Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/508

484 must have those islands; and having shaken off all mawkish sentimentality as to the keeping of faith and as to the “criminality,” according to President McKinley, of “forcible annexation,” we shall just take Santo Domingo and the negro republic of Hayti. As to Cuba, our promise will not stand in the way of superior reasons for making that island a part of our Union. One of those reasons has already found expression. Not long ago I read in a newspaper—and you can hear the same kind of talk from many people—that if the Cubans, having had their chance, show themselves incapable of governing themselves, we must of course annex that island and make a couple of States of it. In other words, if the Cubans are hopelessly incapable of orderly self-government, we must permit them to help govern our own country.

Well, these annexations accomplished, we shall have another lot of over 2,000,000 Spanish-Americans and negroes, who will probably send six or eight Senators and something like twelve to fifteen Representatives into Congress and command over twenty votes in the Electoral College, together with Porto Rico about thirty. That will be a political force five times as great in the Senate and nearly as great in the Electoral College as that of the State of New York—a force, if sticking together, strong enough frequently to hold the balance of power and to dictate its terms to the traders of our political parties.

But we shall hardly stop there. Being once fairly started in the career of aggrandizement regardless of consequences, our imperialists will find an open ear when they tell us that our control of the Nicaragua canal cannot possibly be safe unless that canal be bordered on both sides by United States territory, and that therefore we must have the whole country down to that canal and a good piece beyond. That would bring us another lot of about 13,000,000 of Spanish-Americans mixed with