Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/114

90 shape of bullets. Can there be any doubt that the Continental Congress and General Washington would have retorted that, no matter what the French King might have bought, Great Britain had no sovereignty left to sell; that least of all would the Americans permit themselves to be sold; that the French, in so treating their American allies after such high-sounding professions of friendship and generosity, were a lot of mean, treacherous, contemptible hypocrites, and that the Americans would rather die than submit to such wolves in sheep's clothing? And will any patriotic American now deny that, whatever quibbles of international law about possible cessions of a lost sovereignty might be invented, such conduct of the French would have been simply a shame and that the Americans of that time would have eternally disgraced themselves if they had failed to resist unto death? How, then, can the same patriotic American demand that the Filipinos should surrender and accept American sovereignty under circumstances exactly parallel? And that parallel will not be shaken by any learned international law technicalities, which do not touch the moral element of the subject.

It is also pretended that, whatever our rights, the Filipinos were the original aggressors in the pending fight, and that our troops found themselves compelled to defend their flag against assault. What are the facts? One evening early in February last some Filipino soldiers entered the American lines without, however, attacking anybody. An American sentry fired, killing one of the Filipinos. Then a desultory firing began at the outposts. It spread until it assumed the proportions of an extensive engagement in which a large number of Filipinos were killed. It is a well-established fact that this engagement could not have been a premeditated affair on the part of the Filipinos, as many of their officers, including Aguinaldo's