Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/111

Rh liament of Japan—an infinitely better government than the insurrectionary government of Cuba ever was.

It is said that Aguinaldo's government was in operation among only a part of the people of the islands. This is true. But it is also certain that it was recognized and supported by an immeasurably larger part of the people than Spanish sovereignty, which had practically ceased to exist, and than American rule, which was confined to a harbor and a city, and which was carried on by the exercise of military force under what was substantially martial law over a people that constituted about one-twentieth of the whole population of the islands. Thus, having brought but a very small fraction of the country and its people under our military control, we bought by that treaty the sovereignty over the whole from a Power which had practically lost that sovereignty, and therefore did no longer possess it; and we contemptuously disdained to consult the existing native government, which actually did control a large part of the country and people, and which had been our ally in the war with Spain. The sovereignty we thus acquired may well be defined as Abraham Lincoln once defined the “popular sovereignty” of Senator Douglas's doctrine—as being like a soup made by boiling the shadow of the breastbone of a pigeon that had been starved to death.

No wonder that treaty found opposition in the Senate. Virulent abuse was heaped upon the “statesman who would oppose the ratification of a peace treaty.” A peace treaty? This was no peace treaty at all. It was a treaty with half a dozen bloody wars in its belly. It was, in the first place, an open and brutal declaration of war against our allies, the Filipinos, who struggled for freedom and independence from foreign rule. Every man not totally blind could see that. For such a treaty the true friends of peace could, of course, not vote.