Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/136

112 faith will be required. Keep your conquests, and no such assurances will avail. Our southern neighbors, no less than the Filipinos, will then inevitably distrust our professions, fear our greed and become our secret or open enemies. And who can be foolish enough to believe that this will strengthen our power and help our commerce?

It is useless to say that the subjugated Philippine Islanders will become our friends if we give them good government. However good that government may be, it will, to them, be foreign rule, and foreign rule especially hateful when begun by broken faith, cemented by streams of innocent blood and erected upon the ruins of devastated homes. The American will be and remain to them more a foreigner, an unsympathetic foreigner, than the Spaniard ever was. Let us indulge in no delusion about this. People of our race are but too much inclined to have little tenderness for the rights of what we regard as inferior races, especially those of darker skin. It is of ominous significance that to so many of our soldiers the Filipinos were only “niggers,” and that they likened their fights against them to the “shooting of rabbits.” And how much good government have we to give them? Are you not aware that our first imperialistic Administration is also the first that, since the enactment of the civil service law, has widened the gates again for a new foray of spoils politics in the public service? What assurance have we that the Philippines, far away from public observation, will not be simply a pasture for needy politicians and for speculating syndicates to grow fat on, without much scruple as to the rights of the despised “natives”? Has it not been so with the British in India, although the British monarchy is much better fitted for imperial rule than our democratic Republic can ever be? True, in the course of time the government of India has been much improved, but it required more than a century of slaughter, rob-