Page:Carl Schurz- 1900-05-24 For American Principles and American Honor.pdf/8

 Philippines has established just such a relation as that, and it would be a source of national mortification if we gave up our responsibilities because we find them difficult.”

With due respect, be it said, no illustration would be more unhappy. It might fit if the Creole woman with her seven children had run after our son entreating him to marry her, or if she had at least willingly consented to his proposal of marriage. But what is the truth? The poor woman is desperately struggling against our son’s treacherous embrace, and our son is busy discharging his “responsibility” to the children by killing them at a rapid rate because they resist the shameful subjugation of their mother.

Not very long ago the Bishop, keenly appreciating the moral and political tendencies of our imperialistic policy, told his flock that the main question was not what we would do with the “fruits of our victories,” but rather what they would do with us. One of the first things they have already done with us, it seems, is so to benumb our moral sense and to confuse our moral principles as to make us capable of cheating our own consciences by putting aside the question of right or wrong in what we have done as a mere “academic question” no longer to be discussed, because it is done, and of readily accepting that which exists, however wrongful, degrading, and dangerous, simply because it exists. I would humbly suggest that this is a rather serious thing for teachers of religion and morality to contemplate. They might earnestly consider whether, when we have done wrong, it is not our Christian duty to right the wrong to the utmost of our power; that this is inexorably demanded by our first responsibility as a nation, and that it would, in the Bishop’s words, indeed, be a “source of national mortification if we gave up that responsibility because we find it difficult.” And this responsibility the imperialists have either not the will or not the courage to meet face to face.

How is that responsibility to be met? No sensible man