Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/113

Rh inal aggression”? But if we had thrown aside our code of morals, we had then not conquered more than the bay and city of Manila. The rest of the country was controlled, if by anybody, by the Filipinos. Or was it the right of possession by treaty? I have already shown that the President ordered the enforcement of our sovereignty over the archipelago before the treaty had by ratification gained legal effect, and also that, in making that treaty, we had bought something called sovereignty which Spain had ceased to possess and could therefore not sell and deliver. But let me bring the matter home to you by a familiar example.

Imagine that in our revolutionary times, France, being at war with England, had brought to this country a fleet and an army, and had, without any definite compact to that effect, coöperated as an ally with our revolutionary forces, permitting all the while the Americans to believe that she did this without any mercenary motive, and that, in case of victory, the American colonies would be free and independent. Imagine then that, after the British surrendered at Yorktown, the King of France had extorted from the British King a treaty ceding, for a consideration of $20,000,000, the sovereignty over the American colonies to France, and that thereupon the King of France had coolly notified the Continental Congress and General Washington that they had to give up their idea of National independence, and to surrender unconditionally to the sovereignty of France, wherefor the French King promised them “benevolent assimilation.” Imagine, further, that upon the protest of the Americans that Great Britain, having lost everything in the colonies except New York City and a few other little posts, had no sovereignty to cede, the French King answered that he had bought the Americans at $5 a head, and that if they refused to submit he would give them benevolent assimilation in the