Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/237

Rh to join us, and it would be wrong to repel them. But the question whether a stranger is to be admitted as a member of our family it is our right and our duty to decide according to our own view of the family interest.

We are told that we need coaling stations in different parts of the world for our navy, even if it be a small one, and that the rich resources of the countries within our reach should be open to American capital and enterprise. There is little doubt that we can secure by amicable negotiation sites for coaling stations which will serve us as well as if we possessed the countries in which they are situated. In the same manner we can obtain from and within them all sorts of commercial advantages. We can own plantations and business houses in the Hawaiian Islands. In the American tropics we can build and control railroads; we can purchase mines, and have them worked for our benefit; we can keep up commercial establishments in their towns—in fact, we are now doing many of these things—and all this without taking those countries into our National household on an equal footing with the States of our Union, without exposing our political institutions to the deteriorating influence of their participation in our Government, without assuming any responsibilities for them which would oblige us to forego the inestimable privilege of being secure in our possessions without large and burdensome armaments. Surely the advantages we might gain by incorporating the countries themselves in the Union appear utterly valueless compared with the price this Republic would have to pay for them.

The fate of the American people is in their own wisdom and will. If they devote their energies to the development of what they possess within their present limits, and look for territorial expansion only to the north, where some day a kindred people may freely elect to cast their lot with this Republic, their “manifest destiny” will