Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/529

Rh with. Who will doubt that of all the so-called “foreign votes” this country has ever had, this would be by far the most dangerous? It is useless to hope that this population would gradually assimilate itself to the American people as they now are. It might assimilate itself under the influence of our northern climate, but not in the tropics. In the tropics the Anglo-Saxon race is in the long run more apt to assimilate itself to the Spanish-American than the Spanish-American to the Anglo-Saxon. This is common experience.

The admission as States of the Philippines, the Carolines and so on,—that is, the transformation of “the United States of America” into “the United States of America and Asia,”—would, I suppose, appear too monstrous to be seriously thought of even by the wildest imperialist. Those countries, with an aggregate of about ten million inhabitants, would have to be governed as subject provinces, with no expectation of their becoming self-governing States. This means government without the consent of the governed. It means taxation without representation. It means the very things against which the Declaration of Independence remonstrated, and against which the Fathers rose in revolution. It means that the American people would carry on over large subject populations a kind of rule against which their own government is the most solemn protest. It may be said that those countries and populations cannot be governed in any other way; but is not that the most conclusive reason why this Republic should not attempt to govern them at all?

Against such an attempt there are other reasons hardly less vital. No candid observer of current events in this Republic will deny that the exercise of more or less arbitrary rule over distant countries will be apt to produce most pernicious effects upon our public morals. The