Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/527

Rh of further conquests, and of the building up of the grand American empire embracing not only all the conquests made in the Spanish war, but reaching down to the Isthmus of Panama, with the islands within reach, and strong enough to meet all those accumulating difficulties.

To do justice to the subject, we have to face this grand imperial conception in its full development; for when once fairly launched, this is the direction in which we shall drift. Imagine, then, the United States to cover that part of America here described, and, in addition, Hawaii, the Philippines and perhaps the Carolines and the Ladrones, and what not,—immense territories inhabited by white people of Spanish descent, by Indians, negroes, mixed Spanish and Indians, mixed Spanish and negroes, Hawaiians, Hawaiian mixed blood, Spanish Filipinos, Malays, Tagals, various kinds of savages and half-savages, not to mention the Chinese and Japanese—at least twenty-five millions in all and all of them animated with the instincts, impulses and passions bred by the tropical sun; and all those people to become Americans!

Some of the most prominent imperialists, by the way, have been in a great flurry about a few thousand immigrants from Italy, Russia and Hungary, because their becoming part of the American people would depress American labor and lower the standards of American citizenship. Now they would take in Spanish- Americans, with all the mixtures of Indian and negro blood, and Malays and other unspeakable Asiatics, by the tens of millions! What will become of American labor and the standards of American citizenship then?

We are vexed by a very troublesome race problem in the United States now. That race problem is still unsolved, and it would be very sanguine to say that there is a satisfactory solution in near prospect. Cool-headed men think that we have enough of that. What will be the