objectors that that is
a characteristic much appreciated by American
people. They, too, hold on. They remember, be-
C i*> H
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
sides, a pregnant phrase of their Fathers, who " or-
dained this Constitution/' among other things, "to
promote the general welfare/' That is a thing for
which "this government stands" also; and woe to
the public servant who rejects brilliant opportu-
nities to promote it on the Pacific Ocean no less
than the Atlantic, by commerce no less than by
agriculture or manufactures.
It is said the Philippines are worthless have,
in fact, already cost us more than the value of their
entire trade for many years to come. So much the
more, then, are we bound to do our duty by them.
But we have also heard in turn, and from the same
quarters, that every one of our previous acquisi-
tions was worthless.
Again, it is said our continent is more than
enough for all our needs, and our extensions should
stop at the Pacific. What is this but proposing such
a policy of self-sufficient isolation as we are accus-
tomed to reprobate in China planning now to
develop only on the soil on which we stand, and
expecting the rest of the world to protect our trade
if we have any? Can a nation with safety set such
limits to its development? When a tree stops grow-
ing, our foresters tell us, it is ripe for the axe. When
a man stops in his physical and intellectual growth
he begins to decay. When a business stops grow-
ing it is in danger of decline. When a nation stops
growing it has passed the meridian of its course,
and its shadows fall eastward.
Is China to be our model, or Great Britain ? Or,
C
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
better still, are we to follow the instincts of our
own people? The policy of isolating ourselves is a
policy for the refusal of both duties and opportuni-
ties duties to foreign nations and to civilization,
which cannot be respectably evaded ; opportunities
for the development of our power on the Pacific
in the twentieth century, which it would be craven
to abandon. There has been a curious " about face/'
an absolute reversal of attitude toward England,
on the part of our Little Americans, especially in
the East and among the more educated classes.
But yesterday nearly all of them were pointing to
England as a model. There young men of edu-
cation and position felt it a duty to go into poli-
tics. There they had built up a model civil ser-
vice. There their cities were better governed, their
streets cleaner, their mails more promptly de-
livered. There the responsibilities of their colonial
system had enforced the purification of domestic
politics, the relentless punishment of corrupt prac-
tices, and the abolition of bribery in elections, either
by money or by office. There they had foreign
trade, and a commercial marine, and a trained
and efficient foreign service, and to be an English
citizen was to have a safeguard the whole world
round. Our young men were commended to their
exam pie; our legislators were exhorted to study
their practice and its results. Suddenly these same
teachers turn around. They warn us against the
infection of England's example. They tell us her
colonial system is a failure; that she would be
C
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
stronger without her colonies than with them ; that
she is eaten up with "militarism;" that to keep
Cuba or the Philippines is what a selfish, conquer-
ing, land-grabbing, aristocratic government like
England would do, and that her policy and meth-
ods are utterly incompatible with our institutions.
When a court thus reverses itself without obvious
reason ( except a temporary partisan purpose ) ,our
people are apt to put their trust in other tribunals.
" I had thought/' said Wendell Phillips, in his
noted apology for standing for the first time in
his antislavery life under the flag of his country,
and welcoming the tread of Massachusetts men
marshalled for war, "I had thought Massachu-
setts wholly choked with cotton-dust and cankered
with gold." If Little Americans have thought so
of their country in these stirring days, and have
fancied that initial reverses would induce it to
abandon its duty, its rights, and its great perma-
nent interests, they will live to see their mistake.
They will find it giving a deaf ear to these un-
worthy complaints of temporary trouble or present
loss, and turning gladly from all this incoherent
and resultless clamor to the new world opening
around us. Already it draws us out of ourselves.
The provincial isolation is gone; and provincial
habits of thought will go. There is a larger inter-
est in what other lands have to show and teach ;
a larger confidence in our own ; a higher resolve
that it shall do its whole duty to mankind, moral
as well as national, in such fashion as becomes
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
time's latest offspring and its greatest. We are
grown more nearly citizens of the world.
This new knowledge, these new duties and in-
terests, must have two effects they must extend
our power, influence, and trade, and they must ele-
vate the public service. Every returning soldier or
traveller tells the same story that the very name
" American " has taken a new significance through-
out the Orient. The shrewd Oriental no longer re-
gards us as a second or third class Power. He has
just seen the only signs he recognizes of a nation
that knows its rights and dares maintain them,
a nation that has come to stay, with an empire of
its own in the China Sea, and a navy which, from
what he has seen, he believes will be able to de-
fend it against the world. He straightway con-
cludes, after the Oriental fashion, that it is a nation
whose citizens must henceforth be secure in all
their rights, whose missionaries must be endured
with patience and even protected, and whose friend-
ship must be sedulously cultivated. The national
prestige is enormously increased, and trade fol-
lows prestige especially in the farther East. Not
within a century, not during our whole history,
has such a field opened for our reaping. Planted
directly in front of the Chinese colossus, on a great
territory of our own, we have the first and best
chance to profit by his awakening. Commanding
both sides of the Pacific, and the available coal-
supplies on each, we command the ocean that, ac-
cording to the old prediction, is to bear the bulk
C 164 ]
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
of the world's commerce in the twentieth century.
Our remote but glorious land between the Sierras
and the sea may then become as busy a hive as
New England itself, and the whole continent must
take fresh life from the generous blood of this
natural and necessary commerce between people
of different climates and zones.
But these developments of power and trade
are the least of the advantages we may hopefully
expect. The faults in American character and life
which the Little Americans tell us prove the people
unfit for these duties are the very faults that will
be cured by them. The recklessness and heedless
self-sufficiency of youth must disappear. Great re-
sponsibilities, suddenly devolved, must sober and
elevate now, as they have always done in natures
not originally bad, throughout the whole history
of the world.
The new interests abroad must compel an im-
proved foreign service. It has heretofore been
worse than we everknew,and also better. On great
occasions and in great fields our diplomatic record
ranks with the best in the world. No nation stands
higher in those new contributions to international
law which form the high-water mark of civilization
from one generation to another. At the same time,
in fields less under the public eye, our foreign
service has been haphazard at the best, and often
bad beyond belief ludicrous and humiliating. The
harm thus wrought to our national good name and
the positive injury to our trade have been more
C
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them
now, and when the American people wake up to
a wrong, they are apt to right it.
More important still should be the improvement
in the general public service at home and in our new
possessions. New duties must bring new methods.
Ward politics were banished from India and Egypt
as the price of successful administration, and they
must be excluded from Porto Rico and Luzon. The
practical common sense of the American people
will soon see that any other course is disastrous.
Gigantic business interests must come to reinforce
the theorists in favor of a reform that shall really
elevate and purify the Civil Service.
Hand in hand with these benefits to ourselves,
which it is the duty of public servants to secure,
go benefits to our new wards and benefits to man-
kind. There, then, is what the United States is to
" stand for" in all the resplendent future : the rights
and interests of its own government; the general
welfare of its own people ; the extension of ordered
liberty in the dark places of the earth ; the spread
of civilization and religion, and a consequent in-
crease in the sum of human happiness in the world.
C 166 ]]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
THE chaos of opinion into which the country
was thrown by the outbreak of the Spanish-
American War ceases to be wholly without form
and void. The discussions of a year have clarified
ideas ; and on some points we may consider that
the American people have substantially reached
definite conclusions.
There is no need, therefore, to debate labori-
ously whether Dewey was right in going to Ma-
nila. Everybody now realizes that, once war was
begun, absolutely the most efficient means of mak-
ing it speedily and overwhelmingly victorious, as
well as of defending the most exposed half of our
own coast, was to go to Manila. " Find the Span-
ish fleet and destroy it " was as wise an order as
the President ever issued, and he was equally wise
in choosing the man to carry it out.
So, also, there is no need to debate whether
Dewey was right in staying there. From that come
his most enduring laurels. The American people
admire him for the battle which sank the Spanish
navy ; but they trust and love him for the months
of trial and triumph that followed. The Admin-
istration that should have ordered him to aban-
don the Eastern foothold he had conquered for
his country to sail away like a sated pirate from
the port where his victory broke down all civil-
ized authority but our own, and his presence alone
prevented domestic anarchy and foreign spoliation
C 169 3
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
would have deserved to be hooted out of the
capital.
So, again, there is no need to debate whether the
Peace Commissioners should have thrown away in
Paris what Dewey had won in Manila. The public
servant who, without instructions, should in a gush
of irresponsible sentimentality abandon great pos-
sessions to which his country is justly entitled,
whether by conquest or as indemnity for unjust
war, would be not only an unprofitable but a faith-
less servant. It was their obvious duty to hold what
Dewey had won, at least till the American people
had time to consider and decide otherwise.
Is there any need to debate whether the Amer-
ican people will abandon it now? Those who have
a fancy for that species of dialectics may weigh the
chances, and evolve from circumstances of their
own imagination, and canons of national and in-
ternational obligation of their own manufacture,
conclusions to their own liking. I need not con-
sume much time in that unprofitable pursuit. We
may as well, here and now, keep our feet on solid
ground, and deal with facts as they are. The Amer-
ican people are in lawful possession of the Phil-
ippines, with the assent of all Christendom, with a
title as indisputable as the title to California; and,
though the debate will linger for a while, and per-
haps drift unhappily into partisan contention, the
generation is yet unborn that will see them aban-
doned to the possession of any other Power. The
nation that scatters principalities as a prodigal does
c 170 3
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
his inheritance is too sentimental and moonshiny
for the nineteenth century or the twentieth, and
too unpractical for Americans of any period. It
may flourish in Arcadia or Altruria, but it does not
among the sons of the Pilgrims, or on the conti-
nent they subdued by stern struggle to the uses
of civilization.
Nevertheless, our people did stop to consider
very carefully their constitutional powers. I believe
we have reached a point also where the result of
that consideration maybe safely assumed. The con-
stitutional arguments have been fully presented
and the expositions and decisions marshalled. It
is enough now to say that the preponderance of
constitutional authorities, with Gouverneur Mor-
ris, Daniel Webster, and Thomas H. Benton at
their head, and the unbroken tendency of decisions
by the courts of the United States for at least the
last fifty years, from Mr. Chief Justice Waite and
Mr. Justice Miller and Mr. Justice Stanley Mat-
thews of the Supreme Court, down to the very
latest utterance on the subject, that of Mr. Jus-
tice Morrow of the Circuit Court of Appeals,
sustain the power to acquire "territory or other
property" anywhere, and govern it as we please.
Inhabitants of such territory ( not obviously inca-
pable ) are secure in the civil rights guaranteed by
the Constitution ; but they have no political rights
under it, save as Congress confers them. The evi-
dence in support of this view has been fully set
forth, examined, and weighed, and, unless I greatly
c 171 3
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
mistake, a popular decision on the subject has been
reached. The constitutional power is no longer
seriously disputed, and even those who raised the
doubt do not seem now to rely upon it.
In thus summarizing what has been already
settled or disposed of in our dealings with the
questions of the war, I may be permitted to pause
for a moment on the American contributions it
brought about to international morality and law.
On the day on which the American Peace Com-
missioners to Paris sailed for home after the cere-
monial courtesy with which their labors were con-
cluded, the most authoritative journal in the world
published an interview with the eminent presi-
dent of the corresponding Spanish Commission,
then and for some time afterward president also
of the Spanish Senate, in which he was reported as
saying: " We knew in advance that we should have
to deal with an implacable conqueror, who would
in no way concern himself with any preexisting
international law,but whose sole object was to reap
from victory the largest possible advantage. This
conception of international law is absolutely new ;
it is no longer a case of might against right, but
of might without right. . . . The Americans have
acted as vainqueurs parvenus."
Much may be pardoned to the anguish of an old
and trusted public servant over the misfortunes of
his native land. We may even, in our sympathy,
1 London Times, December 17, 1898.
C 173 ]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
endeavor to forget what country it was that pro-
posed to defy the agreements of the conference
of Paris and the general judgment of nations by
resorting to privateering, or what country it was
that preferred to risk becoming an asylum for the
criminals of a continent rather than revive, even
temporarily, that basic and elementary imple-
ment of modern international justice, an extra-
dition treaty, which had been in force with ac-
ceptable results for over twenty years. But when
Americans are stigmatized as "vainqueurs par-
venus" who by virtue of mere strength violate
international law against a prostrate foe, and
when one of the ablest of their American critics
encourages the Spanish contention by talking of
our "bulldog diplomacy at Paris," it gives us
occasion to challenge the approval of the world
as the facts amply warrant for the scrupulous
conformity to existing international law, and the
important contributions to its beneficent advance-
ment, that have distinguished the action of the
United States throughout these whole transac-
tions. Having already set these forth in some de-
tail before a foreign audience, 1 1 must not now do
more than offer the briefest summary.
The United States ended the toleration of priva-
teering. It was perfectly free to commission pri-
vateers on the day war was declared. Spain was
equally free, and it was proclaimed from Madrid
1 "Some Consequences of the Treaty of Paris," The Anglo-Saxon Re-
view, London, June, 1899.
C
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
that the Atlantic would soon swarm with them,
sweeping American commerce from the ocean.
Under these circumstances, one of the very first
and noblest acts of the President was to announce
that the United States would not avail itself of the
right to send out privateers, reserved under the
Declaration of Paris. The fast-thickening disasters
of Spain prevented her from doing it, and thus sub-
stantially completed the practice or acquiescence
of the civilized world, essential to the acceptance
of a principle in international law. It is safe to
assume that Christendom will henceforth treat
privateering as under international ban.
The United States promoted the cause of gen-
uine international arbitration by promptly and
emphatically rejecting an insidious proposal for a
spurious one. It taught those who deliberately pre-
fer war to arbitration, and, when beaten at it, seek
then to get the benefit of a second remedy, that
honest arbitration must come before war, to avert
its horrors, not after war, to evade its penalties.
The United States promoted peace among na-
tions, and so served humanity by sternly enforcing
the rule that they who bring on an unjust war must
pay for it. For years the overwhelming tendency
of its people had been against any territorial ag-
grandizement, even a peaceful one ; but it unflinch-
ingly exacted the easiest, if not the only, payment
Spain could make for a war that cost us, at the
lowest, from four to five hundred million dollars,
by taking Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
[ 174 H
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
It requires some courage to describe this as either
a violation of international law, or a display of un-
precedented severity by an implacable conqueror,
in the very city and before the very generation
that saw the Franco-Prussian War concluded, not
merely by a partition of territory, but also by a
cash payment of a thousand millions indemnity.
The United States promoted the peaceful liber-
alizing of oppressive rule over all subject peoples
by making it more difficult to negotiate loans in the
markets of the world to subdue their outbreaks.
For it firmly rejected in the Cuban adjustments
the immoral doctrine that an ill-treated and revolt-
ing colony, after gaining its freedom, must still
submit to the extortion from it of the cost of the
parent country's unsuccessful efforts to subdue it.
We therefore left the so-called Cuban bonds on
the hands of the Power that issued them, or of the
reckless lenders who advanced the money. At the
same time the United States strained a point else-
where in the direction of protecting any legitimate
debt, and of dealing generously with a fallen foe,
by a payment which the most carping critic will
some day be ashamed to describe as "buying in-
habitants of the Philippines at two dollars a head."
1 There has been so much misconception and misrepresentation about this
payment of twenty millions that the following exact summary of the facts
may be convenient :
When Spain sued for peace in the summer of 1898, she had lost con-
trol of the Philippines, and any means for regaining control. Her fleet
was sunk ; her army was cooped up in the capital, under the guns of the
American fleet, and its capture or surrender had only been delayed till the
arrival of reinforcements for the American army, because of the fears
C 175 H
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
All these are acts distinctly in accord with in-
ternational law so far as it exists and applies, and
distinctly tending to promote its humane and
Christian extension. Let me add, in a word, that
the peace negotiations in no way compromised
or affected the Monroe Doctrine, which stands as
firm as ever, though much less important with the
expressed by foreigners and the principal residents of Manila that the city
might be looted by the natives unless American land forces were at hand
in strength ample to control them. The Spanish army did so surrender,
in fact, shortly after the arrival of these reinforcements, before the news
of the armistice could reach them.
In the protocol granting an armistice, the United States exacted at once
the cession of Porto Rico and an island in the Ladrones, but reserved the
decision as to the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines
for the treaty of peace, apparently with a view to the possibility of accept-
ing them as further indemnity for the war.
When the treaty came to be negotiated, the United States required the
cession of the Philippines. Its Peace Commissioners stated that their gov-
ernment " felt amply supported in its right to demand this cession, with
or without concessions," added that "this demand might be limited to
the single ground of indemnity," and pointed out that it was "not now
putting forward any claim for fiecuniary indemnity, to cover the enor-
mous cost of the war." It accompanied this demand for a transfer of sov-
ereignty with a stipulation for assuming any existing indebtedness of Spain
incurred for public works and improvements of a pacific character in the
Philippines. The United States thus asserted its right to the archipelago
for indemnity, and at the same time committed itself to the principle of
payment on account of the Philippine debt.
When it became necessary to put the Philippine case into an ultima-
tum the Peace Commissioners did not further refer to the debt or give any
specific reason either for a cession or for a payment. They simply said
they now presented "a new proposition, embodying the concessions which,
for the sake of immediate peace, their government is, under the circum-
stances, willing to tender."
But it was really the old proposition (with the "Open Door " and "Mu-
tual Relinquishment of Claims" clauses added) , with the mention for the
first time of a specific sum for the payment, and without any question of
"pacific improvements." That sum just balanced the Philippine debt
40,000,000 Mexican, or, say, 20,000,000 American dollars.
C 176]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
disappearance of any probable opposition to it;
and that the prestige they brought smoothed the
way for the one hopeful result of the Czar's con-
ference at The Hague, a response to the American
proposal for a permanent International Court of
Arbitration.
A trifling but characteristic inaccuracy concern-
ing the Peace Commission may as well be cor-
rected before the subject is left. This is the state-
ment, apparently originating from Malay sources,
but promptly indorsed in this country by unfriendly
critics, to the effect that the representative of Agui-
naldo was uncivilly refused a hearing in Paris.
It was repeated, inadvertently, no doubt, with
many other curious distortions of historic facts,
by a distinguished statesman in Chicago. 1 As he
puts it, the doors were slammed in their faces in
Washington as well as in Paris. Now, whatever
might have happened, the door was certainly never
slammed in their faces in Paris, for they never
came to it. On the contrary, every time Mr. Agon-
cillo approached any member of the Commission
on the subject, he was courteously invited to send
the Commissioners a written request for a hear-
ing, which would, at any rate, receive immediate
consideration. No such request ever came, and any
Filipino who wrote for a hearing in Paris was heard.
Meanwhile we are now in the midst of hostil-
ities with a part of the native population, origi-
1 General Carl Schurz, at the Chicago Anti-Expansion Convention, Octo-
ber, 1899.
C 1773
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
nating in an unprovoked attack upon our troops
in the city they had wrested from the Spaniards,
before final action on the treaty. It is easy to say
that we ought not to have got into this conflict,
and to that I might agree. "I tell you, they can't
put you in jail on that charge/' said the learned
and disputatious counsel to the client who had
appealed from his cell for help. "But I am in,"
was the sufficient answer. The question just then
was not what might have been done, but what
can be done. I wish to urge that we can only end
this conflict by manfully fighting through it. The
talk one hears that the present situation calls for
"diplomacy" seems to be mistimed. That species
of diplomacy which consists in the tact of prompt
action in the right line at the right time might,
quite possibly, have prevented the present hos-
tilities. Any diplomacy now would seem to our
Tagal antagonists the raising of the white flag
the final proof that the American people do not
sustain their army in the face of unprovoked attack.
Every witness who came before the American
Peace Commission in Paris, or sent it a written
statement, English, German, Belgian, Malay, or
American, said the same thing. Absolutely the
one essential for dealing with the Filipinos was
to convince them at the very outset that what you
began, you stood to; that you did not begin with-
out consideration of right and duty, or quail then
before opposition ; that your purpose was inex-
orable and your power irresistible, while submis-
c 178 n
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
sion to it would always insure justice. On the con-
trary, once let them suspect that protests would
dissuade and turbulence deter you, and all the
Oriental instinct for delay and bargaining for bet-
ter terms is aroused along with the special Malay
genius for intrigue and double-dealing, their pro-
found belief that every man has his price, and
their childish ignorance as to the extent to which
stump speeches here against any Administration
can cause American armies beyond the seas to
retreat.
No; the toast which Henry Clay once gave in
honor of an early naval hero fits the present situ-
ation like a glove. He proposed " the policy which
looks to peace as the end of war, and war as the
means of peace/' In that light I maintain that the
conflict we are prosecuting is in the line of national
necessity and duty; that we cannot turn back;
that the truest humanity condemns needless delay
or half-hearted action, and demands overwhelm-
ing forces and irresistible onset.
But in considering this duty, just as in estimat-
ing the Treaty of Paris, we have the right to elimi-
nate all account of the trifling success, so far, in the
Philippines, or of the great trouble and cost. What
it was right to do there, and what we are bound to
do now, must not be obscured by faults of hesita-
tion or insufficient preparation, for which neither
the Peace Commissioners nor the people are re-
sponsible. I have had occasion to say before what
I now repeat with the additional emphasis subse-
C 1793
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
quent events have warranted that the difficulties
which at present discourage us are largely of our
own making ; and I repeat that it is still not for us,
here and now, to apportion the blame. We have not
the knowledge to say just who, or whether any
man or body, is wholly at fault. What we do know
is that the course of hesitation and inaction which
the nation pursued in face of an openly maturing
attack was precisely the policy sure to give us the
greatest trouble, and that we are now paying the
penalty. If the opposite course had been taken at
the outset, unless all the testimony from foreign
observers and from our own officers is at fault,
there would have been either no outbreak at all,
or only one easily controlled and settled to the
general satisfaction of most of the civilized and
semi-civilized inhabitants of the island.
On the personal and partisan disputes already
lamentably begun, as to senatorial responsibility,
congressional responsibility, or the responsibility
of this or that executive officer, we have no occa-
sion here to enter. What we have a right to insist
on is that our general policy in the Philippines shall
not be shaped now merely by the just discontent
with the bad start. The reports of continual victo-
ries that roll back on us every week, like the stone
of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next
week; the mistakes of a censorship that was abso-
lutely right as a military measure, but may have
been unintelligently, not to say childishly, con-
ducted, all these are beside the real question.
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
They must not obscure the duty of restoring order
in the regions where our troops have been assailed,
or prejudice our subsequent course.
I venture to say of that course that neither our
duty nor our interest will permit us to stop short of
a pacification which can end only in the establish-
ment of such local self-government as the people
are found capable of conducting, and its extension
just as far and as fast as the people prove fit for it.
The natural development thus to be expected
would probably proceed safely along the lines of
least resistance, about in this order: First, and till
entirely clear that it is no longer needed, military
government. Next, the rule of either military or
civil governors (for a considerable time probably
the former ), relying gradually more and more on
native agencies. Thirdly, the development of de-
pendencies, with an American civil governor, with
their foreign relations and their highest courts con-
trolled by us, and their financial system largely
managed by members of a rigidly organized and
jealously protected American Civil Service, but in
most other respects steadily becoming more self-
governing. And, finally , autonomous governments,
looking to us for little save control of their foreign
relations, profiting by the stability and order the
backing of a powerful nation guarantees, cultivat-
ing more and more intimate trade and personal
relations with that nation, and coming to feel them-
selves participants of its fortunes and renown.
Such a course Congress, after full investigation
C
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
and deliberation, might perhaps wisely formulate.
Such a course, with slight modifications to meet
existing limitations as to his powers, has already
been entered upon by the President, and can doubt-
less be carried on indefinitely by him until Con-
gress acts. This action should certainly not be pre-
cipitate. The system demands most careful study,
not only in the light of what the English and Dutch,
the most successful holders of tropical countries,
have done, but also in the light of the peculiar and
varied circumstances that confront us on these dif-
ferent and distant islands, and among these widely
differing races, circumstances to which no pre-
vious experience exactly applies, and for which no
uniform system could be applicable. If Congress
should take as long a time before action to study
the problem as it has taken in the Sandwich Islands,
or even in Alaska, the President's power would
still be equal to the emergency, and the policy,
while flexible, could still be made as continuous,
coherent, and practical as his best information and
ability would permit.
Against such a conscientious and painstaking
course, in dealing with the grave responsibilities
that are upon us in the East, two lines of evasion
are sure to threaten. The one is the policy of the
upright but short-sighted and strictly continental
patriot the same which an illustrious statesman
of another country followed in the Sudan: " Scuttle
as quick as you can/'
The other is the policy of the exuberant patriot
C 182 J
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
who believes in the universal adaptability and im-
mediate extension of American institutions. He
thinks all men everywhere as fit to vote as him-
self and wants them for partners. He is eager to
have them prepare at once, in our new possessions,
first in the West Indies, then in the East, to send
Senators and Representatives to Congress, and his
policy is: " Make territories of them now,and states
in the American Union as soon as possible." I wish
to speak with the utmost respect of the sincere
advocates of both theories, but must say that the
one seems to me to fall short of a proper regard for
either our duty or our interest, and the other to be
national suicide.
Gentlemen in whose ability and patriotism we
all have confidence have put the first of these
policies for evading our duty in the form of a pro-
test "against the expansions and establishment of
the dominion of the United States, by conquest or
otherwise, over unwilling peoples in any part of
the globe." Of this it may be said, first, that
any application of it to the Philippines probably
assumes a factional and temporary outbreak to re-
present a settled unwillingness. New Orleans was
as "unwilling," when Mr. Jefferson annexed it,
as Aguinaldo has made Manila; and Aaron Burr
came near making the whole Louisiana territory
far worse. Mr. Lincoln always believed the people
of North Carolina not unwilling to remain in the
Union, yet we know what they did. But next, this
protest contemplates evading the present respon-
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OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
sibility by a reversal of our settled policy any way.
Mr. Lincoln probably never doubted the unwilling-
ness of South Carolina to remain in the Union, but
that did not change his course. Mr. Seward never
inquired whether the Alaskans were unwilling or
not. The historic position of the United States, from
the day when Jefferson braved the envenomed
anti-expansion sentiment of his time and bought
the territory west of the Mississippi, on down, has
been to consider, not the willingness or unwill-
ingness of any inhabitants, whether aboriginal or
colonists, but solely our national opportunity, our
own duty, and our own interests.
Is it said that this is Imperialism ? That implies
usurpation of power, and there is absolutely no
ground for such a charge against this Administra-
tion at any one stage in these whole transactions.
If any complaint here is to lie, it must relate to the
critical period when we were accepting the respon-
sibility for order at Manila, and must be for the
exercise of too little power, not too much. It is not
imperialism to take up honestly the responsibility
for order we incurred before the world, and con-
tinue under it, even if that should lead us to ex-
tend the civil rights of the American Constitution
over new regions and strange peoples. It is not
imperialism when duty keeps us among these cha-
otic, warring, distracted tribes, civilized, semi-civ-
ilized, and barbarous, to help them, as far as their
several capacities will permit, toward self-govern-
ment on the basis of those civil rights.
C 184 ]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
A terser and more taking statement of oppo-
sition has been attributed to a gentleman highly
honored by Princeton University and by his towns-
men there. I gladly seize this opportunity, as a con-
sistent opponent during his whole political life, to
add that his words carry great weight throughout
the country by reason of the unquestioned ability,
courage, and patriotic devotion he has brought to
the public service. He is reported as protesting
simply against " the use of power in the extension
of American institutions/' But does not this, if ap-
plied to the present situation, seem also to miss an
important distinction ? What planted us in the Phil-
ippines was the use of our power in the most efficient
naval and military defence then available for our
own institutions where they already exist, against
the attack of Spain. If the responsibility entailed by
the result of these acts in our own defence does
involve some extension of our institutions, shall
we therefore run away from it? If a guarantee to
chaotic tribes of the civil rights secured by the
American Constitution does prove to be an inci-
dent springing from the discharge of the duty that
has rested upon us from the moment we drove
Spain out, is that a result so objectionable as to
warrant us in abandoning our duty?
There is, it is true, one other alternative the
one which Aguinaldo himself is said to have sug-
gested, and which has certainly been put forth in
his behalf with the utmost simplicity and sincerity
by a conspicuous statesman at Chicago. We might
C 185 ]]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
at once solicit peace from Aguinaldo. We might
then encourage him to extend his rule over the
whole country, Catholic, pagan, and Mohamme-
dan, willing and unwilling alike, and promise
him whatever aid might be necessary for that task.
Meantime, we should undertake to protect him
against outside interference from any European
or Asiatic nation whose interests on that oceanic
highway and in those commercial capitals might
be imperilled I 1 1 do not desire to discuss that prop-
osition. And I submit to candid men that there are
just those three courses, and no more, now open
to us to run away, to protect Aguinaldo, or to
back up our own army and firmly hold on !
If this fact be clearly perceived, if the choice
between these three courses be once recognized
as the only choice the present situation permits,
our minds will be less disturbed by the confused
cries of perplexity and discontent that still fill the
air. Thus men often say, " If you believe in liberty
for yourself, why refuse it to the Tagals?"That
is right; they should have, in the degree of their
capacity, the only kind of liberty worth having in
the world, the only kind that is not a curse to
its possessors and to all in contact with them
ordered liberty, under law, for which the wisdom
of man has not yet found a better safeguard than
the guarantees of civil rights in the Constitution
of the United States. Who supposes that to be the
1 The exact proposition made by General Carl Schurz in addressing the
Chicago Anti-Expansion Convention, October, 1899.
C l86 3
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
liberty for which Aguinaldo is fighting ? What his
people want, and what the statesman at Chicago
wishes us to use the army and navy of the United
States to help him get, is the liberty to rule others,
the liberty first to turn our own troops out of the
city and harbor we had in our own self-defence
captured from their enemies; the liberty next to
rule that great commercial city, and the tribes
of the interior, instead of leaving us to exercise
the rule over them that events have forced upon
us, till it is fairly shown that they can rule them-
selves.
Again it is said, " You are depriving them of
freedom/' But they never had freedom, and could
not have it now. Even if they could subdue the
other tribes in Luzon, they could not establish
such order on the other islands and in the waters
of the archipelago as to deprive foreign Powers
of an immediate excuse for interference. What we
are doing is in the double line of preventing other-
wise inevitable foreign seizure and putting a stop
to domestic war.
"But you cannot fit people for freedom. They
must fit themselves, just as we must do our own
crawling and stumbling in order to learn to walk/'
The illustration is unfortunate. Must the crawl-
ing baby, then, be abandoned by its natural or
accidental guardian, and left to itself to grow
strong by struggling, or to perish, as may happen ?
Must we turn the Tagals loose on the foreigners
in Manila, and on their enemies in the other tribes,
C 187 ]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
that by following their instincts they may fit them-
selves for freedom?
Again, " It will injure us to exert power over an
unwilling people, just as slavery injured the slave-
holders themselves/' Then a community is injured
by maintaining a police. Then a court is injured by
rendering a just decree, and an officer by execut-
ing it. Then it is a greater injury, for instance, to
stop piracy than to suffer from it. Then the manly
exercise of a just responsibility enfeebles instead of
developing and strengthening a nation.
"Governments derive their just powers from
the consent of the governed/* "No man is good
enough to govern another against his will/' Great
truths, from men whose greatness and moral ele-
vation the world admires. But there is a higher
authority than Jefferson or Lincoln, Who said: "If
a man smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also." Yet he who acted literally on even
that divine injunction toward the Malays would
be a congenital idiot to begin with, and his corpse,
while it lasted, would remain an object-lesson of
how not to deal with the present stage of Malay
civilization and Christianity.
Why mourn over our present course as a de-
parture from the policy of the Fathers ? For a hun-
dred years the uniform policy which they began
and their sons continued has been acquisition, ex-
pansion, annexation, reaching out to remote wil-
dernesses far more distant and inaccessible then
than the Philippines are now to disconnected
C 1*8 D
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
regions like Alaska, to island regions like Midway,
the Guano Islands, the Aleutians, the Sandwich
Islands, and even to quasi protectorates like Libe-
ria and Samoa. Why mourn because of the pre-
cedent we are establishing? The precedent was
established before we were born. Why distress
ourselves with the thought that this is only the
beginning, that it opens the door to unlimited ex-
pansion ? The door is wide open now, and has been
ever since Livingston in Paris jumped at Talley-
rand's offer to sell him the wilderness west of the
Mississippi instead of the settlements eastward to
Florida, which we had been trying to get; and
Jefferson eagerly sustained him. For the rest,
the task that is laid upon us now is not proving so
easy as to warrant this fear that we shall soon be
seeking unlimited repetitions of it.
That danger, in fact, can come only if we shirk
our present duty by the second of the two alter-
native methods of evasion I have mentioned the
one favored by the exuberant patriot who wants to
clasp Cuban, Kanaka, andTagal alike to his bosom
as equal partners with ourselves in our inheritance
from the Fathers, and take them all into the Union
as states.
We will be wise to open our eyes at once to the
gravity and the insidious character of this danger
the very worst that could threaten the American
Union. Once begun, the rivalry of parties and the
fears of politicians would insure its continuance.
With Idaho and Wyoming admitted, they did not
C 1*9 ]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
dare prolong the exclusion even of Utah, and so
we have the shame of seeing an avowed polyga-
mist with a prima facie right to sit in our Congress
as a legislator not merely for Utah, but for the
whole Union. At this moment scarcely a politician
dares frankly avow unalterable opposition to the
admission of Cuba, if she should seek it. Yet, bad as
that would be, it would necessarily lead to worse.
Others in the West Indies might not linger long
behind. In any event, with Cuba a state, Porto Rico
could not be kept a territory. No more could
the Sandwich Islands. And then, looming direct
in our path, like a volcano rising out of the mist on
the affrighted vision of mariners tempest-tossed in
tropic seas, is the spectre of such states as Luzon,
and the Visayas and Haiti.
They would have precedents, too, to quote, and
dangerous ones. When we bought Louisiana we
stipulated in the treaty that "the inhabitants of the
ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union
of the United States and admitted as soon as pos-
sible, according to the principles of the Federal
Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, ad-
vantages, and immunities of citizens of the United
States." We made almost identically the same stip-
ulation when we bought Florida. When one of the
most respected in the long line of our able Secre-
taries of State, Mr. William L. Marcy, negotiated
a treaty in 1854 for the annexation of the Sand-
wich Islands, he provided that they should be in-
corporated as a state, with the same degree of sov-
II 190 ]
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
ereignty as other states, and on perfect equality
with them. The schemes prior to 1861 for the pur-
chase or annexation of Cuba practically all looked
to the same result. Not till the annexation of San
Domingo was proposed did this feature disappear
from our treaties. It is only candid to add that the
habit of regarding this as the necessary destiny
of any United States territory as soon as it has
sufficient population has been universal. It is no
modern vagary*, but the practice, if not the theory,
of our whole national life, that would open the
doors of our Senate and House, and give a share
in the government, to these wild-eyed newcomers
from the islands of the sea.
The calamity of admitting them cannot be over-
rated. Even in the case of the best of these islands,
it would demoralize and degrade the national suf-
frage almost incalculably below the point already
reached. To the Seriate, unwieldy now, and greatly
changed in character from the body contemplated
by the Constitution, it would be disastrous. For the
present states of the Union it would be an act of
folly like that of a business firm which blindly
steered for bankruptcy by freely admitting to full
partnership new members, strangers and non-res-
idents, not only otherwise ill qualified, but with
absolutely conflicting interests. And it would be a
distinct violation of the clause in the preamble that
" we, the people, ... do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America."
There is the only safe ground on the letter
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OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
and the spirit of the Constitution. It contemplated
a continental union of sovereign states. It limited
that union to the American continent. The man
that takes it farther sounds its death-knell.
I have designedly left to the last any esti-
mate of the material interests we serve by holding
on in our present course. Whatever these may be,
they are only a subordinate consideration. We are
in the Philippines, as we are in the West Indies,
because duty sent us; and we shall remain because
we have no right to run away from our duty, even
if it does involve far more trouble than we fore-
saw when we plunged into the war that entailed
it. The call to duty, when once plainly understood,
is a call Americans never fail to answer, while to
calls of interest they have often shown themselves
incredulous or contemptuous.
But the Constitution we revere was also or-
dained "to promote the general welfare/' and he
is untrue to its purpose who squanders opportuni-
ties. Never before have they been showered upon
us in such bewildering profusion. Are the Amer-
ican people to rise to the occasion ? Are they to be
as great as their country? Or shall the historian
record that at this unexampled crisis they were
controlled by timid ideas and short-sighted views,
and so proved unequal to the duty and, the oppor-
tunity which unforeseen circumstances brought to
their doors ? The two richest archipelagoes in the
world are practically at our disposal. The greatest
ocean on the globe has been put in our hands, the
C 19S H
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
ocean that is to bear the commerce of the twen-
tieth century. In the face of this prospect, shall we
prefer, with the teeming population that century
is to bring us, to remain a "hibernating nation,
living off its own fat a hermit nation," as Mr.
Senator Davis has asked? For our First Assist-
ant Secretary of State, Mr. Hill, was right when
he said that not to enter the Open Door in Asia
means the perpetual isolation of this continent.
Are we to be discouraged by the cry that the
new possessions are worthless? Not while we re-
member how often and under what circumstances
we have heard that cry before. Half the public men
of the period denounced Louisiana as worthless.
Eminent statesmen made merry in Congress over
the idea that Oregon or Washington could be
of any use. Daniel Webster, in the most solemn
and authoritative tones Massachusetts has ever
employed, assured his fellow Senators that, in his
judgment, California was not worth a dollar.
Is it said that the commercial opportunities in
the Orient, or at least in the Philippines, are over-
rated? So it used to be said of the Sandwich Islands.
But what does our experience show ? Before their
annexation even, but after we had taken this little
archipelago under our protection and into our com-
mercial system, our ocean tonnage in that trade
became nearly as heavy as with Great Britain.
Why? Because, while we have lost the trade of
the Atlantic, superior advantages made the Pacific
ours. Is it said that elsewhere on the Pacific we
C 193 3
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
can do as well without a controlling political influ-
ence as with it? Look again ! Mexico buys our prod-
ucts at the rate of $1 .95 for each inhabitant; South
America at the rate of 90 cents; Great Britain at
the rate of $13.42 ; Canada at the rate of 1 14; and
the Hawaiian Islands at the rate of $53-35 for each
inhabitant. Look at the trade of the chief city on
the Pacific coast. All Mexico and Central Amer-
ica, all the western parts of South America and
of Canada, are as near to us as is Honolulu; and
comparison of the little Sandwich Islands in popu-
lation with any of them would be ridiculous. Yet
none of them bought as much salmon in San Fran-
cisco as Hawaii, and no countries bought more
save England and Australia. No countries bought
as much barley, excepting Central America; and
even in the staff of life, the California flour, which
all the world buys, only five countries outranked
Hawaii in purchases in San Francisco.
No doubt a part of this result is due to the near-
ness of Hawaii to our markets, and her distance
from any others capable of competing with us, and
another part to a favorable system of reciprocity.
Nevertheless, nobody doubts the advantage our
dealers have derived in the promotion of trade
from controlling political relations and frequent
intercourse. There are those who deny that " trade
follows the flag," but even they admit that it
leaves if the flag does. And, independent of these
advantages, and reckoning by mere distance, we
still have the better of any European rivals in the
194
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
Philippines. Now, assume that the Filipino would
have far fewer wants than the Kanaka or his coolie
laborer, and would do far less work for the means
to gratify them. Admit, too, that, with the Open
Door, our political relations and frequent inter-
course could have barely a fifth or a sixth of the
effect there they have had in the Sandwich Islands.
Roughly cast up even that result, and say whether
it is a value which the United States should throw
away as not worth considering !
And the greatest remains behind. For the trade
in the Philippines will be but a drop in the bucket
compared to that of China, for which they give us
an unapproachable foothold. But let it never be for-
gotten that the confidence of Orientals goes only
to those whom they recognize as strong enough
and determined enough always to hold their own
and protect their rights ! The worst possible intro-
duction for the Asiatic trade would be an irresolute
abandonment of our foothold because it was too
much trouble to keep, or because some Malay and
half-breed insurgents said they wanted us away.
Have you considered for whom we hold these
advantages in trust? They belong not merely to
the seventy-five millions now within our borders,
but to all who are to extend the fortunes and pre-
serve the virtues of the Republic in the coming
century. Their numbers cannot increase in the
startling ratio this century has shown. If they did,
the population of the United States a hundred
years hence would be over twelve hundred mil-
c 195 n
OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
lions. That ratio is impossible, but nobody gives
reasons why we should not increase half as fast.
Suppose we do actually increase only one-fourth as
fast in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth.
To what height would not the three hundred
millions of Americans whom even that ratio fore-
tells bear up the seething industrial activities of
the continent ! To what corner of the world would
they not need to carry their commerce? What
demands on tropical productions would they not
make? What outlets for their adventurous youth
would they not require ? With such a prospect be-
fore us, who thinks that we should shrink from an
enlargement of our national sphere because of the
limitations that bound, or the dangers that threat-
ened, before railroads, before ocean steamers, be-
fore telegraphs and ocean cables, before the enor-
mous development of our manufactures, and the
training of executive and organizing faculties in
our people on a constantly increasing scale for
generations ?
Does the prospect alarm ? Is it said that our na-
tion is already too great, that all its magnificent
growth only adds to the conflicting interests that
must eventually tear it asunder? What cement,
then, like that of a great common interest be-
yond our borders, that touches not merely the
conscience, but the pocket and the pride of all
alike, and marshals us in the face of the world,
standing for our own ?
What, then, is the conclusion of the whole
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OUR DUTY IN THE PHILIPPINES
matter ? Hold fast ! Stand firm in the place where
Providence has put you, and do the duty as just
responsibility for your own past acts imposes. Sup-
port the army you sent there. Stop wasting valu-
able strength by showing how things might be
different if something different had been done at
the outset. Use the educated thought of the coun-
try for shaping best its course now, instead of
chiefly finding fault with its history. Bring the best
hope of the future, the colleges and the genera-
tion they are training, to exert the greatest influ-
ence and accomplish the most good by working in-
telligently in line with the patriotic aspirations and
the inevitable tendencies of the American people,
rather than against them. Unite the efforts of all
men of goodwill to make the appointment of any
person to these new and strange duties beyond seas
impossible save for proved fitness, and his removal
impossible save for cause. Rally the colleges and
the churches, and all they influence, the brain and
the conscience of the country, in a combined and
irresistible demand for a genuine, trained, and pure
Civil Service in our new possessions, that shall put
to shame our detractors, and show to the world
the Americans of this generation, equal still to the
work of civilization and colonization, and leading
the development of the coming century as bravely
as their fathers led it in the past.
C
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
KTus begin by stating the elements of the prob-
lem.
First, then, a new and vast country, develop-
ing at the outset with painful slowness, later with
startling rapidity, under a self-governing people.
Next, important characteristics among this
people derived from the land which first ruled
them a vehement attachment to their personal
rights and a belief, which never admits a ques-
tion, in the imperative duty of giving the best
possible education to their children.
Next, a growing tendency toward universal suf-
frage, creating a political necessity for the nearest
practicable approach to universal intelligence.
Next, a habit of thought, fervidly religious at the
outset, but diverging into many forms of religion;
strenuous, therefore, at once in a demand for re-
ligious freedom and in hostility to an established
church.
And finally, a continent to be conquered from its
primitive wildness and savagery to the uses of civ-
ilized man, a task sometimes shortening the years
parents could spare their children for education,
and impressing on what education they did get a
new and very practical bent, in order to promote
these material conquests through scientific means.
We hear occasionally about the Science of His-
tory more, in fact, at times than some of us be-
ll 201 ]
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
lieve. But, given these elements of the problem,
we may well imagine that the philosophic student
might on such data almost construct the history
of educational evolution in the United States from
first principles and without reference to the rec-
ords. Thus:
It would be clear that at the outset every reli-
gious sect would start private schools, and would
try to sweep into them not only the children of its
own faith, but all others it could lay its hand on.
It would be equally clear that wherever it could,
it would load the support of these schools on the
whole tax-paying community. There would thus
arise public schools ( by which an American always
means tax-supported schools), giving sectarian
instruction.
But when different sects, nearly or quite balanc-
ing each other in influence, disputed the control
in a new and unconventional community, where
there were no roads through these novel perplex-
ities any more than through their forests, and
where they had to blaze their trails for themselves,
it is clear that this sectarian instruction would in
the end be so modified as to include only tenets
common to all, and would tend in fact to become
less doctrinal andmore ethical a teaching merely
of morals and of duties to each other.
In course of time many of the churches would
be dissatisfied with this and would revert to pri-
vate schools at their own cost and under their own
exclusive control. The burden of supporting these
202
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
would be so considerable that they would object to
being taxed also for the support of public schools
for other people's children.
But in a country controlled by popular suffrage
and among a people passionately convinced that
the success of their government depended on the
widest diffusion of intelligence, it is evident that
a system of free public schools supported by public
taxation, when once started, could never be aban-
doned. It would be thought a necessary measure
of self-defence in the government to educate all
the rising generation for the duties of citizenship,
the poorest of them as well as the richest, and the
pagan no less than the Puritan. The public school
system, free to all and supported by public taxa-
tion, would inevitably become, therefore, a fixed
feature of public policy.
Now, with the two systems in force, it would be
obvious that the one where tuition was free would
grow the faster ; and equally obvious that those
who paid for their own and were taxed for the
other would wish to limit as far as possible the scope
and consequently the cost of the one they didn't
use. Two rival theories as to taxing everybody for
the education of the rising generation would thus
develop: one, that such taxation was necessary
and justifiable only far enough to fit them for the
common duties of citizenship ; and the other that it
was also to the public interest to fit them for any-
thing. Heavy taxpayers would naturally lead in the
first; those who felt less the burden of taxation, or
C
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
paid no taxes, in the second. As heavy taxpayers
are never in the majority, and as the readiness to
vote burdens on others is apt to be more marked
in those who do not bear like burdens themselves,
it would be natural to expect the tendency in the
long run, in a democratic government, to be found
in favor of the most liberal appropriations and the
widest scope for the studies.
The first class would hold that only reading,
writing, and arithmetic were necessary, with per-
haps the history of the country and the nature
of its government. To tax them for teaching other
people's children more than that, Latin or algebra
or chemistry, they would regard as robbery. But
the second class, those depending on the free pub-
lic schools rather than on the sectarian schools for
the education of their children, would wish it car-
ried as far as the children seemed capable of re-
ceiving and profiting by it. They would easily per-
suade themselves, too, of the sound public policy
and justice of this, since they would argue that the
more the child knew and the more its judgment
was developed, the better and more useful mem-
ber of a self-governing community it would make.
Thus could be easily foreseen a struggle be-
tween those who wished to limit the free public
school system to primary education and those who
wished to carry it through secondary schools to
colleges and universities. The one side would hold
that the free secondary and university education,
besides harming the taxpayer through unequal
204
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
burdens, would harm many of those encouraged to
take it for the reason that it cost nothing ; since it
would educate them beyond their intellect and dis-
qualify them for what they are fit for, in the effort
to qualify them for tasks they never can be made
fit for spoiling good farmers or blacksmiths to
make worthless lawyers or doctors or speculators.
The other side would hold that the more educa-
tion one is found capable of receiving, the better
fitted he will be to do whatever he finds to do
that the better education you give him, the better
farmer or blacksmith he will make, if that is to be
his vocation.
Finally, our philosophic student would infer that
in the long run, in a country without an established
church or a governing class, constantly tending
toward universal suffrage and toward the changes
wrought by enormous and highly varied immigra-
tion, the side likely to prevail would be the one
making all education, from the lowest rung at the
foot of the educational ladder to the very highest,
open to the poorest child on the sole condition of
capacity to receive it. He would further infer that
of those who set their foot on this ladder many
would be intensely eager to get off it again to
begin making a living, and eager while on it for a
great variety of special studies that they thought
would help them in the varied pursuits they ex-
pected to follow.
It may be briefly said that something like this is
the exact history of two centuries of educational
C 205 ]
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
evolution in the United States. It seems to be end-
ing in a system, ranging from the alphabet to the
classics, the modern languages, literature, history,
civics, the higher mathematics, and science, with a
strong leaning to practical applications of science
in all fields of art and industry, sustained abso-
lutely at the public expense and free to all, with
every grade open to the poorest and most friend-
less pupil in the grade below, on the single re-
quirement that his standing there fits him for it.
That is all that is necessary to-day in the greatest
city of the New World to carry the child of the
Ghetto or of the Levantine push-cart quarter from
the primer to a fairly earned degree of Bachelor
of Arts in the College of the City of New York,
or to an equivalent degree, involving equal study
and to a considerable extent along equally varied
lines, in its Normal College for Women.
This system had grown in the early years of
the present century into a total enrolment in the
schools, colleges, and universities of the United
States, public and private, of 1 7,539,000 pupils, of
whom 16,127,000 were in public institutions sup-
ported by taxation. When the enrolments for certain
special interests, evening schools, reform schools,
Indian schools, schools for deaf, blind, feeble-
minded, etc., were added, the grand total was
reached of 18,187,000. Nearly one-fourth of the
total population is at school in a nation of eighty
millions! 1
1 United States Commissioner of Education, Refiart, December 1, 1904.
C 206 ]
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
The system thus developed, though varying some-
what in the different states, is characterized by
certain general peculiarities.
Fir st y as to religion in the schools. Broadly speak-
ing, religious instruction is not compulsory in any
public schools and not permitted in the most. Re-
ligious exercises at the daily opening of the school
were long encouraged, and are still common, but
seem to be growing less frequent, especially in the
great cities. The language of the New York City
charter probably states, though in a somewhat in-
volved fashion, the ground which most city schools
throughout the Union and many of those in the
country are fast approaching :
' ' No school shall be entitled to or receive any portion
of the school moneys in which the religious doctrines or
tenets of any particular Christian or other religious sect
shall be taught, inculcated, or practised, or in which any
book or books containing compositions favourable or pre-
judicial to the particular doctrine or tenets of any par^
ticular Christian or other religious sect shall be used, or
which shall teach the doctrines or tenets of any other re-
ligious sect, or which shall refuse to permit the visits and
examinations provided for in this chapter. But nothing
herein contained shall authorize the board of education
or the school board of any borough to exclude the Holy
Scriptures, without note or comment, or any selections
therefrom, from any of the schools provided for by this
chapter ; but it shall not be competent for the said board
of education to decide what version, if any, of the Holy
Scriptures, without note or comment, shall be used in
any of the schools; provided that nothing herein con-
[ 207 ]
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
tained shall be so construed as to violate the rights of
conscience, as secured by the constitution of this state
and of the United States."
Under this, the reading of a chapter of the Bible at
the opening of the school is still common.
The New York state constitution prohibits aid
from public funds to denominational schools, or to
schools where any denominational tenet or doc-
trine is taught; and similar prohibitions are general
in other states. The New York provision reads as
follows:
4 ' Neither the state, nor any subdivision thereof, shall use
its property or credit or any public money, or authorize
or permit either to be used directly or indirectly, in aid
or maintenance, other than for examination or inspection,
of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part
under the control or direction of any religious denomi-
nation, or in which any denominational tenet or doctrine
is taught."
To discuss the effects of this general policy might
approach too closely to contentious domestic ques-
tions. One may be permitted, however, to say that
in the prevalent American view it certainly throws
a greater work upon the family and the church;
but that, where these both do their full duty, it is
probable that no harm results.
As to the extent of the public school education. The
doctrine is rapidly gaining ground in most of the
states that it should be carried at the public ex-
pense from the primary branches straight through
the secondary schools and on to the universities,
C 208 ]
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
for all who are found capable, able, and desirous
to continue such a course. In more than half the
states free universities are already to be found.
As to its character. "I would found an institu-
tion/' said Ezra Cornell, "where any person can
find instruction in any study/' The sentiment has
been inscribed on the walls of the Capitol in his na-
tive state at Albany, and it is beginning to expand
the available courses of study, not only in the
colleges and universities, but largely also in the
secondary schools, and sometimes even in the pri-
maries. A reaction against the excessive extension
of this elective system is setting in ; and there is a
good deal of complaint, especially in the primary
schools, where it is often said the attention of
the children is distracted to so many other things
that they do not learn reading, writing, and arith-
metic as well as they should. But in the secondary
schools and the universities there is an enormous
multiplication of studies and of separate courses of
study, designed forthe varying wants of the pupils,
with reference to the varied vocations they expect
to enter. The tendency is strongly to the practical
side, and scientific and technological studies are
greatly in favor.
As to the time taken for public education. This
tendency to specialize at school with reference to
what the pupil expects to do to earn a living is ac-
companied with another peculiarity a haste, once
almost a craze, to get out of school and get to work
at one's life-business at the earliest practicable mo-
ll 209 ]
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
ment. Nowhere else has there been the like fever-
ish anxiety to keep the studies of the secondary
schools or of the universities within such a range
that the pupil may think he has received a lib-
eral education, but get through it in fewer years
than formerly. He even tries now to complete the
usual college course*in three years, instead of the
traditional four; and would like the course in the
professional school for a doctor or lawyer to be
two years instead of three or more. In fact, he
often begrudges every month between the primary
school and the entry on his business or profession,
and fears that those taking still less time than him-
self for liberal studies will get ahead of him in the
race of life.
As to women. In all the public schools, primary
and secondary, there are apt to be as many girls
as boys. In the colleges and universities the pro-
portion may be smaller, but in those supported by
public taxation both sexes are admitted on equal
terms, as well as in many others. It begins to be
considered, however, that coeducation is chiefly
commended by its economy. A state university can,
of course, educate such girls as seek its classes
at less cost to the taxpayers than if a separate
institution had to be built up for them and a sec-
ond set of professors engaged. But aside from this,
it is coming to be thought in many quarters that
better results may be had in separate institutions.
Thus one of the richest and most independent of
the new universities, that of Chicago, endowed
[ 210 3
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, came to adopt the
segregation of female students, and another, the
Stanford University of California, is limiting the
female students to one-third or less of the entire
number. There are, however, many well-endowed
and admirably equipped colleges for women alone,
sometimes independent, sometimes affiliated with
a great university like Harvard or Columbia ; and
the number of women pursuing their education
through colleges and universities is already large
and rapidly increasing.
A final peculiarity of the American system may
be noted : the extraordinary readiness of rich men
to found colleges and universities; to endow chairs
in them, or make to them gifts of libraries or
museums, or to help on the lower schools in a
multitude of ways. Two American citizens, both
noted for other benefactions, have given forty mil-
lions of dollars to four educational enterprises
alone Andrew Carnegie to the Carnegie Insti-
tution for Original Research and to a fund for
pensioning college professors; John D. Rockefel-
ler to the Chicago University and to the General
Education Board. Another, Leland Stanford, gave
what promises, when the estate is fully settled, to
amount to from thirty-five to forty millions for the
university founded in memory of his lost son. Ezra
Cornell founded, financed, gave to, and solicited
for the university in western New York which
bears his name till it now has property and endow-
ment amounting to about twelve millions or more.
c 211 n
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
Matthew Vassar, a brewer, founded the first col-
lege for women in America, at Poughkeepsie,New
York, and gave and secured for it two millions and
a half. To call the long roll of similar benefactions
would exhaust both time and patience. In ten years
the gifts to universities, colleges, and schools of
technology in the United States amounted to a hun-
dred and fifteen millions of dollars . The tide was
steadily rising, for in the last of those years, 1902,
the gifts to such institutions amounted to sixteen
and three-quarter millions.
The basis of this whole system is, of course,
the common primary or elementary school. The
enrolment in the primary schools in the different
states generally equals about twenty per cent of
the population, and the average daily attendance
about sixty-nine per cent of the enrolment. The
average length of the school term throughout the
country is one hundred and forty-seven days;
the annual cost, roughly speaking, is about two
hundred and fifty millions of dollars. The general
tendency is to make attendance compulsory be-
tween the ages of six and fourteen, and to apply
the penalties for non-attendance to the parent.
The home rule disposition of a democracy leaves
the business management of the school to the
people of the locality, but the state alone passes
upon the fitness of the teacher.
In the state with whose educational system I
have the greatest familiarity, that of New York,
the average of daily attendance rises to seventy-
C
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
six per cent of the enrolment; and the compulsory
education law is supplemented and made far more
effective among the mixed population of our great
cities by rigid laws against child labor. Whether
parents wish it or not, it is thus made difficult for
the children to lose their American birthright to
a sound elementary education.
A more distinctive feature of the American system
is the secondary school. In countries where free
tuition is not carried up to the university, there is
apt to be a vague, undeveloped territory between
the primary schools and the universities, filled
sometimes and to a certain extent by tax-supported
high schools, but more frequently by private high
schools. The distinguishing feature of the free
common school system of the United States is the
completeness with which it fills this gap between
the primary schools and the colleges or universi-
ties. This began almost with the beginning of the
colonies. In 1647 Massachusetts required by law
the establishment of a primary school wherever
there were fifty families in a settlement or town-
ship ; and a grammar school which should be capa-
ble of fitting students for college wherever there
were a hundred. Connecticut and Maryland re-
quired a grammar school in every county town.
Other colonies in one way or another made pro-
vision for secondary education at the public ex-
pense. But as the troubles preceding the Revolu-
tionary War increased, these grammar schools or
C 21 3 H
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
high schools fell into some neglect and many com-
munities were without them. Then sprang up a
system of private academies, often under sectarian
control, and sometimes receiving subventions from
the public treasury , though never under public con-
trol. The two long continued to occupy the field
together. The differences between them have been
incisively stated by the accomplished Commis-
sioner of Education in the State of New York,
Dr. Andrew S. Draper:
'The function of the academy was to prepare for col-
lege and incidentally for life ; that of the high school is to
prepare for life and incidentally for college. The one was
classical, with some practicalities; the other is severely
practical and generally in the best sense, with classical
appurtenances. The academy was essentially an advanced
school for boys; the high school is as essentially co-
educational."
Meantime the various states were slowly feeling
their way toward more harmonious and better ar-
ticulated systems of education entirely under pub-
lic control and at the public expense. New York
was the first. Its organization of secondary schools
in 1 784 was intended to fit into the primary edu-
cation on the one hand, and to lead, on the other,
to colleges and universities. Indiana outlined such
a system in 1816, Pennsylvania began state sup-
port of secondary and higher education in 1838,
and many large towns in other states did the same.
But the system was still disjointed and irregular.
C 214 ]
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
At the close of the Civil War a new educational
movement began to be increasingly felt through-
out the United States. Amid all the vivid pictures
left on my mind by what I saw during that gigan-
tic convulsion, none, even of Gettysburg or Shiloh,
bring back such a thrill as these of Washington
in 1862:
First, a calm, sunshiny day when the great bronze
Statue of Liberty was hoisted to the dome of the
still unfinished Capitol and slowly settled to its
place above that exquisite structure, almost within
eyesight of Confederate troops on the other side
of the Potomac. Not even the Conscript Fathers,
advancing the price of public land across the Tiber
on which the armies besieging Rome were then
encamped, were finer than that.
The others came under my eye as a young offi-
cial of the House of Representatives. When the
fitful flame of the nation's life seemed flickering
with every fresh bulletin from the field, Congress
calmly considered and passed three bills. One gave
free a hundred and sixty acres of land to any citi-
zen on the sole condition that he should occupy
and develop it. Another reached across mountains
and deserts to bind together in an indissoluble
union the East and the farthest West by the Pacific
Railroad. The third and the greatest signed, as
Dr. Draper reminds us, by Abraham Lincoln with
the same penful of ink with which he had just
signed the second call for three hundred thousand
soldiers gave of the public lands to every state
[ 215 H
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
as much as was needed to found a free university
for the sons and daughters of the state.
From that inspiring act came the two great im-
pulses that have almost transformed American
education in the last forty years : the vast expan-
sion of the secondary schools and the development
of the state universities. Between them, when the
system is complete, they put within reach of any
child of the Republic a free university education.
We are not deluded with the conceit that our
secondary school system is yet the best possible
means for fitting children either for college or for
life. What we may say is that it is the best means
yet devised and put into operation for placing
within reach of the greatest number of children
the opportunity to climb the educational ladder as
high as they can; and that the education thus
afforded tends in the main to develop, even out of
the masses of imported raw material, the kind
of citizens who have thus far made the fortunes
of the country.
Statistics of attendance in these schools are
scarcely available in any satisfactory form before
1876. In that year there were in the public high
schools of the country only about 23,000 pupils,
and in the corresponding private schools about
74,000. By 1902 the proportions were remarkably
reversed. There were then in the 6292 public high
schools 551,000 pupils, and in the private schools
105,000 ; or, roughly speaking, about one in every
216
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
twenty-three of the youth of the land was pur-
suing some form of higher education, while the
door was open to as many of the others as showed
themselves qualified to enter it.
The nature of the instruction varies in differ-
ent localities. In a general way it may be said that
the standard curriculum toward which educational
authorities are striving would include either mod-
ern or ancient languages, mathematics, English,
and science for about one-half the work of a four
years' course, while the rest would be made up of
studies chosen by the pupil or the parents.
Perhaps a better idea may be given by taking
first the requirements of a good secondary school,
and next the bewildering array of " electives " it
is apt to allow. For this purpose the high school of
St. Louis may be selected. All its pupils who com-
plete its four years' course have been required to
study English, algebra, plane geometry, physics,
biology, history, and Shakespeare, and to these
they must give somewhat more than half their
time. Then, under the guidance of the authorities,
studies sufficient for the rest of the time must be
made up out of a long list, including ethics, civics,
economics, psychology, arithmetic, bookkeeping,
commercial law, higher algebra, solid geometry,
trigonometry, chemistry, penmanship, phonogra-
phy, drawing and history of art, Latin, German,
French, Spanish, and Greek.
A more conservative arid, as I must think, a wiser
class of schools leaves less to the choice of the pupils
C 217 H
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
or parents, but allows an election between scien-
tific and classical courses. In the first they have
Latin and either German or French, with alge-
bra, history, English, geometry, trigonometry,
botany, and chemistry. In the classical course they
generally carry Latin and English through the
four years, Greek through three, and German
and French through two, with algebra, geometry,
and history. Still others ( as ordered by the State of
Minnesota, for example ) arrange most of the stud-
ies already named into three courses, called re-
spectively English, Literary, and Classical, and be-
tween these the pupils or their parents make choice.
Where students were preparing for college, it was
found in 1902 that a little over one-half took a clas-
sical, a little less than one-half a scientific course. A
more definite idea as to the present bent of second-
ary school education may be given by the facts
that in 1 898, out of over a million students, 306,000
studied algebra, 274,000 Latin, 147,000 geom-
etry, 113,000 physics, 78,000 German, 58,000
French,47,ooo chemistry, and only 25,000 Greek.
The general tendency was summed up in the
pregnant statement by Elmer Ellsworth Brown,
then Professor of Education in the University of
California, afterward United States Commissioner
of Education, that in consideration of secondary
school curricula, it is now coming to be thought
that" what is good preparation for life is good prep-
aration for college. More and more the question of
college entrance requirements is coming to be a
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
question as to what is best for the schools ; and a
situation in which certain demands of the colleges
were once the determining factor, now finds its
determining factor in the demands of the public
high school/' To this I may add that in 1902 the
pupils entering college from the tax-supported high
schools stood, as to those entering from academies
or private schools, in the proportion of 2^3 to i.
They comprised less than a quarter of a million
boys and nearly a third of a million girls.
Naturally, then, the secondary schools are striv-
ing to make the education they give stand on its
own merits, and to avoid having it narrowed into
a process of cramming for college examinations.
Help is given to this effort by some of the colleges
themselves, which do away with entrance exam-
inations altogether, in the case of pupils from cer-
tain schools whose certificates of fitness for entry
they accept. This means that it is the school that is
examined, its methods, fitness, and thoroughness;
and that it is the daily work of the pupil that counts,
not the accidental performance on a few points on
a single day of apprehension and nervous strain.
The school is thus sustained in trying to give its
pupils a rounded mastery of their subjects and
to rate their work by both its average quality and
its quantity. The pupil is stimulated to learn his
subject for its own sake, not to think only of what
he must know to " pass " on the questions of some
particular college.
Methods of instruction, too, are changing. There
C
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
is an abandonment of mere learning by rote and of
old routine ; a greater tendency to throw the stu-
dent on his own resources and make him think for
himself ; a vast extension of practical illustrations,
and particularly of laboratory work, in physics,
chemistry, and the biological sciences. Text-books
often come then to be used chiefly to formulate
and explain what the pupil has already found out.
The Massachusetts system still keeps the inspi-
ration of its great educator, Horace Mann, and
leads the country in carrying free secondary educa-
tion into the remotest hamlets. By state law, every
township is compelled to furnish high school edu-
cation to every child within its limits prepared to
receive it. I may be pardoned for the belief that in
other respects the system of secondary schools in
New York stands at the head or at least abreast
of the foremost, the best in organization and in-
spection, with as good results as any, and on the
largest scale. There are eight hundred secondary
schools in that single state. Independent of their
support through local taxes, they have been dis-
criminatingly aided from the literature fund since
i 79O, on constant inspection of schools and exam-
ination of pupils by the state regents, to the extent
of over four and a half million dollars. In 1903 they
had 95,000 students, spent in the year over seven
million dollars, and had net property to the amount
of thirty-four millions. The whole country had only
fourteen times as many secondary schools in its
22
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
forty-six states, with only eight times as many
pupils. The secondary school attendance in the
whole country has doubled in thirteen years; it has
doubled in New York in nine years. Yet while at-
tendance at the primary school is compulsory, that
at the secondary schools is not the state feeling
that it has exhausted its right of self-protection
against ignorance when it has compelled its chil-
dren to acquire an elementary education. The sec-
ondary schools are held to a high standard by in-
spections, examinations, and special allowances for
special efficiency ; while the attempt of feeble be-
ginners to masquerade as fully equipped schools is
rigidly repressed. As the state superintendent ex-
plained it, there is nothing to be said against their
starting before they are qualified to give a full four
years' course, but everything to be said against a
fifty-cent piece having the effrontery to try to pass
itself for a dollar.
Throughout the Union the secondary schools
are generally to be found in good buildings
oft en, especially at the West,better than the church
or the court-house. The farther west you go, the
more noticeable it is that in the newest and rough-
est settlements the one important structure visi-
ble in the landscape is the large, substantial, and
attractive two-story schoolhouse. So it is in the
deserts of Arizona and on the shores of Puget
Sound ; so it is in the remotest and most isolated
communities in Montana or in Wyoming or in
Idaho. The hardy pioneer himself may still be liv-
C 221 3
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
ing in an adobe or in a sod cabin ; but his child, that
royal personage who holds the sovereignty of the
future, must be schooled in what is to him a palace.
And now let me refer more briefly to the top of the
system, the colleges and universities. No doubt,
with reference to the wisest conservation of edu-
cational force, there are too many of them. One may
count up about four hundred and fifteen. Of these
not less than 275 are under some sort of sectarian
or denominational control, while over 40 are state
institutions. The severest critic would admit that
at least 1 6 are not unworthy to stand in the class
headed by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton.
The scope and quality of others may not be rated
so high, but more and more the education they
impart grows worthy of the degrees they grant.
The collated reports of 328 of them show a total of
6207 professors, associate and adjunct professors,
receiving an aggregate of over nine and a half mil-
lion dollars in salaries, or an average of over $1 500
per year. In denominational colleges the average
salary falls to $ 1 1 80 ; in the state institutions it rises
to nearly $i 800, and in those independent of both
church and state control to over $1900. In these
colleges and universities there were in 1902, one
hundred and sixty-one thousand students. If you
add the numbers in separate professional schools
of law, medicine, and theology, there were in all
over two hundred thousand students pursuing uni-
versity studies.
C 222 U
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
There has been an enormous expansion in the
oldest and best universities within the past twenty-
five years. Their teaching force has been doubled
or even trebled; the standards for admission and
for thoroughness of instruction have both been
raised ; there has been a great broadening of scope,
and while the Humanities have not been displaced,
there is far greater attention than formerly to mod-
ern languages, to literature, history, economics,
civics, and to science pure and applied.
The feeling was early and widespread, partic-
ularly at the West, that the government should
support colleges and universities as well as the
primary and secondary schools. As far back as in
1816, the constitution of the new State of Indiana
provided that "it shall be the duty of the General
Assembly, as soon as circumstances will permit,
to provide by law for a general system of educa-
tion, ascending in regular gradation from township
schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall
be gratis and equally open to all." Other states
moved in the same direction, but the great impulse
came in the passage of the Land Grant Act in the
second year of our Civil War. It gave each state
in the Union public land in proportion to its repre-
sentation in Congress, to the smallest ninety thou-
sand acres, to the largest over a million, "for the
endowment and maintenance of at least one col-
lege, whose leading object shall be, without ex-
cluding other scientific and classical studies, and
including military tactics, to teach such branches
C 223 3
HOW THE UNITED STATES FACED
of learning as are related to agriculture and the
mechanic arts ... in order to promote the liberal
and practical education of the industrial classes in
the several pursuits and professions of life/' Con-
gress has since increased this princely endowment
by an annual appropriation of twenty-five thousand
dollars in cash to each institution founded under
this act.
There are nowfortyof them. They have twenty-
seven hundred instructors, thirty-three thousand
students, sixty thousand graduates, twenty-two
millions of productive funds, and an aggregate
annual income of six millions of dollars. In all, the
ideal of a free university education for anybody
qualified to enter is approximated. Fees, where any
are charged, are low. Cornell takes free six hun-
dred students from the state secondary schools on
regents' certificates of fitness. Others take all their
students free. With all the effort is to complete
and crown the work of the free primary and sec-
ondary school system.
Their general characteristics are less promi-
nence for the old collegiate " Humanities/' greater
attention to science and particularly to applied
science with reference to agriculture and the in-
dustrial arts, a greater variety and freedom of
choice in elective studies, military training, and the
admission of women. One of them, which may be
taken as a fair average type, divides its work into
eleven different colleges or schools, ranging from
literature and the arts to science, engineering,agri-
C 224 ]
ITS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
culture, music, ancient and modern languages, and
library science. Then its school for post-graduates
gives advanced instruction in twenty-seven sub-
jects, beginning with the languages and mathe-
matics and extending to chemistry, civil, mechani-
cal, electrical, and sanitary engineering, agricul-
ture, horticulture, etc. In short, they undertake
most of the work of the older universities and do
it well, but add many things the old ones never
touched, bringing the instruction more into relation
with the daily life of the majority of the people.
Half a dozen of them might be named which main-
tain practically as high standards and offer as wide
a range and as sound instruction as the best of the
old universities. They draw fresh blood and their
chief strength from the robust product of the com-
mon schools ; they are yearly becoming more and
more the colleges of the common people, often,
especially at the West, of all the people ; and their
graduates are coming forward among the most
prominent and most useful of the people's leaders.
I have tried to show some features of the sys-
tem that is growing up in the United States to carry
any capable child in all the land from primary
school to university at the public expense ; aiming
to give every human being within our borders his
chance, and to make America more than ever the
home of Opportunity aiming, first of all, in the
golden words which Abraham Lincoln signed and
made alive, "to promote the liberal and practical
education of the industrial classes/' In that lies our
225
HOW THE UNITED STATES, fcfc.
hope to preserve and perpetuate ordered liberty
under law over a united country that stretches
from the tropics to the Arctic Zone, and from ocean
to ocean. In that lies our hope to make our vast
immigration from every clime and race capable of
sharing and carrying on a complex system of gov-
ernment that has hitherto taxed the best resources
and best qualities of the best native stock the world
ever saw. In that lies our trust that they can never
be long misled by any corpse-lights from the grave-
yard of lost hopes and abandoned ambitions, where
collectivism and communism hold sway; never
maddened by the more lurid temptations that
blaze the way to militant anarchism. The second-
ary school and the state university are our antidote
to all that gospel of despair, with its low level and
dreary monotony, its withdrawal of all incentive
to rise, and its fatal obstruction of the individual
initiative which has thus far been the greatest sin-
gle cause of our marvellous growth. And for every
other ill, as for this, our remedy is light, and again
light, and to the end more and more light. Withal
we try to keep in sight as well as we can the real
object of a true education, as John Ruskin stated
it: "To make people not only do the right things,
but enjoy the right things not merely industri-
ous, but to love industry not merely learned, but
to love knowledge not merely pure, but to love
purity not merely just, but to hunger and thirst
after justice."
C 226 ]
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES IN AMERICA
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
IN AMERICA
THE nineteenth century is commonly said to
have made greater progress for the human
race than all that preceded it since the dawn of the
Christian era. However great, it was a progress
made possible by the diffusion of learning ; it was
very largely stimulated by American colleges and
universities, and was in nothing more remarka-
ble or more valuable than in the progress of these
colleges and universities themselves. Their growth
in influence, the change in their character, re-
sources, and scope since the Civil War have been
almost revolutionary.
I recall a conversation with Professor Huxley,
with which I was honored in my younger days.
To my question what, on the whole, he thought
the greatest achievement of the century, even
then nearly four-fifths passed, he replied, not as
I had been expecting, the telegraph, or the tele-
phone, or the ocean cable, or steam navigation, or
the photograph, or Bessemer steel. All these he
brushed aside, in order to select as the greatest
and most beneficent discovery of the nineteenth
century, antiseptic surgery! Surely, in a like
spirit, we can hold as secondary the wonderful
strides America has made in subduing a continent,
in spreading out over the islands of the sea, in
gaining and maintaining independence, and even
in abolishing slavery; while we find its noblest
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
achievement in building up from ocean to ocean
a gigantic system, free practically to the poorest
as well as to the richest child of the Republic,
under which any man can learn anything. Not in
the armies that have so heroically borne our flag,
not in the navies whose eight-inch guns, fired on
the other side of the globe, shattered an ancient
monarchy at ten thousand miles range ; not in the
inventions that amaze, nor in the growth that be-
wilders, nor even in the general diffusion of com-
fort that beggars the world for parallels, is our
greatest glory to be found. Rather is it in the mind
that has been enlightened, in the life that has been
shaped and directed, in a word, it is in the kind
of man that America rears.
In government aid, state or national, for edu-
cation, and in private gifts for education, the world
has never seen wealth lavished as it has been on
this continent during the century just closed, and
especially during its last twenty-five years. What
is to come of it all? We may no doubt claim now
the widest diffusion of learning in the world ; but
how can we best entitle ourselves to claim also the
highest and best learning of the world? Before
essaying to answer that question, we may find it
profitable to pause for a moment on some current
complaints about what we have.
One is that education is too cheap and open to
everybody; and that in consequence, largely at the
public expense, whole classes in the community
are educated out of fitness for anything that, with
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IN AMERICA
their limitations of intellect or character or envi-
ronment, they are capable of doing. We spoil a
good day laborer, it is said, or a promising young
farmer or mechanic, to make an unsuccessful shop-
keeper or a worthless lawyer. But this is only an-
other way of saying that the man has missed his
vocation, and you have to look back of the schools
to find the cause for that. The world is full of mis-
fits, among the uneducated as well as the educated.
Educating a man if it be a real education and not
a smattering you give him does not intellectu-
ally unfit him for finding what he can do. He may
develop a distaste for it, but that is the fault not
of the education but of the character, inherited and
developed by environment, that was brought to
be educated. Other things being equal, an educated
man is far better qualified than an uneducated
one to find out what he is fit for and to keep at it.
" Know thyself" is one of the first maxims of phi-
losophy ; and to help their students to that know-
ledge is one of the highest and most sacred duties
of the college. The man that is really educated has
learned his limitations, and found out at least what
he is not fit for. It is the half-educated person, good-
naturedly carried forward in classes and studies
from which his intellectual or other limitations
under discriminating and honest teaching would
have excluded him, that is unfitted by his so-called
education for what he can do, and not fitted for any-
thing else. To avoid turning a lad's head by letting
him think he has mastered a study "well enough"
C 231 H
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
when he has been found incapable of grasping it
at all, is as much the duty of the conscientious edu-
cator as to teach him what he is capable of learn-
ing. When he is relentlessly turned back from the
preparatory studies that are beyond him, there is
the less danger of his being drawn from the pro-
ductive work he should remain at, to the profes-
sion he is unfit for. No doubt, in the interest of the
state and the community, the true rule for the sec-
ondary schools as well as the colleges if the ideal
could be attained would be to make it easy for
every youth to get all the education his capacity
will warrant and his circumstances permit, and
difficult for him to try for any more.
Another current complaint is that many of these
colleges are little beyond pretentious high schools ;
that they degrade degrees by giving them to unfit
graduates ; degrade learning by lowering its stand-
ards ; and degrade men by making them charlatans
while calling them and making them think them-
selves scholars. There is an element of justice here,
as there is apt to be in widespread complaints of
almost any sort. But it is not true that a commu-
nity is worse off for having feeble colleges ; though
certainly it would always be better off if it had bet-
ter ones. In various educational publications and
among others in one sent under the authority of
the State of New York to represent the condition
of our education in the World's Fair at Paris
there is free censure of the State of Ohio for dissi-
pating on thirty-six small colleges energies which
C 232 ]
IN AMERICA
might make one or two great ones. But does not
this miss the real objection to the condition in
Ohio? If there is a valid objection at all, it must be
less that the colleges are not large, than that they
are not good.
A third complaint, then, and a just one, is that an
undignified and unworthy competition for students
among some weak colleges and universities has
lowered courses of study, cheapened degrees, de-
ceived students, and generally degraded education.
The aim has been to see how soon they could turn
students out, not how much they could teach them.
Thus the vulgar ambition to use the numbers ad-
mitted and the fees received as a test and adver-
tisement of success has led to the spectacle of some
schools clamorously announcing, almost in the
shrill fashion after which the street merchant vends
his wares, that you can get as much here, owing
to our superior process of cramming, in two years
as you can get at the shop across the way in three,
and so have just a year saved in your lifetime
in which you can be busy making money. In other
schools the very source is poisoned by the admis-
sion of students without adequate preparation, on
the plea that the superior facilities in the college
will make up for any deficiencies in the prepara-
tory work. One way or the other, swarms of strug-
gling institutions which look first to numbers and
fees, and only afterward to thoroughness and ad-
equate scope, do bring discredit upon education, do
give many young people a distaste for any work
233
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
they are fit for in the world, do draw to the cities
shoals of people who would live better and stand
higher in the country, and do crowd the profes-
sions with worthless lawyers, physicians, and cler-
gymen who ought to be at the plough. But it is the
sham, not the education, that does the harm; and
that sham should be hunted down relentlessly,
whether found in the colleges themselves, or in
the medical or other professional schools of the
universities.
There is a just complaint, too, against institutions
of a better class for the low and bookkeeping spirit
in which matters of learning are sometimes treated.
Thus this question is occasionally made the vital
one, not what has he learned ? but how many hours
has he given to the study ? and above all is there
a system of educational hocus-pocus, a plan for the
student to hoist himself to the educational ceiling
by a tug at his educational bootstraps, through the
ingenious process of counting these same hours
twice once for the college and once for the pro-
fessional training that is to follow ! Grave, grown
men, who imagine themselves engaged in promot-
ing advanced learning, have been found to write
out the details for this educational sleight-of-hand,
and insinuatingly explain to ingenuous youth how
the time devoted to this or that particular study
may be contrived, like Box and Cox's bedroom, or
like Goldsmith's furniture, a double debt to pay,
a chest of drawers in college and a bed of down
in the law school! To make hours of study rather
234
IN AMERICA
than maturity of mind and acquirement the prelim-
inary for professional courses, and then to select
the studies so that these hours can be counted first
on the preliminary and again on the professional
work, is the sort of shifty thrift that in less ideal
realms is apt to bring a man to the constable.
Nevertheless, after its bad fashion, this practice
does meet another popular complaint. If a boy is to
work his way in life, parents often say, he cannot
spare so much time before getting at it. The young
man kept in college till twenty-two, and in pro-
fessional studies three or four years more, starts
at twenty-five or twenty-six, it is complained, in a
competition that can only be disastrous, with the boy
who set up for himself at eighteen. Now, if the end
of educating a man is only to get him ready to keep
a shop, or run a factory or an iron-mill, or to go
into Wall Street, or in some way merely to make
money, I am not much inclined to dispute that con-
tention. At least it is difficult to match from among
college or university graduates such an array of
non-collegiate names, representing the greatest
present business success, as will readily occur to
every one. The men who consolidated the Astor
fortune came, it is true, from Heidelberg, but the
man who founded it did not. The founders of the
Vanderbilt, the Morgan, the Moses Taylor, the
Goelet, the Mackay, the Gould, or the Cooper
fortunes came from no college at home or abroad.
Take the most conspicuous business successes,
confessedly won and maintained by high ability,
C 235 n
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
now or recently at the front in New York. C. P.
Huntington, for example, was emancipated from
schools of any kind long before he was eighteen.
So were John and William Rockefeller, and so
not to weary you with mere enumeration so was
Andrew Carnegie. The latter even goes so far as
to hold college training a positive disqualification
for business. "The graduate has not the slightest
chance/' he says, "as against the boy who swept
the office/'
Mr. Grover Cleveland, who gave this subject
some consideration, remarked acutely enough that
the methods in great enterprises had so changed
of late as to demand a higher grade of education,
and that the new competition easily distanced the
self-made man who started young without equal
equipment for the race. In the field particularly of
applied science and invention Mr. Cleveland had
much reason for his belief; and the tendencies of
an age in which the engineer, the chemist, and the
electrician threaten to be kings are sure to do a
great deal more to confirm it. But the fact remains
that, within the general knowledge,the very great-
est business successes of recent years, the greatest
quite up to this present moment, have been more
generally won by men who were at work before
twenty instead of in college.
What then? Must men who expect to follow
business careers abandon the joy and comfort of
a liberal education? There are several answers.
One is the argumentum ad hominem. The success-
C
IN AMERICA
ful self-made man scarcely ever favors that course
himself, when it comes to the education of his own
sons. Another is that there are specialized courses
provided by all the leading colleges now, which
partly meet the wants of those who think they must
begin life by seventeen or eighteen.
But, more conclusive than either, there are bet-
ter things to aim at than mere money-making,
at least for those not pressed by an inexorable
necessity, higher joys than that of simple busi-
ness success. If there'are many who must forego
these for the sake of beginning life prematurely,
sweeping out the shop, as Mr. Carnegie puts it,
in the hope of coming some day to own the shop,
that is no reason why the institutions of higher
learning should not develop along the best lines
for the sake of the steadily increasing number in
this prosperous land who can take time for the best
things. This is no longer a young, poor people on
a wild, unexplored continent, struggling desper-
ately with hard circumstances to make a beginning.
It is a great nation, rich with the unprecedented
progress and accumulated prosperity of a hundred
years. The average man no longer needs, like the
sons of the pioneers, to sacrifice the highest things
of which he is capable for the sake of getting into
the shop early, so as not to be outstripped in the
mere race for a living. Success in American life here-
after will be measured with more characters than
merely the dollar-mark ; and American education
must be shaped in the future to fit the man, rather
C 237 U
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
than merely his business. Many, no doubt, who
will hold deservedly high places in the twentieth
century must be at work by eighteen or earlier ; but
that is a reason for giving them such an education
as they need and can assimilate, not for lowering
the college standard, to the detriment of all the
rest, in order to give them the deceptive decoration
of a diploma thus depreciated and undeserved.
Akin to this tendency to cheapen the lower
degrees for the sake of students who lack the
time to earn them is another error, barely show-
ing itself, in quarters more advanced, of which
whispers begin to be heard. This is the fault of
encouraging post-graduate study for the higher
learning, less for its own sake than for the degree.
Thus one reads in a recent and important educa-
tional authority about the respective advantages
of divers ways and means of " studying for the
Doctorate, as the goal to which the graduate stu-
dent presses on/' It is a high ambition, no doubt.
And yet there have been educational authorities
with a loftier view of their mission, who sought
to lead their students to move on a higher plane
and strive for a worthier goal. If students are en-
couraged to select what advanced learning they
are to seek, and to shape the course of study they
adopt in any measure with reference simply to its
degree-producing powers, if they do not seek it
for itself and choose the course purely because it
is the most helpful to the end, then our post-grad-
uate courses must have less value and our degrees
C 238 3
IN AMERICA
must convey less distinction. The man who serves
his imperilled countrymen in an alarming crisis
by a supreme act of devotion may well prize the
Victoria Cross with which his proud and grateful
country distinguishes him. But if he laid his course,
not as a patriot to do his duty to his imperilled
countrymen, but merely as an adventurer, feeling
the need of decoration, to hunt for the quickest
and easiest opportunity to get it, the cross wears
another aspect if won, and carries an altogether
different value.
There are objectors, too, who question the
advantage of the present overwhelming tend-
ency, especially at the West, toward collegiate
and university coeducation. Certainly, in no part of
the educational field has greater progress been
made than in the facilities for the education of wo-
men ; and shrivelled must be the soul that would
have it otherwise. Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn
Mawr,have long marked a higher standard than
similar schools for women in other lands ; and now
colleges abroad, like Girton and Newnham, enjoy-
ing high university affiliations, are at last finding
their worthy counterparts here in Radcliffe and
Barnard and others. It is an inspiring progress,
and even if it may have been carried in some in-
stitutions to an illogical development, the error,
if error there be, will cure itself. But certainly it
must be admitted that the western trend to direct
coeducation in colleges and universities is plainly
at variance with another development we have all
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
regarded as characteristic of progress toward the
higher education, the process of differentiation
and specialization. Grant at once, as a thing no-
body in this age dreams of questioning, the right of
woman, quite as clear as the right of man, to learn
everything. But the fact remains that the great ma-
jority of women seeking an advanced education
will probably in time come to do the same thing the
men do, specialize it with reference to the life
they are going to lead ; and the girl graduate from
one of the great coeducational universities is not,
as a rule, going to lead the same life as the bach-
elor of science, or the bachelor of electrical engi-
neering. If the highest progress be in differentia-
tion and specialization of effort, then women are
entitled to that progress as well as men ; and uni-
versity coeducation, though, perhaps, as yet the
most economical, is manifestly not the best way
of supplying it. On the disadvantages that some
think they find in throwing the two sexes into the
intimacy of a common college life at the most
impressionable period, when their thoughts ought
to be on their books and are so easily kindled in-
stead into dreams of love and matrimony, I do not
imagine it profitable to dwell. The parents who
send their sons and daughters to coeducational in-
stitutions know what they are doing. One can only
say about the system they are likely to select,
what Mr. Lincoln said about the book : " If you like
this kind of a book, then I reckon this is just about
the book you would like."
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IN AMERICA
An acute English observer, Mr. Bryce, remarks
that German universities are popular, but not free;
English universities free, but not popular; and
American universities both popular and free. Let
us hope that these characteristics in our system
may be preserved in their purity. Long may we
continue to have our universities popular in the
sense that they are open on equal terms to every
rank and condition of life that they have no un-
written laws restricting them to the sons of gen-
tlemen of birth or distinction, and making them
uncomfortable for anybody else. Long may they
remain free, in the sense that the instruction is
limited only by the desire to seek and to teach
the truth. But the popularity will be harmful if it
degenerates into a vulgar catering for numbers by
throwing down the bars of admission which time
and experience have sanctioned ; and the liberty
will be disastrous if it degenerates into license,
whether for the students in their conduct, or for
the professors in their teaching. The freedom for
a student which absolves him from the obligations
of a gentleman is no better and no worse than the
freedom for a professor which absolves him from
the duties of a patriot, and converts his relations
to his country into general railings against its
present and its past policy, rather than the exer-
cise of an influence, justly belonging to the highly
educated and highly placed, upon the country's
future. It is a misfortune for the colleges, and no
less for the country, when the trusted instructors
[ 241 ]
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
are out of sympathy with its history, with its devel-
opment, and with the men who made the one and
are guiding the other.
It was suggested at the beginning of these re-
marks that the splendid gifts of learning which illu-
minate and ennoble our history, and in an unprece-
dented degree our recent history, entitle us to ex-
pect for our country the highest and best learning
of the world. But what is the highest and best? Or,
if that question be too abstract for a conclusive an-
swer, what is the highest and best for this coun-
try ? What sort of education does a republic most
need in the days of its overwhelming success and
unparalleled prosperity? Perhaps a solution may
be easier if we state the problem differently. What
defects of human character does a republic tend
to develop, that the higher education should cor-
rect ?
Well, our critics, foreign and domestic, are free-
spoken enough to leave us little difficulty in find-
ing answers to that. We are conceited beyond en-
durance. We brag like Bombastes. We are slow to
believe that other people can teach us anything.
We have the provincial idea that because we are
conspicuously ahead in some things, we are ahead
in everything. We reach conclusions without see-
ing a subject on all sides, and are then intolerant
of diversity of opinion. We value big things sim-
ply because of their bigness. We live in a whirl
of money-making, or amusement, or excitement of
some kind; we rarely take time to think of other
C
IN AMERICA
things, and, because we are too busy for it our-
selves, we let the newspapers make up our minds
for us. When acting collectively we are liable to
go off at half-cock, and are swept by sudden waves
of popular excitement, like the French. We do so
many things in a hurry that often we fail to do
some of them thoroughly. We come to think that
pretty well is good enough ; that veneer is better
than the solid mahogany, looking just as well and
costing far less ; that a chromo is as good as the
oil-painting from which a casual glance does not
distinguish it; that a plaster cast of the Venus of
Milo is, "for practical purposes," about as good
as the broken and discolored old marble in the
Louvre ; that a ma.chine-made American carpet is
as good as the rug from the looms of India ; a pot-
metal vase for the garden as good as one of bronze
or marble; an iron cornice, painted stone color, as
good as one of the carved stone ; always the thing
that has been done by wholesale by machinery,
"more in the prevailing style," and just as good
for practical people as the thing patiently wrought
in every line to individual beauty by a trained and
beauty-loving intelligence.
Do not these superficial defects go deeper? Has
there not been a constant tendency, developed
by democratic institutions thus far everywhere, in
ancient times as well as our own, to level down ;
sometimes to pare off individualism in character or
action; often to resent and pull down superiority,
to encourage mediocrity, and to try to believe, if
243
UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
not to avow, as a necessary article of true demo-
cratic faith, that mediocrity is equal to the best
and just as good? Naturally, this tendency, which
a republic generally seems to develop, will lead to
treating men not asindividuals,but in great masses.
It thus invades the field of education and converts
the noblest work confided to man the moulding,
one might almost say the very creation of individ-
ual character into high-pressure arrangements
for the production of scholars by wholesale ; into
schemes to shape and manufacture characters and
lives like watches or steam-engines by machinery.
Should the best American education tend to con-
trol this bias of republican institutions or be con-
trolled by it? If the latter, then let us make our col-
leges and universities bigger and bigger; crowd
more scores and hundreds of eager, immature in-
dividual human units into each class, and deal with
them in gross; run our institutions as one or two
( for better reasons, no doubt) are already run, on
full time or overtime, like a factory, summer and
winter, spring and autumn ; show the students how
to make one hour count for two ; veneer and var-
nish them as quickly as possible; and let each
educational factory be rated by the rapidity of its
methods and the quantity of its output. But if the
best education for a republic should tend to coun-
teract the defects it develops, and to elevate and
strengthen it for a long and successful life, is it not
clear that we shall do better with less wholesale
processes, that our effort must be to exert individ-
244
IN AMERICA
ual influence upon the individual youth to be trained
with reference to his individual wants, and that if
changes are to occur, it is better colleges we want
instead of bigger ones ?
Consider the extent to which we have gone in
banishing the parent or teacher from his old close
and intimate influence with the individual boy. The
most fashionable educational tendency of the day,
particularly in our large cities, eliminates family in-
fluence from the school period almost at the outset
by abandoning our excellent secondary schools, or
even the local private schools, in either of which
that influence might still be maintained. The boy
must not be made a mollycoddle. He must not be
kept tied to his mother's apron strings. He must
learn to rough it with other boys, and dig his
strenuous way through the rough and tumble of a
distant boarding-school without being able to run
always to sympathizing parents in trouble or in
trivial illness. That, we are told, is the only way to
make a man of him. He must not be guarded from
evil. To do that long is impossible; therefore take
him away from his family life, expose him early to
contamination, and let him learn to conquer it, if
he can, by fighting his battle alone. And so the boy
must be thrown more with other boys than with
parents or teachers from the outset, and must be
sent at a tender age to St. Paul's or St. Mark's,
or Groton or Lawrenceville, or the Pacific coast
equivalents, for a four or six years' stay. Then the
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
parents, who have scarcely seen him save at vaca-
tions, part with him again, and he enters one of the
big colleges. Here he finds himself in a class of
several hundred freshmen, with little possibility
for more than a speaking acquaintance with the
professors in the class-room, and less likelihood of
much close contact with them outside. The individ-
ual and social substitutes for family influence that
make up the refined life of the English university
are largely lacking in the American system, and
the young men in these big colleges are still ne-
cessarily dealt with in the mass, and given their
education by wholesale.
Consider next how the intense practicality of
our education hitherto the insistent demand for
something from the colleges that would let the stu-
dent think himself liberally educated, and yet let
him begin life early has drawn us away from the
highest aims. Let us revert again to the inquiry,
What sort of an education does a republic most
need for its most favored citizens in the days of
its bewildering success and prosperity ? Do not the
very quality of its defects and the nature of its
dangers compel the answer that what the Repub-
lic thus needs is not merely or mostly knowledge?
No doubt it must always strive for an education
that will place the experience of the world in all
ages at its service. But beyond and far above that
must be its development of the disposition for re-
flection, the power to consider dispassionately, the
capacity to reason accurately, and then to reach
C 246 j
IN AMERICA
just judgments on these acquired facts. One of the
easiest tasks in the world is to learn things. The
child does it almost by instinct. One of the hardest
tasks in the world is to think about things exactly,
judiciously, correctly; to estimate, to weigh, to
give the proper value to each, to reach sound
conclusions, in a word, to make the knowledge
of things of the most value for the conduct of life.
When the crude knowledge has thus been assim-
ilated by the reflective mind, as the ruminating
animal assimilates the crude food for the physical
frame, there has come a new quality to the student.
Out of the things he has learned and the philoso-
phy that has taught him their meanings and rela-
tions has come the faculty of seeing straight and
of thinking straight, and from this follows, as cer-
tainly as the needle follows the pole, the crowning
gift of living straight. Knowledge as the basis there
must be : knowledge of what the world has done
and is doing, in civics, in economics, in everything
relating to the history or the science of govern-
ment; knowledge of man, the being to be gov-
erned, of the motives that influence his conduct,
the circumstances that change his purpose, what
his mind is and how it works; knowledge of the
languages he works with, of the literature that in-
spires him and the laws that govern him; know-
ledge of the ideas he cherishes, the faith he holds,
the customs and prejudices that hold him. But all
these are as nothing, and may even be worse, with-
out the reflection, the reasoning, the judgment,
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
that transmute them into charts for our guidance
and safeguards against our dangers. First, then,
the Republic, where every citizen is a ruler, needs
knowledge, of course, for its citizens ; but next and
more it needs the judgment which can vitalize
knowledge; and then the character, born of the
right principles coming from the two, which fruc-
tifies both and becomes the most precious posses-
sion of the state.
In thus noting the need of more direct personal
contact and individual influence between teacher
and taught, or in noting the need of strengthen-
ing the college course where it has been weakened
by changes making it more attractive to practical
people who are in a hurry to begin life, there is not
the slightest intention to disparage or undervalue
the undeniable merits of what we have. Surely,
enough has been said already to show an adequate
appreciation of our progress under the present sys-
tem and the marvels it has wrought. But it is fair,
I think, to say, in a general way, and with admis-
sion in advance of the thousands of exceptions,
that hitherto our education in this country has
been to make a living. The country is old enough
and prosperous enough now to warrant us in ex-
pecting that henceforth it will be more an educa-
tion to make a life. I would plead, then, for a sys-
tem that would put the most into one's life, rather
than for that which enables one quickest to begin
life and earn a living. That, too, has its place, su-
premely important in the past, highly important
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IN AMERICA
still and always. But let us not deceive ourselves
as to proportions and values. It is not the highest. To
make a life, full, rounded, with balanced character
and serenity of judgment, with trained capacities
for the highest work, the highest appreciation, the
fullest and purest enjoyment, that is a greater
thing than to make a living!
Unless these observations have wholly missed their
purpose, they must now have led us at least to
consider, if not to accept, two propositions which
seem to me to sum up the next advances for Amer-
ican colleges and universities. They need now to
give more individual attention to the individual
pupil, and they need to lead him on paths to the best
learning for the best life, rather than merely for
the quickest business or professional success. The
first proposition does not point to big colleges ; and
the second does not point to university develop-
ment exclusively on the lines thus far most in favor.
Bigger colleges must mean less individual influ-
ence on the eager immature mind; the specializa-
tion most in favor now in our universities is that
which leads to ways to make a living, and while no
one would want less of that, the highest education
must give more of something else.
We started in America with the English idea of
a college. Later we grew into the German idea of
a university. We changed the English college, after
the American fashion, by making it bigger and, as
we thought, more practical. Then we rejected the
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
English idea of a university, partly because the
"shrieks of locality," as some politicians once ex-
pressed it, made such a grouping of colleges at
one spot difficult, if not impossible ; but still more
because the English idea chiefly encouraged what
might be called pure learning, as distinguished from
the professional and specialized teaching which was
a more marked characteristic of the German uni-
versity. The outcome is, first, colleges sometimes
as big as half a dozen English ones, and then cer-
tain professional, scientific, and technical schools
added, and the whole called a university. But this
has been attended by material changes in the
course of the college intended to facilitate entrance
to, and perhaps quicken passage through, the uni-
versity. It all makes, beyond question, an admirable
outcome for the practical people that needed and
organized it. But it is not the best outcome now for
a people who have outgrown their early needs.
When the next Stanford has another forty mil-
lions or more to expend in an effort to give his
country an institution of learning worthy of its glo-
rious present and its bewildering future, why not
begin with the idea of an eminent church dignitary
of the West, that a university, primarily considered,
is less a school than an atmosphere ? Let him create
the atmosphere by grouping and organizing his
colleges in close and friendly emulation, as at Ox-
ford or Cambridge. Then let him see to it that the
entrance requirements admit only students capable
of using the opportunities he offers, and that the
[ 250 ]
IN AMERICA
colleges prescribe only those courses of study which
the best experience of the world has found to fur-
nish the best basis for any profession, or for fur-
ther intellectual training in any direction. When he
has thus secured them the best start, let him open
to the graduates of these colleges a real university,
comprising the best features of both the English
and the German type, with the splendid encour-
agement Oxford and Cambridge offer for the fur-
ther prosecution of learning for its own sake, and
with all the professional, scientific, technological,
and other schools and courses we have already
adapted from German models and improved upon
from our own experience.
Suppose some one had the power to plant Dart-
mouth and Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin, and
Brown and Smith in one neighborhood, retain-
ing for each its separate organization, its individ-
ual merits and inspiring history, and to build on
them the University of New England. Who does
not perceive that here would be an atmosphere of
learning, an emulation and inspiration for the best
work, an authority, a dignity, a promise, and po-
tency such as the New World has never yet seen
in the educational field ? Of course it is wildly im-
possible. But in dealing with younger institutions,
or in establishing new ones with the colossal pe-
cuniary power some educational benefactors now
wield, such a system could be begun. In that direc-
tion might be found a realization of the higher
aims that have been indicated. In such a group of
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
colleges, none need be so overgrown as to make
individual contact between the pupil and the pro-
fessor impossible; or if one is, a smaller one, be-
side it, will have the same atmosphere and the
same university control and advantages. None need
dilute its course by " electives" which belong in the
university, or lower its course to accommodate the
haste of those who must begin life early. From
such a group of colleges the true university would
rise naturally, broad-based and spreading at will
in every direction to which the trained mind, now
competent to choose for itself, would seek to extend
its studies. But the more stimulating atmosphere
and the more strictly collegiate training would
alike insure the direction of larger numbers to
the fields of languages, history, philosophy, math-
ematics, and pure science, which give the train-
ing more needful and more useful for a republic
than anywhere else, and which properly rank first
in an institution of the highest learning that aims
to cover all the great departments of intellectual
life. The opportunity for differentiation and special-
ization in educational effort would be greater than
ever, but it would be put where it belongs, not with
the youth in his plastic, uncertain, formative period,
but with the trained young man, competent to
select and eager to pursue. Thus when the grad-
uate passed from the college, whether he devoted
himself chiefly to the highest learning or sought
at once an education in applied science or in a pro-
fession, he would, at any rate, carry into the uni-
C 252 3
IN AMERICA
versity a mind fit for the work it demands. To bor-
row the happy illustration of President Stryker of
Hamilton, the college would have made the intel-
lectual iron that came to it into steel; and there-
fore the university would not be wasting its time
in trying to put a fine edge upon pot-metal.
Perhaps it is a fanciful idea that we shall ever
group colleges anywhere in a great university in
America, as circumstances that can never be re-
produced did group them, six or seven centuries
ago, on the banks of the Cam and the Isis. We
have gone far, with good results, on another road.
The old universities sprang from a desire for a
wider learning than the schools of the cathedrals
and monks would furnish. So the American uni-
versity of to-day sprang from a need for a wider
and more practical learning than those English
and Continental models furnished ; and we can no
more afford to lose this widening and extension
than we can afford to go back to the schools of the
cathedrals. But the universities that sprang up in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries held on to
the best in the schools they replaced. Now that we
have the leisure and the opportunities which great
growth and great prosperity confer, it should be
our instinct to hold on to the best in the university
system which we replaced with our own a hundred
years ago. Whether the exact organization can be
reproduced or not, the essentials are surely within
reach.
First, the university atmosphere, which can be
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES
obtained only by the flocking of teachers and pupils
to a great educational centre.
Secondly, the individual influence of the teacher
upon the pupil, especially throughout the collegi-
ate course, which can best be attained in colleges
of moderate size, under the university, by methods
of instruction less formal and more vitalizing to
the immature mind than merely by lectures and
written examinations, and by the more intimate
association, in commons and elsewhere, between
professors and students.
Thirdly, the old college course as the best train-
ing for the new university work, the humanities,
to recur to the finely descriptive phrase by which
our fathers designated a thorough education in
the classics ( to which we would gladly add also
modern languages), and philosophy; next, pure
mathematics, and next, science.
This ideal college course once mastered, the pot-
metal has been made steel, fit for the miracle-
working uses to which the university then really
opens the door. Then, and not till then, is the time
for the man in a hurry, who nevertheless wants a
genuine liberal education, to consider how much
farther and whither he will go. Then, and not till
then, with disciplined mind and enlarged vision,
he is competent to make his own choice from the
"electives," decide in what direction his life is to
turn, and what further learning he will find of the
most worth for his aim, whether that be profit,
or the service of his fellow men in politics or else-
254
IN AMERICA
where, or merely pure intellectual enjoyment.
This collegiate course was the best basis for the
higher learning the best systems of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries had to offer. It is the best
basis still, as we turn to the wider and better at-
tainments the twentieth century has to offer. It has
formed for generations of our race the badge of
the best title any of the race has ever worn in any
land, or can wear, the proud title of scholar and
gentleman.
It is to the high duty of perpetuating and enlarg-
ing that exalted type we have the right to summon
our institutions of the most advanced learning. We
demand from them the combination of exact know-
ledge and ripe reflection that makes the scholar;
the combination of right thinking and right liv-
ing that makes the gentleman. There we have the
greatest possibility of our colleges and universities,
the consummate flower of our educational system,
the inspiration and guide of progress, the safe-
guard of society, the ornament and defence of the
Republic.
We have lately seen the close of a century which
in the splendor of its discoveries and the rapid-
ity of its progress surpassed all that went before
it. We stand at the dawn of a century that is to
surpass it still more. The Republic closed the old
century with a continental population of not far
from eighty millions, and perhaps fifteen or six-
teen millions more in its dependencies. The new
century, before its close, may see that population,
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UNIVERSITY TENDENCIES IN AMERICA
even if the ratio of increase be reduced to a third
or fourth of the present average, rising to the al-
most incomprehensible number of three hundred
millions. The Republic enters this new century
with the control of the continent of the future, of
the ocean of the future, and of the two richest
archipelagoes of the world. It will pass no self-
denying ordinance against growth. It faces the
dazzling prospect with undazzled eyes, and scorns
to shrink back from greatness through craven
fear of being great. From insignificant beginnings
it moved to the head of the material progress of
the nineteenth century. The field of the American
universities is not merely material, but intellectual
and moral. It is their task in the twentieth century
to see to it that this Republic of our love and pride,
whose world- wide extent and illimitable opportu-
nities thus confuse the understanding and bewilder
the imagination, shall respond not unworthily to
the wider duties of its fortune, shall rise to pre-
eminence in more than material progress, and
march at the head of the culminating civilization
of the world.
C 256
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
FROM the English came our first educational
ideas; to them we long looked, in colonial
days and later, for the highest types of collegiate
and university education; from them we got the
religious control so long felt in so many of our
schools, as it is still felt in theirs. More important
still, from them came the fervid, almost fanatical
belief in the necessity of education, which we, in
accordance with our custom, broadened far be-
yond their original view, and have clung to through
two centuries, and over a continent and many
islands, with a tenacity which, if it were not
American, might be called truly British. Plainly,
the educational fever runs in the blood !
I shall treat, then, briefly, of some details of
past and present English educational work. But I
shall do no violence to the maxims either of Dog-
berry or Don Quixote ; shall enter upon no com-
parison with our own work in similar fields. There
are two reasons. First, all comparisons between
countries are apt to be odious. Secondly, unless far
more time were taken than is at our disposal for
a careful statement of varying circumstances, all
comparisons are sure to be unfair.
In any consideration of English education for
the masses, it must be remembered that a national
system for it did not exist before 1870, and could
not be said to have reached good working order
before 1892. The government gave no assistance
C 259 H
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
whatever for elementary schools (i.e., for what we
should call common schools, or primary schools )
until 1834, when the House of Commons made its
first appropriation of ,=20,000. This was to be
used solely for new school buildings. Not till 1839
did the government make an appropriation for
more direct aid to popular education.
Yet meantime England had somehow trained
Shakespeare and John Milton. She had also trained
the Pilgrims, who began in the Colony of Massa-
chusetts Bay that common school system which is
now the pride of every American.
Until William E. Forster in 1 8 70 carried through
the bill to provide for public elementary education
in England and Wales, the government itself could
hardly be said to have taken much share in real
educational provision for the poorer classes, and
not a great deal even for the middle classes. Nev-
ertheless, such as their system was, and for what
it undertook, it had long been of rare excellence.
It had admirably accomplished for a certain num-
ber the highest aim of education ; it had been a
wonderful developer of character. Public schools,
Eton and Harrow, Winchester and Rugby, and
many another leading up to and cooperating with
the two universities, had been such a nursery of
statesmen, of soldiers and sailors and great pro-
consuls and civil administrators throughout the
Empire on which the sun never sets, as the world
had never before seen. It may have been a fanciful
notion, attributed to the Iron Duke, that Waterloo
C 260 i
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
was won at Eton, but certainly the secret of Anglo-
Saxon superiority in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries was largely to be found in the Brit-
ish schools and universities.
The secret of some other things was to be found
in the chaotic and undeveloped state of popular
elementary education. The long reign of Queen
Victoria had but recently begun, when in Febru-
ary, 1839, Lord John Russell wrote to the Lord
Lansdowneof the day: "I have received Her Maj-
esty's commands to make a communication to
Your Lordship on a subject of the greatest impor-
tance. Her Majesty has observed with deep con-
cern the want of instruction which is still observ-
able among the poorer classes of her subjects. All
the inquiries which have been made show a defi-
ciency in the general education of the people,
which is not in accordance with the character of a
civilized and Christian nation/' Continuing to speak
for Her Majesty, Lord John went on to specify a
lack of qualified teachers, imperfect teaching, de-
ficient inspection of the work done by the schools
of both the Established Church and the Non-Con-
formists, and finally the neglect of the subject by
Parliament,
Four years later, inspectors reported that the
teaching in these schools was so bad that only half
the scholars learned to read and only a quarter
of them to write. And four years after that, now
almost in the middle of the nineteenth century,
Macaulay, in a speech in the House of Commons,
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
gave the reason: " How many of these teachers,"
he said, "are the refuse of other callings, dis-
carded servants, or ruined tradesmen, who can-
not do a sum of three ; who would not be able to
write a common letter; who do not know whether
the earth is a cube or a sphere, and cannot tell
whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America ; whom
no gentleman would trust with the key of his
cellar, and no tradesman would send of a mes-
sage."
Even as late as 1861, about the time our Civil
War broke out, the Newcastle Commission re-
ported almost as unsatisfactory a state of affairs.
It considered that only about one-fourth of the
children in the schools got a tolerable facility in
reading, writing, and arithmetic the great ma-
jority leaving school between the ages of ten and
eleven. It told of a public school with such prim-
itive facilities that, when the writing lesson was
given, four boys were required to carry ink bot-
tles up and down between the desks, so that each
boy in turn might dip his pen in the ink. And finally
this commission said concerning the private school
teachers in one part of London: "None are too
old, too poor, too ignorant, too feeble, too sickly,
too unqualified to regard themselves and to be
regarded as fit for school-keeping. Domestic ser-
vants out of place, discharged barmaids, vend-
ors of toys and lollypops, keepers of small eat-
ing-houses, of mangles or small lodging-houses,
needlewomen who take in plain or slop work,
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
milliners, consumptive patients in an advanced
stage, cripples almost bedridden, persons of at least
doubtful temperance, outdoor paupers, men and
women of seventy or eighty years of age, persons
who spell badly, who scarcely write, and who can-
not cipher at all, such are some of the teachers,
not in remote rural districts but in the heart of
London/' In recalling this and other accounts
of the time, it is well to bear in mind that in all
countries reformers have sharp voices and use
many staccato notes.
But Matthew Arnold was not of that class; yet
he reported in 1869 that nearly half the children
he examined had been less than one year at school,
and half the rest for less than two years.
Now, to end this statement of earlier conditions,
which has been really necessary to a comprehen-
sion of the present situation, it should be added
that the schools thus described might be either
purely private enterprises, sometimes aided a little
by local taxation, or might be under the manage-
ment either of the Established Church of England,
or of the British and Foreign School Society, repre-
senting the bulk of the Non-Conformist churches,
or of sundry minor religious organizations. By far
the greater number were under some distinct and
positive sectarian control. Great sums had been
invested by the different denominations in school
buildings and in supporting schools, when there
was little other support for them. Their work had
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
come gradually to be supplemented not only by
fees, but by allowances from the local taxation, and
finally from the government. Thus the churches
controlled the schools: the local taxpayers had
a pecuniary interest in them, the parents who
paid fees had, and finally the general government
had.
As would be naturally inferred, the churches
that built them up insisted on religious teaching.
In the case of the Established Church this meant
the Bible, church hymns, the church catechism, and
particularly the doctrine of the Trinity ; and at first
pupils coming into such a school from Non-Con-
formist families, from Agnostic or Jewish families,
or from aggressive unbelievers, had to receive the
same instruction. Here, of course, was one opening
for trouble ; and another was to be found among
local taxpayers, not connected with the Church of
England, or perhaps with any church. With Non-
Conformist schools the difficulty was somewhat
different. They were disposed to be content with
what was known as Cowper-Temple teaching ;/..,
as legally defined in the Act of 1 870, without " re-
ligious catechism or religious formulary , distinctive
of any particular denomination." Subject to that
restriction, whatever religious instruction the local
authorities desired could be given. This Cowper-
Temple teaching, though apt to be satisfactory to
the majority of Non-Conformists, did not satisfy
the Established Church, or the unbelievers, and
might not always satisfy the local taxpayers. As
C 264 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
a matter of fact, however, it evoked little protest,
excepting from the Established Church.
Now, it is easy for an American to say that all
this confusion and dissatisfaction could be avoided
by confining the public schools to secular instruc-
tion, and leaving religious training to the church
and the family. But it is not so easy to show how
vested rights, going back often for a century or
more, can thus be preserved ; nor is it easy to show
how the churches, which invested and were en-
couraged to invest their money and labors for one
purpose, are to be reconciled to the arbitrary diver-
sion of their investment, long afterward, to an-
other purpose. Between 1869 and 1876, houses for
over a million school-children were erected by de-
nominational agencies, and the total of voluntary
subscriptions for that purpose in that time was over
=3, 000,000. Besides the claim in equity which on
the basis of such facts the churches assert, it is prob-
ably true that the majority of the English people,
however much they may differ as to details, and
to whatever rival sects they belong, would be still
more discontented if all religious teaching were to
disappear from their schools. There is increasing
impatience, no doubt, with the conflicting demands
and disputes of the churches, a growing tendency
to say "a plague on both your houses; let the tax-
paid education be purely secular!" But in spite of
such outbursts, I believe the decided majority of
the taxpayers still think religious instruction a ne-
cessity for the rising generation, and do not think
C 265 3
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
they would have adequate security for getting it, if
it were excluded from the tax-supported schools.
Until 1870 the daily reading of the Bible was an
essential condition of getting any government aid
for an elementary school, and it is still habitually
read in most of the schools, even where not re-
quired by any authority.
. The leading English lines of thought on the sub-
ject finally found expression in two organizations
which have contended for many years. The Bir-
mingham League advocated a national system of
education, to be compulsory on all, free to all, and
unsectarian, but not to exclude undenominational
religious instruction. The National Education Union
represented the Established Church, and was or-
ganized to oppose the efforts of the Birmingham
Union, and to hold on to the church hymns and the
church catechism. Untiringly the contest rages. A
most hotly fought measure was Mr. Birrell's bill
(passed after long debate in the Commons and
thrown out by the Lords ) , which attempted a con-
siderable advance toward the ideals of the Birming-
ham League. The way in which the other side re-
garded it was hinted in the epithet by which many
of the London newspapers had the habit of describ-
ing it Bir-religion.
During the popular debates over this measure,! re-
ceived a letter from the editor of "The Salisbury
Times/' besides several from private sources, all
calling my attention to a startling statement made
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
in a speech on the subject at a political meeting in
Salisbury by a well-known and perfectly reputable
Conservative candidate, to this effect:
' ' In Australia, since religious teaching was abolished in
the day schools, crime has increased 75 per cent. In the
United States in 1850 there was one crime to every 3422
of the population, but to-day there is one criminal for
every 300. In Denver, out of 10,000 boys, 2000 of them
have been in jail. Now, we do not want the same thing to
happen in Great Britain."
I was asked if these statements were not mislead-
ing, and I prepared such a reply as careful inquiry
seemed to show that the facts warranted. 1 But there
was at the moment no such storm centre in British
politics as this religious phase of the educational
question; and on second thoughts it appeared wiser
for a diplomat to obey the old rule to avoid get-
ting in any way involved in the domestic debates of
the country to which he was accredited even if it
should be at the temporary cost of not promptly cor-
recting misapprehensions about his own country.
Now, it would have been easy, first, to call at-
tention to the curious fact that the statements were
strikingly like some unwise stories published from
time to time, some only a few years earlier, in
American reviews of high standing, concerning
an alleged increase of juvenile crime in London,
1 Valuable aid in securing the facts was kindly furnished by Dr. Draper,
the New York Commissioner of Education, by Mr. Eugene A. Philbin, of
the Board of Regents, and by Professor Elmer E. Brown, National Com-
missioner of Education. The reports of his predecessor, Dr. W. T. Harris,
also shed much light on the subject.
C 26? 3
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
following the extension there of the free school
system. Next, as to the allegations concerning the
United States, it might have been said at once
that they were inexact, and that, even if they had
been accurate, they would have needed to be made
more complete to avoid giving an inaccurate im-
pression.
They were inexact because the latest census
statistics available, those furnished by the Census
Office in 1904, show that instead of one criminal to
every 300 of population, there is only one to every
990 ; also that there has been a reduction between
1890 and 1904, not merely in the proportion of
criminals to total population, but also in the actual
number of criminals, in spite of the increase of
population ; and finally, that the Census Office be-
lieves that its own returns of criminals before 1880
were imperfect, making the number previous to
that date too small, and consequently exaggerat-
ing the increase in the next decades.
Next, even if these allegations had been exact,
they would still have given an inaccurate impres-
sion anyway. It is obviously misleading to point to
the number of criminals and say that is the work of
our educational system, without showing whether
these criminals have ever been under the system.
Plainly you must know what proportion of the
whole population has not been taught at all in our
schools, and next what proportion of the criminals
that illiterate part furnishes. Thus, in the largest
states, New York and Pennsylvania, the wholly
C 268 j
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
illiterate are only 4 per cent of the population, yet
they furnish 33 per cent of the prisoners. If you
add to the wholly illiterate in those states the oth-
ers enumerated as very deficient, you find that the
two classes furnish 60 per cent of the prisoners.
Again, it is obviously misleading to use statistics
of crime as evidence of a bad effect of the educa-
tional system, without mentioning that, while the
educational system has been steadily extending,
the number of criminals in the same period has
been shrinking having been in the whole United
States 132 to the 100,000 of population in 1890,
and only 101 in 1894.
And again, it is obviously misleading to hold
the educational system responsible for an increase
of prisoners clearly caused by changes in the laws.
Thus, in the State of Massachusetts, in a period
of thirty-five years (between 1850 and 1885),
commitments by the courts increased, yet crimes
against persons and property rapidly decreased,
and all crimes excepting intemperance decreased.
Now, more rigid laws against drunkenness and
the more frequent arrests that followed can hardly
with fairness be charged to the growth of the
educational system!
As to the Denver case I know less, but from
the report of the Juvenile Court of Denver for 1904
it appears, not that one boy in five was sent to
jail each year, but that in the six years previous
to the establishment of the court, about one boy in
seven out of the total population of boys between
C
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
ten and sixteen years of age had been, as the court
said, under the old system " thrust into jail." In the
two years after the establishment of the court, it
tried but seven hundred and nineteen cases and
committed only forty-four.
Whether religious instruction should be en-
forced upon every body in English schools is purely
a question for English people. We have no right
and no disposition to meddle with it ; and I ven-
ture to think the facts just cited prove that there
is nothing in either our educational or our crim-
inal record to make it needful for any of them to
import us into it.
And yet I cannot help feeling that on the general
subject we might profitably take a hint from the
old country. Whatever else we may say about the
English schools, they do turn out well-behaved,
orderly boys and girls, respectful to those set over
them, grounded in the morals of Christian civil-
ization, with an instinctive sense of obedience to
law and a becoming regard for the authorities that
represent it. Would we be any the worse off if
we had more of these qualities here? May it not
happen that in our effort to keep all questions of
religion and morals in what we consider their
proper place, they may in reality be left without
any place in the training of a good many children ?
If the interest of the Republic requires that every
child should be compelled to learn to read its laws,
does not the same interest as imperatively require
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
that every child should be taught, and should be
unable to escape being taught, the absolute neces-
sity of respect for those laws and of prompt and
dutiful obedience to the officers of the law? Does
not the interest of the Republic further demand
that the coming citizens shall have some idea of
our old beliefs in the Fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man, or at least shall be thor-
oughly grounded in the great principles of the
moral law, without which neither ordered liberty
nor civilization itself can exist?
If English schools, according to our ideas, go
too far in teaching creeds, may we not be going
too far the other way, in some parts of the coun-
try at least, in excluding altogether, or in giving
too little space to teaching unsectarian religion and
morals, to enforcing respect for authority, and to
training the habit of mind that secures unhesitat-
ing obedience to law, and to its officers? In Lon-
don the policeman, the representative of law,often
controls the biggest and angriest crowd by lifting
his hand, in cases where the New York policeman
has to lift his club. Nay, here the giddy chauffeur,
for a single example out of many, gayly snaps his
fingers at the uplifted .club, and has to be run down
on a motorcycle. Even then, when caught, he is
apt to tell the presumptuous policeman he means
to have him "broken" for his pains. Such a threat
in London would railroad him to a long term in
jail. The mere failure to stop, the moment a police-
man lifts his hand, is generally in England un-
L 271 3
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
thinkable; the imagination is staggered to con-
ceive the punishment that might befall the fool-
hardy person who should venture on such unpre-
cedented lawlessness. Some cause has produced
this difference. Is it improbable that early train-
ing in a school that could be nowise escaped by
the growing boy had something to do with it?
It has been seen that even yet, to use a Hiber-
nicism, the English system of elementary educa-
tion is notably unsystematic. Besides purely private
schools, sometimes receiving government aid, and
some old public schools having endowments run-
ning back for a century or more and also receiv-
ing government aid, there are " provided schools/'
i.e., council schools, or, in American parlance, com-
mon schools; and "non-provided schools," that is,
voluntary schools, largely under church control.
The two classes last named had accommodation in
1906 for about three and one-half million scholars
each. Both receive aid from local taxation and also
from the state. They had between them an aver-
age attendance in that year of five and one-fourth
millions, or over 86 per cent of the registration.
To support the work of elementary education
thus distributed, aside from other resources, there
were public grants of nearly eleven and one-half
million pounds say fifty-seven million dollars.
To indicate the nature of instruction thus given
we may take the London "provided schools" as
favorable examples. The curriculum, as first fixed
C 272 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
by the board in 1 870, included instruction in moral-
ity and religion, reading, writing, arithmetic, geog-
raphy, English grammar, English history, elemen-
tary physical science, elementary social economy,
drawing, singing, mensuration for boys, needle-
work for girls, and physical exercises, besides a
few discretionary subjects. By 1902 the latter had
been materially enlarged, and the head teacher now
had the liberty of selecting, according to the capa-
city and desire of the pupils, from algebra, geom-
etry, mechanics, animal physiology, botany, chem-
istry, hygiene, bookkeeping, shorthand, Latin,
French, and German. Nearly all upper class boys
also attend special centres for manual training, and
upper class girls for domestic economy.
American critics of tendencies in their own
schools sometimes object to the "fads and frills"
which, as they say, keep the children from learn-
ing "the three R's." It will be observed that the
London elementary schools likewise provide for a
good many so called " frills." But it must be noted
that these are not permitted to take the place of
the essentials. Whatever else a London child may
learn at a "provided school," he must and does
learn to read, write, and cipher. Two out of the
three at least he generally learns remarkably well.
Nothing is apt to strike an American more, when he
comes to know the product of English elementary
schools, than their thoroughness in these essentials.
I have rarely seen a domestic servant who did not
have a fairly good handwriting, spell with more
C 273 l
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
accuracy than some of our own misguided col-
lege professors, and compose a clear letter, well
expressed, in civil phrases, not offensive by an
unwarranted familiarity or wanton assurance in
demanding the time of a stranger, not verbose or
slangy; in fact, likely, by its appearance and man-
ner at least, to create a good impression. Would
that we could say as much for all the graduates of
our colleges.
In most of the London schools there are three
departments, those for boys, girls, and infants. An
average number for the three would be about
one thousand. There are also schools in which the
sexes are not separated. About half the teachers
in 1869 were women and girls, by 1900 they had
become three-fourths. Certified masters of schools
are paid about i 29 per annum, say $640 ; and cer-
tified mistresses about two-thirds as much. Pupil
teachers are put in training, on application and fa-
vorable reports, at fourteen years of age ; and after
a year, study only half the day, teach the other
half, and are paid a graded salary which, at the
end of three years more, rises to 30 for boys and
=24 for girls. Women are eligible for educational
committees, and their service seems to be popular.
The general limit for compulsory attendance at
elementary schools was thirteen years, but the local
authorities now have the power to raise it to four-
teen, and the prevailing tendency is toward an
exercise of this power. The penalty on parents for
neglect is i with costs. The pupils are graded by
274 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
various standards, known as standard i , the low-
est, and so on up to standards 5 and 6, which rep-
resent the highest elementary work, and standard
7, which denotes the distinct extension of the work
into the secondary field.
Discipline in the schools is generally very well
maintained ; pupils of both sexes are early taught
obedience, courtesy, and respect sometimes even
yet in the old way ! Persuasion and kindness are
first tried ; the effort is to lead the pupil by rewards
rather than to drive him by punishments. But the
hard-headed local authorities have generally not
the remotest intention of spoiling the child in order
to spare the rod, and the traditional cane is still
served out to the head-masters and the head-mis-
tresses along with the other school supplies. It is
not often used, and never without care and some
thought of possible legal reprisals, but it is there,
and it is used if needs must. Perhaps the lad's opin-
ion of Archbishop Temple, at Rugby, may be taken
as the ordinary schoolboy's general notion about
this application of discipline, when it does come :
"He's a beast, but a just beast."
There is a marked tendency in most of the ele-
mentary schools to freshen the work, take it away
from the old routine methods, and make it a real
process of drawing out the latent capacities of the
child and encouraging it to think, to feel its own
way, and to learn for itself. There are many illus-
trations and experiments, occasional excursions
and object lessons. Efforts are made to use the
C 2 ?5 D
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
successes of pupils as an abiding stimulus for the
schools, and the permanent tablet on the wall serv-
ing as an " honor board " is a frequent feature. The
local authorities sometimes offer a valuable picture
as a prize to a class or a school that in some way
distinguishes itself, and with a thrift almost Yankee
in its subtlety gain by what they give, since the
picture remains as the permanent adornment of the
schoolhouse!
In 1861 Matthew Arnold, after inspecting foreign
school systems, returned to report to the Royal
Commission on Endowed Schools, which had sent
him out, with the appeal: "Organize your sec-
ondary and your superior education/' Ten years
later Professor Huxley, in the first London School
Board, urged an arrangement by which a passage
could be secured for children of superior ability
from the elementary schools to schools in which
they could obtain a higher instruction. No educa-
tional system, he said in a notable speech, now
familiar, I think, to most American educators no
such system would be worthy the name of a na-
tional system, "unless it established a great edu-
cational ladder, the bottom of which should be in
the gutter and the top in the university, on which
every child who had the strength to climb might,
by using that strength, reach the place for which
nature intended him/'
But the appeal of Matthew Arnold is not yet
fully answered, the dream of Professor Huxley
C 276 3
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
not yet fully realized. Unsystematic as the pri-
mary education has been found, secondary educa-
tion is still more so. There are in London " higher
grade schools/' "organized science schools/' and
"higher elementary schools/' Some of these are
merely the highest class of elementary schools,
reaching up into subjects proper to the first years
in secondary education ; some others represent a
rather confused effort to promote secondary edu-
cation, technical education, and commercial art
education side by side; some of them give efficient
instruction in chemistry, physics, electricity, phys-
iology, botany, French, German, algebra, geom-
etry, trigonometry, English literature, and his-
tory. It is not clear that many of them enable their
students to pass on to the universities. A "higher
grade" school at Leeds has a superior record in
that respect, ninety-three of its pupils having
matriculated at London University, and sixty-five
having taken university degrees.
There is another development of secondary ed-
ucation directly from the elementary schools, gen-
erally more practical in its nature, and tending often
to scientific or technical courses. This is the one
stimulated bya system of scholarships, junior,inter-
mediate, and senior, offered by the London County
Council and open to competition by the pupils in
the elementary schools. About six hundred junior
scholarships are thus given in a year to boys and
girls under thirteen years of age, and nearly all
go to pupils of the council schools. These keep the
c 277 n
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
children at a higher grade council school or at a
secondary school for two years, pay fees where
there are any, and give the pupil for his mainte-
nance for the two years an allowance of 20 ; but
the parents of the children receiving them must
have an income less than 150, say less than $750.
The boy or girl who gains one of these scholar-
ships gets tuition one year beyond the usual four-
teen year limit, and is then able to compete for an
intermediate scholarship. These again are open to
any under sixteen, whose parents have an income
of less than ^400 a year; and when won, secure
any fees in secondary schools, together with an
allowance of 55 for maintenance for two years.
There are about one hundred of them a year for
all London, and they practically denote the high-
water mark of council school education. There are
still, however, seven or eight senior scholarships
a year, and these carry the successful contestants
for three years at a university, with tuition fees
and a maintenance of 30 a year. This, it will be
observed, constitutes a genuine scheme of state
supported secondary education. It is not open to all
who may have passed through the lower classes
and feel like keeping on. But it is open to the se-
lected few who have shown special qualifications
for a higher training, and whose parents are poor ;
and to these most hopeful and most deserving chil-
dren of the empire their government extends not
merely free tuition, but free support.
Those seeking the old universities, and many
C 278 3
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
of those seeking scientific courses at the new ones,
still resort, if they can, either to schools conducted
for private profit, or to the public schools, so called,
i.e., endowed schools, like Harrow, Rugby, West-
minster, St. Paul's, Manchester Grammar School,
and thirty or thirty-five more. Many of these are
ancient foundations, and they have borne a vital
relation to some of the proudest pages of English
history. At least two of them, Winchester and
Eton, were well endowed for the time and in suc-
cessful operation before the discovery of America.
A much larger number were established before the
colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth were; and
most of the more noted ones before our Declara-
tion of Independence. These schools belong, there-
fore, to our history, too. They recall to us as well as
Englishmen, in their scrupulously guarded rolls,
the successive generations of eminent men, whose
achievements are a part of our inheritance. They
make alive again the proud records above the
sacred dust of myriads of the great departed all
over the land, from stately cathedrals to the quiet
churchyard of the remotest hamlet. This sacred
dust it was that gave the inspiration to Oliver
Wendell Holmes's eulogy of England and her
illustrious dead, and justified his vivid outburst:
* ' One half her soil has walked the rest,
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages."
These public schools are in general splendidly
healthy and useful yet; within their field and for
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EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
their purposes unsurpassed in the educational work
of the world. But their field, until recent years, has
been almost exclusively the humanities ; and their
aim, senior wranglerships and double firsts in the
universities, the front benches in the House of
Commons, and responsible places all around the
world in the administration of the empire, or in
their most esteemed services, the army, the navy,
and the church. Till 1851 mathematics was not
compulsory at Eton, nor French till 1862. Natural
science was scarcely noticed.
An English educational writer has unfairly said
that "England is the country where dead systems
live." A student of her educational history might
be tempted to accept that judgment if he looked
merely to the fact that it was only as late as 1895,
and after the notable report of Mr. James Bryce
on the best methods of establishing a well-organ-
ized system of secondary education in England,
that a central organization was created to coordi-
nate all these previous divergent and unregulated
schools which furnish the links between the ele-
mentary schools below and the universities above,
as well as the technical and scientific schools that
ought to be above. Before that date the most con-
siderable part of the secondary education work was
under the control of the Charity Commission ! The
Science and Art Department had been administer-
ing the newer plans to meet the special demand
for technical instruction, and had the disposition
C 280 1
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
of an income for this purpose of nearly a million
pounds (five million dollars ) per annum. The Ed-
ucation Department had charge of the elementary
schools, and, as has been seen, had developed from
these some interesting advances into the second-
ary field. At last, in 1900, a board of education
was created, which took over the secondary educa-
tional work of the Charity Com mission, of the Sci-
ence and Art Department, and of the Educational
Department.
The work thus finally coordinated had reached
great proportions. In 1892 the Charity Commis-
sioners reported the educational endowments in
England alone, available for secondary education,
as producing an income of over ,=697,000 a year,
say three and one-half million dollars not to
reckon at all the value of their buildings and sites.
In 1897 the Educational Department made a cen-
sus of English secondary schools. Its returns were
thought to be vitiated by including many not really
entitled to rank as secondary schools; but it re-
ported 6209 of them, with pupils numbering almost
ten in the thousand of the whole population. The
Science and Art Department received the cus-
toms and excise money (popularly "the whiskey
money " ) , and from this fund technical schools were
given nearly ,=864,000 in 1900, while the sum
raised for the same purpose by rates ( local taxes )
amounted to 106,000 more, say in all over four
and three-quarter million dollars. Under the lat-
est legislation this goes to the county councils, and
[ 281 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
the councils of county boroughs and of urban dis-
tricts. It must be spent on secondary education.
They have authority to raise more by local rates,
but this in the case of counties must not exceed
a two-pence rate.
At present the regulations forbid teaching more
than thirty-five scholars together at one time.
They permit fees that may be approved by the
board, but require that one-fourth of the school
places be open without fees to pupils from ele-
mentary schools who pass a satisfactory entrance
examination. The number of such schools in Eng-
land and Wales recognized by the board and given
state aid was six hundred and eighty-nine, in the
years 1905-06, and the number of pupils was
ninety-four thousand six hundred and eighty-nine.
As early as 1895 the feeling that general sec-
ondary education was in danger of being neglected
in the rush for scientific or technical or trade
training, took shape in the form of a requirement
for compulsory literary and commercial instruction.
At the same time religious instruction is not made
compulsory, and only non-sectarian instruction is
permitted.
I have not mentioned Scotch or Irish schools.
The systems are different. There is only space to
note that as to Scotland general popular education
began early and has been thorough, almost uni-
versal, and highly successful; while as to Ireland
the religious question has been even more control-
ling and more embarrassing than in England. In
[ 282 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
all three there is more than ever before an accept-
ance of the idea tersely expressed by President
Roosevelt to Mr. Moseley, that while education
alone may not make a nation, it would surely be
ruined without it.
Attendance at English elementary and second-
ary schools is still apt to stop at the age of four-
teen, if not earlier, but the tendency begins to be
toward a longer stay. Sports are still an absorbing
part of the school work, and interest in them is
almost as necessary for the teacher as scholarship.
The teachers are not so apt to show individuality
and energy as they are to be careful and perti-
nacious. Much attention has been paid to the train-
ing of teachers of late years, but the system of
"pupil teachers" has still to eke out the supply.
In the great cities there is an enormous and in-
teresting development of evening schools. Trade
schools are increasingly numerous and popular.
In the great technical schools there is a notice-
able absence of pupils who seek easy electives, and
are there chiefly for the degree. Often the work is
not very rapid, but it is apt to be thorough. In all
these directions the admonition of the Prince of
Wales on his return from his eastern trip has been
heard, and England has "waked up."
It will have been noted that in elementary schools
the prevailing tendency of late years has been
toward sense-training, object lessons, and manual
employment. So among secondary schools the tend-
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
ency has been toward studies fitting for practical
scientific, or manufacturing and commercial life.
Both are more democratic than the historic public
schools; and there begins to be a greater mingling
of classes in the more recent secondary schools,
in the scientific technological schools, and in the
newer universities to which they lead.
Naturally, then, the chief new development of
educational activity has been in the expansion or
creation of advanced institutions to carry on this
practical training beyond the secondary stage.
Until less than a century ago, there were only
two universities in England and Wales. Now there
are ten. Practically all the new ones yield the pre-
eminence in the old classical, mathematical, and
philosophic training to Oxford and Cambridge,
while they strive to occupy more thoroughly the
less developed field of scientific and technologi-
cal work. Then there are twenty-three technical
institutions in England and Wales, recognized by
the Board of Education, and two hundred and
thirty-one schools of art applied to the industries.
The universities have been slowly led to exami-
nations for the various kinds of secondary schools,
some of which serve as leaving examinations for
the schools and others as matriculation examina-
tions for the universities, though often used by the
recipients for other purposes. Oxford and Cam-
bridge took up this work near the middle of the
last century, first separately , then in a joint board.
Subsequently, London University undertook it on
C 284 H
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
a large scale, and Durham, Victoria, and Birming-
ham have moved in the same direction. The City
and Guilds of London Institute also held examina-
tions for technical schools and classes throughout
the country.
A word in closing might be given to the Rhodes
scholarships at Oxford. We have almost a hun-
dred young American graduates there, distributed
through the colleges of that venerable and illus-
trious university. They are chosen on examination,
two from each state and territory ; they are given
free the best the university can offer through a
three years' stay, and they receive from the fund
an allowance of ^300, say $ 1500, per year for
their maintenance. The purpose of the great man
who founded this trust was to increase intimate
and friendly relations between the most highly
educated classes of the mother country and those
of her "giant offspring of the West;" and to fur-
ther a good understanding between the three
nationalities included in the arrangement, Eng-
land, Germany, and the United States. I have met
with these Rhodes scholars at their annual reun-
ion at Oxford; and I am glad to testify at home to
their admirable appearance and conduct, and to the
favorable opinions of them expressed to me by
the Oxford dons with whom I conversed. As one
saw them together, breaking in upon the cloistered
quiet of those historic halls, he might almost im-
agine himself at a big Middle West college in our
own country. He would scarcely be able to single
C 285 ]
EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
out the German Rhodes scholars from the rest,
and quite unable to tell Americans from Australians
or Rhodesians or Newfoundlanders or Cape Colo-
nists or New Zealanders. But about them all was
the air of new worlds and a new era. One might
almost fancy their eyes had already seen the glory
of the time when, under the leadership of the Eng-
lish-speaking peoples, the war drum throbbed no
longer, and the battle-flags were furled, in the par-
liament of man, the federation of the world.
C 286
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
FIRST of all, let me make my best acknow-
ledgments for the most gratifying honor of
my life. To come back to Xenia, to the dear old
town which in my boyhood treated me so much
better than I deserved, and around which centre
my earliest and happiest recollections, is always
a pleasure; to come, an absent son, summoned by
the council for the opening of the new City Hall,
is more than a pleasure it is a grateful duty.
We have been hearing, however, of late, that
it is no longer quite prudent to make public con-
fession of the fact that one was born in Ohio. It
is going to be a political crime, a sort of pleading
guilty to political disability. The fault, you will
observe, is not entirely in living here ; it attaches
even to the error of having been so inconsider-
ate as to be born here. Massachusetts, a few years
ago, might people half the legislatures and execu-
tive chambers of the Northwest, and crowd their
delegations in Congress, and gather in the prizes
of half the diplomatic service ; it only added to the
glory of the Puritan Commonwealth that stood
there on her bays, and spoke for herself. Virginia
might fill offices with similar frequency on lines
of emigration a little further south, and it only
added to the pride of the whole country in what
they delighted to call the Old Dominion, the Mo-
ther of Presidents. But when her greatest off-
spring, the first-born of the Ordinance of 1787,
C 289 ]
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
became the Mother of Presidents too, and when
her wandering sons, in turn, came to the front, all
over the Union, in war, or politics, or business, the
feeling seemed suddenly to change. A huge de-
tective society was forthwith formed, whose duty
was not only to note with disparagement every
advance of an Ohio man, but to ferret out and to
"spot "every advancing man in any other state
who could be suspected of having been born in
Ohio. When found, the order was simple and per-
emptory: "Hunt him down!"
Well, with the changed conditions of our local
emigration, that becomes something of an under-
taking. Forty years ago the chief native source of
supply for the hardy settlers who toiled westward
in the old Conestoga wagons,
"Who crossed the prairies, as of old
Their fathers crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free,"
was in New England, and particularly in Massa-
chusetts. For the past fifteen or twenty years it
has been in Ohio. There is no land into which their
lines have not gone. There is no state or territory
to the westward Ohio emigrants have not largely
helped to people. Call over the familiar names of
the pioneer families of Greene County, and see
where you will find their living representatives.
Take the Galloways, the To wnsleys, the Kyles, the
Turnbulls, the Harbines, the Baughmans, the Mc-
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
Coys, the Colliers, the Gowdys, the Shields, the
Sterretts , the Deans , the Collinses , the Puterbaughs ,
the Hivlings,the Nisongers,the Snyders,the An-
kenys,the Barbers, the McMillans, the Millers, the
Bells, the Corrys, the Stevensons, the Laugheads,
theWhitemans,the McHattons, the Maxwells,the
Armstrongs, the McClungs, what one is there
that has not more members in the West than here
at the old home? "You can take your horse and
buggy/' said one of our emigrants, "on the banks
of the Miami, and drive to the base of the Rocky
Mountains, stopping every night at an Ohio man's
house."
So the huge detective society, of which we spoke,
has plenty of work on its hands. For wherever this
Ohio emigrant went, he carried with him the Ohio
basis, education, manliness, self-reliance, enter-
prise ; in a word, the Ohio blood, and he made his
way. One day an Ohio emigrant turns up in the
Senate from Kansas, the next,in the Supreme Court
from Georgia, the next, in some other conspicu-
ous place he has fairly earned and to which the
people of his adopted state help advance him ; but
every time the detective society groans and hoots
and exclaims: "Another Ohio man in office is
nobody else to have a show? Hit his head. Never
mind where he spent his life or what he has done ;
he was born in Ohio!" And yet the truth is that
if Ohio were to be represented as Massachusetts
and Virginia have been, she has not nearly offices
enough ! A comparison in appointments is difficult ;
C 2 ^i H
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
but one as to elections may easily be made. Go
no further back than the beginning of this polit-
ical period say about the time the Republican
party arose and take the representation in Con-
gress. In 1856 there were in the two Houses
twenty-three men of Virginia birth, fourteen from
Massachusetts, and, notwithstanding her size, only
twenty from Ohio. To-day there are still twenty-
one of Virginia birth, thirteen from Massachu-
setts, and thirty-five from Ohio. But if Ohio were
to be represented merely in proportion to popu-
lation, as Virginia was in 1856, she should still
have thirteen more ! If in proportion not only to her
size but to the quality of her product, perhaps we
ought modestly to refrain from saying how many
more yet it would be fortunate for the country to
get her to furnish !
A friend of mine recently received a dispatch
about which there has been some talk. It congrat-
ulated him on his election to the Senate because
he had never apologized for being "a Stalwart."
Well, here is a wandering Ohioan who has never
apologized and never means to apologize for his
birthplace.
The tools to those that can use them. If you don't
like men of Ohio birth in public life,find better men,
and persuade the people that they are better. But
don't resort to the puerile course of condemning
them merely because of their birth breaking their
heads because they were once within the prohib-
ited lines of longitude. There have been times when
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
one's being an Ohioan was not an objection to his
serving the state. When you had Edwin M. Stanton
as Secretary of War, and Ben Wade as Chair-
man of the Committee on the Conduct of the War,
and John Sherman as Chairman of the Finance
Committee, was there anybody uneasy, anybody
less than grateful, that the noblest Roman of them
all, Salmon P. Chase, was at the same time Sec-
retary of the Treasury? When you had Grant at the
head of one army, nobody wanted to drive Sher-
man away from another because he also was born
in Ohio. Even Sheridan was forgiven the offence of
his birthplace ; and McPherson was mourned as sin-
cerely as if he had not been another of those push-
ing Ohioans. When Gillmore was bombarding Fort
Sumter, and revolutionizing our artillery practice
and coast defence, his birth in Ohio was not thought
to injure the range of his projectiles; and when
Steedman and Garfield, political foes, but brothers
in patriotic devotion, left a disheartened chief and
rode without orders toward the sound of the ene-
my's cannon, till through fire and blood they found
the Rock of Chickamauga, the nation in its grati-
tude for their heroism quite overlooked the crime
of their birth.
And so, once again, let us fall back upon the
motto of the great Scotchman so recently gone
from us: "The tools to him that can use them/'
If you want fewer of these Ohioans in prominent
places, match them ! Or surpass them! Till then,
why not frankly recognize the position of the great
C 293 ]
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
state that produced them, the centre of the national
population, the focus and very flower of its freest,
manliest development. Peopled mainly by Massa-
chusetts and Virginia influences, of the best, most
adventurous, and self-reliant types, it nourished
a population strongly marked by the most desira-
ble characteristics of this dual origin, and it holds,
because it deserves, the legitimate successorship to
both, in its present place at the National Council
Board, and in the physical and the intellectual strife
of the continent.
Why Virginia and Massachusetts were able to
assert and so long maintain their leadership, our
historians have fairly shown. Why the power and
place of both should have passed so unmistakably
and conspicuously to the " territory northwest of
the Ohio, and the Connecticut Reserve/' some
Western Buckle may yet find it a most interesting
study to trace.
He would note the fine mingling of races the
first actual blending of the Virginia and Massachu-
setts strains, with a strong infusion of the sturdy
Scotch-Irish from over the Pennsylvania border.
He would appreciate the gain in climate to each
the winters permitting greater activity than in
New England, but not encouraging the laxity of
more southern regions. He would observe not only
the fertility of the soil, but the boundless mineral
resources that almost compelled a more varied
industry. And having thus recognized three of the
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
notable four classes of physical agents to which the
philosophical historian of civilization referred all
the external phenomena by which the development
of man has been permanently affected, he would
not fail also to find in the fourth, or " the general
aspect of nature," an equal significance. We do not
sufficiently appreciate the total difference between
the stern face nature showed the hardy pioneers
in Ohio and the easier dandling she gave to the less
strenuous sons of the prairie. Here was no marking
out the lines of a farm with a furrow, to be followed
by an immediate entry upon its cultivation. The
land was covered with dark and pathless forests.
It was threaded by rivers, the Muskingum,the Sci-
oto, the Miami, the Maumee, which were the first
means, and yet the most dangerous, for penetrat-
ing the wilderness. Their banks were lined by the
bravest Indians of the West, the tribes that rallied
around Logan and Tecumseh, the Wy an dots, the
Cherokees,the Delawares, and the Shawnees, the
last of whom, at their capital in your own county,
scarcely four miles from where we stand, achieved
the distinction of holding as their prisoner the most
famous pioneer of the West, Daniel Boone him-
self. There were no railroads to bring the luxuries
of civilization to the frontiersman's cabin. You can
track the emigration across the plains by the lines
of empty fruit cans and the bottles that once held
let us hope Apollinaris water. But you could
track the pioneers through the white oak and black
walnut forests of Ohio only by the blaze of the
295
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
tomahawk on the trees, the marks of the struggle
with bear or panther, the sadder marks that told,
too often, of the Indian ambush. There were no
telegraphs, as now, in many of our frontier settle-
ments, to keep them feeling the throbbing pulses of
a feverish world outside ; no newspapers to distract
them with the daily records of crime the world
over; scarcely even an occasional mail to bring a
three months' old letter from wife or sweetheart
left behind. They lived isolated lives, in the heart of
the forest, fighting nature and fighting the Indians.
Sobered by these severe surroundings, nerved
by these difficulties, purified by these deprivations,
this mingled strain of Puritan, Cavalier, and
Scotch-Irishman bred in the forests and on the
clearings between the river and the lake, the self-
reliant race that has given this state its place in the
Republic. Whether she can maintain it or not, who
can tell? Emigration is draining away her best
blood, as it did that of Virginia and Massachu-
setts; and it does not always happen that under
the luxuries of an older civilization the children
emulate the high virtues of their hardy ancestry.
But whatever the future may have in store, we can
say of our state, our gracious Mother, as Webster
said of Massachusetts, the Past at least is secure.
The place she has, she has earned.
Nor does there seem any immediate danger of
her losing it. None of us, whatever our politics, are
hanging our heads for the Administration that is
just drawing to a close. Whether we approve its
C
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
policy or not, we agree that under it we have come
to unprecedented prosperity ; that our business has
been well and honestly managed ; that the public
service is clean, and the public faith untarnished.
It has indeed given us peace with honor ; and the
man whom you three times chose governor retires
from a most difficult presidency, upon which he
entered amid universal prophecies of failure, far
more popular with the whole country than when he
was elected, and with the reasonable certainty that
twenty years hence, when the petty grudges of
the disappointed are forgotten, his Administration
will be reckoned by both parties one of the most
creditable and fortunate in our history.
Two years ago, before the Convention of Ohio
Editors, I ventured the prediction that, whichever
party succeeded, the next President too would be
an Ohio man. One party missed its opportunity by
failing to choose the one man, clean, incorruptible,
able, patriotic, whom it had a fair chance to elect.
So of course, when Henry B. Payne, of Cleveland,
was not nominated by the Democrats, there was
nothing for the country to do but elect the distin-
guished citizen of Mentor, who had been nomi-
nated by the Republicans. Now, a little further in
advance, let us hazard another non-partisan pre-
diction, and challenge the horror of the society
for the detection and exposure of Ohioans, by de-
claring that the state which has given the country
Grant and Hayes and Garfield will once more
furnish the President in 1884!
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We shall all be happy over it, too. Ohioans
rarely lose the state pride and the personal satisfac-
tion in a success worthily won by a fellow citizen
that make your politics dignified, and even thefierc-
est of your political battles measurably free from
petty meanness. It was from political opponents,
charmed by a chivalric courtesy never lost in the
sharpest struggles, that Senator Pendleton fairly
earned that most complimentary and agreeable of
political sobriquets, " Gentleman George/' When
Henry B. Payne came promptly forward at the be-
ginning of a feverish Presidential campaign, to say
that he utterly scouted the charges against James
A. Garfield, because he knew him thoroughly, and,
though a vehement political foe, had implicit trust
in his personal honor, he gave the true type of
Ohio politics and Ohio manliness. Long may his
tribe increase ; and long may all the parties in the
dear old state continue to put such men at the front.
But all this while we have been thinking about
our state. What we are more concerned with to-
night is our city. That name may be used now, no
doubt, without reproach, its gloss is a little worn
off. But having helped to get this city charter, I
remember being quizzed by a neighboring and
unneighborly newspaper for having found ways to
use the new title fifty-seven times in a single issue
of the paper, the week afterward. Admonished by
the old experience, I shall be careful not to speak
of the city of Xenia too often to-night.
[ 298 3
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
Indeed, as one looks around, he may be permit-
ted to wonder whether he is in the old town at all.
This isn't the way we did things, in my time, in
Xenia. McMillan Hall was the best we had then,
and we were careful to keep that under, or rather
over, good moral influences, by putting it in the
loft, with one end resting on "The Torch-Light"
office, and the other on the local depository of
the American Bible Society. Now we are met to
open a new City Hall, and it takes the form of
this elegant Opera House, as big as some of the
New York theatres and a great deal prettier than
many of them. What would Joseph Vance and
the pioneers who, with him, laid out the town,
have said if before their eyes closed forever on
those lovely slopes they found in the wilderness,
they had been invited to attend a town meet-
ing in this hall! Even I, so young a resident that
I have hardly yet recovered from the disgrace
of having been detected ( by one of the dear old
ladies of the town, with a painfully precise recol-
lection of dates ) in editing a political newspaper
and exhorting people how to vote before I was old
enough to vote myself, even I am forced to rub
my eyes to be sure that all this is real. A theatre
in Xenia! with folding chairs and a dress
circle and galleries and good stage scenery
and, above all, this portrait of Shakespeare it
passes belief. Why, I remember a lad here, of ten
or eleven years of age, coddled too much perhaps
by anxious parents and a physician, who was told
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
he must quit studying so hard, and take to light
reading. Light reading was a phrase not well un-
derstood in sober families in Greene County in
those days, and so the lad asked for particulars.
" Oh, any light thing you please," answered the
physician; "take Shakespeare!" The next week
came along a doctor of another school, a Boaner-
ges of the faith, Dr. McMaster, over whose more
distinguished son you have lately been rearing
a memorial shaft, on the peaceful hillside beyond
the Shawnee. According to the fashion of the day,
the lad was promptly " examined," and after Cat-
echism and Psalm Book and Latin declensions, fol-
lowed questions of books. The advice about light
readingthus came out. " Very bad ad vice, "groaned
the good doctor; "a very bad lesson for a boy.
But what light reading have you? "Then Shake-
speare was confessed and the horrorwas complete.
"To think," exclaimed the doctor, "of the son
of so good a man wasting his time and corrupting
his mind with that frivolous and profane writer of
plays! "And so Shakespeare was summarily taken
away, and in its place light reading was furnished
in the shape of Rollings " Ancient History," in eight
volumes ! Not till nearly a year later did a kinder
fate and a younger clergyman, your own sainted
McMillan, substitute Plutarch's "Lives" and the
"Percy Anecdotes"! And now, in this same place,
after a special act of the legislature and an over-
whelming vote of the people, you have built your
new Town Hall in the guise of an Opera House,
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
and as you entered to-night the drop-curtain faced
you with the portrait of Shakespeare above it!
Well, it is a public-spirited enterprise, worthily ex-
ecuted by your faithful official servants. You have
your Town Hall and Opera House. What are you
going to do with it? Doubtless it shows that this
community no longer regards life as simply a
struggle, but is willing to be entertained and even
amused, as well as instructed.
The amusements will be sure to come. Let us
only hope that they will be up to the intellectual
and moral level of a county second in these regards
to none in the state or the nation. Of what passes
for oratory, too, you will be sure to have an abun-
dance, and we may well hope that, while you are
about it, you will get the best. Even then, the in-
tellectual treats this platform may bring you will
not surpass the memories of your youth. This com-
munity has been used to the eloquence of Henry
Clay and Thomas Ewing and Thomas Corwin. It
has heard in turbulent times the fiery appeals of
another, whose courage and force even his bit-
terest foes had to recognize, Clement L. Vallan-
digham. Under the trees before the Court House
it heard Salmon P. Chase end an impassioned de-
fence of the Free Soilers against disunion charges
with the outburst: "We in Ohio are accustomed
to look on the union of these states as we look on
the broad arch of heaven above us, undissolved
and indissoluble/' I have listened to nearly every
[ 301 ]
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
prominent orator of the country in this generation,
and have yet to hear nobler eloquence than re-
sounded in the court-room yonder when Thomas
Corwin rescued from a Calvinistic jury, who be-
lieved that murder deserved hanging, an Irish
manslayer from Bellbrook; or more persuasive
teaching than fell from the lips of our Yellow
Springs neighbor, Horace Mann. You give your
speakers a finer platform now, match the old
eloquence if you can.
Let us hope, too, that amid these more elegant
surroundings you will still keep up the good old
wholesome Greene County respect for politics ; and
that your Opera House will not wean you away
from that careful attention to political discussion,
and discussion on both sides, too, which used to
centre about a Town Hall. I wonder if, among the
disappearing traditions of pioneer Xenia, there
has yet faded out all recollection of the way the last
jurymen in the old log court house in 1804 were
sworn. Arthur St. Clair came up from Cincinnati,
with cocked hat and sword, to serve as prosecut-
ing attorney. The story ran that he hunted in
vain for a Bible, but at last found something he
thought would do, and upon it jury and witnesses
" took their Bible oath/' The volume turned out to
be a tattered copy of the "Arabian Nights' Enter-
tainments." In my boyish days in politics here,
when things went wrong, when a candidate broke
his pledges or an out-township ally was found
C 302 ]]
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
to have deceived us and worked for the other
man, it was the irreverent and rather vulgar habit
to say that our politicians anyway were lineal de-
scendants of Arthur St. Glair's witnesses, and their
oaths were no better. Let us dignify, not degrade
politics. Let us realize may this Town Hall per-
petually teach that to "go into politics" is to
deal with the highest objects of human concern;
and that the pretended feeling of contempt for those
who do, merely because they do, which grows
fashionable now, is the sure sign of a snob. Next
to the ministry of God, the highest career open to
human ambition is the service of the people.
This place ought, besides, to become the centre
and incitement for some special intellectual stir, in
the community, from the community, and about
the immediate concerns of the community. It should
stimulate what we may call a real municipal life.
Till you have that, you lack the best gift of our
republican institutions. These are not the best form
of government because they insure the best im-
mediate results, because they are the cheapest,
or the simplest, or the most efficient. They are the
best because you have to work for them, and work
to keep them, and be perpetually active in run-
ning them. They are what you make them; and
are the best because in the making of them you
yourselves are exercised and trained and built up
to the best measure of free, American manhood.
Government by the people must always be expen-
C 303 H
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
sive, generally slow, and, in the main, carried on
only through the strain of a perpetual excitement
and tumult of debate. But therein lies the very se-
cret of its superiority. It is not the mere reaching
the goal that helps the athlete: what does him the
real benefit is his running the race. It is not simply
the gathering of the crops that makes the farmer's
life the best; it is the work of growing them. It
is not the government you get that makes repub-
licanism the best ; it is the work you have in get-
ting it. And till you bestow that work on your own
municipal affairs you are not getting as much out
of the great privilege of republican institutions as
you ought to get.
Rightly used to stimulate and develop a true mu-
nicipal life, this hall may likewise give you some
other mode of dealing with affairs besides the news-
papers; and perhaps I may be permitted to say
that the tendency to let these do all your thinking
in public affairs is not an unmixed good. Useful as
they always must be in their place, and unsur-
passed in their sphere as the journals of Xenia cer-
tainly are, it is just as well to avoid entire depend-
ence upon them for municipal discussion. So, too,
in the atmosphere of spirited inquiry which we may
hope the influences centring here will develop,
should come broader views of life and duty: a
recognition of the fact that something can often
be said on the other side ; a wider toleration than
is always common in rural communities, of what
C 304 U
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
other people think, and of their right to think it,
in politics, education, temperance, or religion.
On some special topics this Town Hall should
never be silent. I may venture to name three. It
should keep the municipal attention fixed with
ceaseless watchfulness on questions of public mor-
als, of municipal taxation and indebtedness, and
of educational necessities.
On the first of these there is no need to dwell
in Xenia. Here, if anywhere in Ohio, that is the
one topic sure never to be neglected. To the second
your attention may not have been so faithfully
called.
The growth of municipal taxation and munici-
pal indebtedness is in fact one of the stealthiest and
most seductive of our foes. Governor Dennison
once told me he was a great believer in the wis-
dom of a young man's running in debt and my
worst enemy could n't deny that I practised faith-
fully on his advice ! Half the municipalities of the
country seem to have the same notion, and they
don't limit the time for running in debt to their
youth, either. Six years ago Senator Elaine esti-
mated the municipal debt of the country at five
hundred and seventy millions, and that of the coun-
ties at one hundred and eighty millions more. The
exhibit startled the country. General Walker, the
Superintendent of the Census, is taking the utmost
care now to develop the latest facts upon the sub-
ject. To the officer in special charge of the inves-
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
tigation, the Hon. Robert P. Porter, of Chicago, I
am indebted for a summary of what has already
been ascertained. He says:
' The Census of 1870 was, as you doubtless know, sadly
defective, as the office at Washington could not, under
the old Census law, deal directly with the officials of the
cities, counties, villages and towns, and school districts
throughout the country. This I am attempting to do in
the present investigation. There are in the United States
330 cities with a population of 7500 and upward, and
there are no less than 6016 incorporated towns and vil-
lages with a population of less than 7500, making a total
of 6346 incorporated towns and villages which have to
be dealt with directly from this office. The above calcu-
lation does not include the New England States, Penn-
sylvania, Illinois, and Indiana. Where the township has
a financial existence we deal with the township, and the
number of townships in the three states I have referred
to is 4000, making an estimated total of 11,846 cities,
towns, and townships, to say nothing of the 2700 coun-
ties of the country, all of which have to be dealt with sep-
arately. But these statistics will not be completed until
we have returns from all the school districts, number-
ing, at a rough guess, between 70,000 and 80,000 divi-
sions, to the financial officers of which schedules have
been sent and a correspondence opened. I give these facts
that you may be the better able to appreciate the im-
mense detail involved in the collection of these statistics.
' When the present investigation is ended I shall be
able to show a complete analysis of this vast amount of
local indebtedness, which will reach to nearly $900,000,-
000, comprising an exhibit of the purposes for which it
was contracted, the amounts contracted each year from
C 306 ]]
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
1860 to the close of 1880, the amounts maturing each year
from 1880 to 1900, and the rates of interest they bear. I
have already complete returns from all but some 200 of the
towns of 1000 population and upward."
Nine hundred millions of local debts, county, vil-
lage, and city, wholly outside of all the state and
national indebtedness ! The figures are almost ap-
palling. And yet this is only the part of the extrav-
agant local expenditure which you have n't paid
for. What has been paid, the rapidly rising tax rate
shows. Note the figures in this suggestive extract
from the report of the Hon. R. B. Strang, Chairman
of the Commission to devise a plan for the gov-
ernment of the cities of Pennsylvania. He said:
1 Without referring to particular cities or making invidi-
ous distinctions, it is perhaps sufficient to say that a care-
fully prepared table, showing the increase of population,
valuation, taxation, and indebtedness of fifteen of the
principal cities of the United States, from 1860 to 1875,
exhibits the following result:
Increase in population 70.5 per cent
Increase in taxable valuation 156.9 percent
Increase in debt 270.9 per cent
Increase in taxation 363.2 per cent
"It must be borne in mind that this alarming increase
in debt and taxation occurred during a period of great
apparent national prosperity, when money was plenty,
when property commanded enormous values, and when
it was easier to apply the maxim ' pay as you go ' than
at any period in our national history."
And now let us bring the examination into a nar-
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
rower compass. In a paper by Simon Sterne, in-
tended to show substantially that universal suf-
frage in large cities is a failure, the figures are col-
lated showing the population, taxation, and indebt-
edness of five cities, in 1860 and in 1875. I omit
the details and will read you merely the respec-
tive percentages of increase in these fifteen years:
Pofiula- Taxa- Indebted-
lion tion ness
Brooklyn 82.7 313.4 356.9
New York 28.5 430.9 504.1
Philadelphia 30.6 317.8 152.3
Providence 98.7 443.3 529.8
Newark 65.2 558.8 2,658.2
This system extends over the whole country. In
most cases the figures are not so startling; and
yet it has been but a little while since two cities,
one near New York, another in the South, became
openly bankrupt the debts being said to be ac-
tually greater than the taxable property; while
in more than one western county we have had
the distinct repudiation of bonds for indebtedness
which nobody disputed, solely because the county
thought it could n't tax heavily enough to provide
the interest, without driving oflf its population !
Let me give you only one more contrast in
figures. In 1875 the amount raised by the New
York civic government was $35 for each man,
woman, and child within the boundaries, while
the immense and luxurious city of London taxed
its inhabitants only $10 each!
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
I waste no time in enforcing upon an audience
like this the significance of such alarming facts. It
is enough to state two or three obvious conclu-
sions :
1 i ) Such municipal indebtedness tends to pro-
mote wanton extravagance in public affairs.
( 2 ) It tends to demoralize private life.
( 3 ) It tends to weaken the senseof public honor.
There was a third topic on which it was thought
that the influence of this hall should keep the
municipal attention fixed the direction of your
educational necessities. No thoughtful observer has
failed to notice the growing discontent, especially
in heavily taxed communities, with some features
of the existing system. It tries to teach too much.
It teaches little thoroughly. In giving a smattering
of a multitude of subjects, it neglects the essen-
tials. It unfits boys for mechanics and manufac-
turers, without fitting them for the professions. Its
tendency is to make them discontented with the
country where they are wanted, and to lure them
to the cities where they strive in vain to find a place
in ranks already overcrowded. It reduces the pro-
ducers. It over-educates great numbers for the only
work they can do, at the expense of taxpayers, who
are only damaged by the result of the expenditure.
These are among the current objections. Doubt-
less they overstate the case, but they do point to
a dangerous discontent, and they do centre about
one undeniable weakness. It is true that the sys-
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
tern is top-heavy; that the basis is too flimsy for
the ever spreading superstructure. As a result we
turn out too many who will go through life igno-
rant of arithmetic because they have spent their
time on chemistry, deficient in English grammar
because they were laboring with Latin or French.
And it is true that this flashy shell of an education
dissatisfies many with the real work of their lives.
Meantime, what is the chief defect to be found
throughout the whole working of our industrial
system? Is it not just what such an education has
absolutely organized, a chronic, inbred lack of
thoroughness? Who learns a trade now, as the
apprentices did fifty years ago? What master work-
man is able to get apprentices ? In what trade do
the men of middle-age find the average workman
as thoroughly master of all its details as he was
when they first began to be employers? In what
one is there a supply of boys coming up under
such training as surely to make them the full equals
of the old hands ?
Well, what is the remedy ? Obviously, nothing
will restore the old conditions. All over England
and America the apprenticeship system seems
doomed, and as yet there are only glimmerings
of something that may come to take its place.
Here, then, are three grave facts:
Common schools too wide to be deep enough ;
A growing lack of thoroughness in the industrial
world; and
A growing discontent on the part of the heavier
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
taxpayers with an educational system that some-
how doesn't seem to them to produce what is just
suited either to the trades or to business and the
professions.
Does not the mere grouping of the facts suggest
the remedy ? Strengthen the basis of the school
system before you increase the superstructure.
Teach fewer things, but teach them so they will
be absolutely known. Make the course of study
more compact and manageable; postpone the ac-
complishments ; banish even science and drawing,
and first give the child what will be essential for
the practical business of life, and a basis for self-
improvement.
Then meet the obvious want by establishing in
county seats, or wherever the population is large
enough to warrant it, free or partly free industrial
schools. There teach your science, your draw-
ing, and whatever else may tend to make better
artisans. In the great cities extend the system
to free technical schools, such as are now begin-
ning in New York, where boys may learn the prin-
ciples, and even some of the practical detail of
the trades, of painting, of carriage-building, of
plumbing, and the like. This is the plan to which
England is already largely resorting, which has
long been established in France, Germany, Bel-
gium, Switzerland, Sweden, and to which we
must soon come. The multitude of common schools
may thus be k freed from a work they cannot do
properly, while the attempt to do it spoils the work
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
they can and should do. In such a system, says
Professor Huxley, is to be found the only available
remedy for the losses from the downfall of ap-
prenticeship. To such a system one of the shrewd-
est of our United States Consuls, in a recent un-
published report, traces the growing success of
certain important branches of British manufactures.
To such a system some of our own statesmen are
beginning to look for the surest means of devel-
oping our native industries, and checking the un-
wholesome tendency away from the trades, into
trade.
Since the foregoing was prepared the State De-
partment has received and I have been permit-
ted to examine a most interesting report on the
progress of technical schools in England, and par-
ticularly those in textile fabrics in Bradford and
through the West Riding, from the Hon. C. O.
Shepard, the alert United States Consul at Brad-
ford. After reciting the endowments, income, and
other provision fora large number of these schools,
the numbers of pupils in attendance, and the spe-
cific results attained, he summarizes his conclu-
sions in a statement which I have been permit-
ted to copy, and which I shall venture to read to
you:
' ' Let me add a few remarks as to the objects of technical
schools and the best means of securing them.
" (l) They are intended to supplement the education
of the ordinary school with an education specially calcu-
lated to increase a man's knowledge of his trade or busi-
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
ness, and so to make him a more useful member of so-
ciety and a larger contributor to the Nation's wealth.
" (2) They should, in my opinion, form a part of the
National system of education, and the scholars should
largely consist of boys and girls drafted from our pub-
lic elementary schools. I include girls because I believe
that no system of technical education will be complete
which does not make provision for their training. In all
art schools girls take a very high place, and it is my
opinion that greater facilities ought to be afforded them for
earning a livelihood by the use of their artistic taste and
acquirements in relation to all trades or manufactures in
which a designer's skill is required. This will apply par-
ticularly to the manufacture of fancy stationery, pottery,
and every variety of textile fabrics.
44 (3) The course of instruction should include lectures
by competent men upon subjects of technical interest,
such as the daily discoveries of science afford.
4 ' (4) Arrangements should be made in connection with
every school for granting certificates or diplomas to de-
serving students, and every care should be taken in the
election of the Board of Examiners and the choice of
subjects and questions to make the examinations fairly
severe, and such as to give the certificate or diploma real
value to its possessor.
"(5) Examination in technological subjects might be
adopted by the educational department of any State in
the event of its undertaking to carry on the work of tech-
nical education, and would no doubt be found of great
practical value.
1 ' 1 am glad to know that a few technical schools have
already been established in the United States, principally
in the engineering and iron trades. I earnestly hope ere
long to hear that a system of thorough technical educa-
313 D
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
tion has been adopted for the whole country, as I do not
know of any other means whereby the resources of the
Nation are more likely to be developed, or its manufac-
tures improved, than by increasing the knowledge and
perfecting the skill of its artisans. English manufacturers
acknowledge that their most successful rivals are in those
countries or localities where technical education has been
carried to the highest point."
I take the greater pleasure in being able to give
you this early access to an important public docu-
ment because, from an independent point of view
and across the ocean, it comes as a confirmation of
the suggestions already offered. The whole idea is
yet in its infancy, but there is at least reason to
believe that the next great advance in our educa-
tional system will give us fewer studies and more
thoroughness in our common schools, with sepa-
rate industrial schools for some of the excluded
branches ; and whether this be a correct or mis-
taken forecast, it is clear that no worthier or more
important question can challenge the discussion
and watchful attention which it is one of the func-
tions of the Town Hall to stimulate.
One thing more. Here is the place to revive your
local history, watch your wandering sons, and keep
green the early memories. Here would be the per-
fect field for some worthy successor, if you only
had one, to the lamented William Mills. Here you
might fitly recall the fact that the foremost literary
editor of America, William D. Howells, was once
314
IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
a Greene County boy, his father living a few miles
to the westward of Xenia, at what were then called
the Eureka Mills ; that the foremost sculptor of
America, J. Q. A. Ward, was born only a little way
out of the Miami Valley, to the north of us, at
Urbana; that another president of the National
Academy, the admirable landscape artist, Worth-
ington Whittredge, was born in the valley, a few
miles from Clifton in this county. And you keep
with you still a real poet, whom you need to chide
because, having given such charming proof of what
he can do, Mr. Coates Kinney now persistently de-
frauds the world of the further work he ought to do.
Here, too, should be told over the fast fading
story of the heroism and devotion of your sons
in the war. Do not let this younger generation
forget that the first field officer given to death for
the Union, from Ohio, was John W. Lowe, the first
colonel this town sent out, and that he fell as you
would have had him fall, sword in hand, in front
of his regiment, cheering them to the advance upon
the intrenched army of Floyd and Wise. Do not
let them forget the political leaders you followed
before the war,Harlan,and Gest,and Hivling,and,
before them all, Joshua Martin. Do not let them
forget the good fellows of your earlier political
activity. The echoes in the Town Hall of Xenia
should still linger lovingly on the names of John
Boyd, and John McWhirk, and Albert Galloway.
Teach them the pure fame of your old lawyers
and officials, Ellsberry, and Barlow, and Winans,
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IN AN OLD OHIO TOWN
and Scott, and Coke Wright. Teach them to re-
vere those devoted public servants who left their
indelible impress on the education and morals of
this community, the old clergy of the town, Bev-
eridge, Smart, McMillan, Armstrong, Gill, Sim-
mons, Steele. Above all, teach them to hold in
everlasting honor the memory of the men who
found this county a wilderness and left it to you a
magnificent heritage, the fairest in our eyes the
sun kisses between the river and the lake. Honor
and reverence for the virtues of our pioneers, the
settlers of 1800-1810 Kentuckians, Virginians,
Pennsylvanians, who fought the Indian and the
wild beast, felled the forest, built first a church and
then a court-house, lived hard and solitary lives,
but with courage and constancy, in their place,
nobly served their day and generation. A few of
them, with whitening locks and rugged faces,
seamed with the privations and struggles of three-
quarters of a century ago, still go in and out among
us lacking, I am sure, no token of the love and
reverence in which their descendants hold them.
Heed them well, for it is a sight not long vouch-
safed us. In a few months or years at best the very
last pioneer settler of Greene County must have
passed over to the majority.
' Heroic spirits! take your rest!
Ye are richer, we are poorer;
Yet, because ye have been with us
Life is manlier, Heaven surer."
AC Reid, Whitelaw
3 American and English studies
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