Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/182

158 character of their population; coal and other mineral deposits; their harbor and commercial advantages, and in a naval and commercial sense, which would be the most advantageous, etc.

Thus, it appears that the President was then not yet quite certain how far it would be profitable to us that Providence should impose that “unsought” trust upon us. When he had received information which made him think it would be profitable to have the whole archipelago intrusted to us, he instructed our Peace Commissioners at Paris to insist that Spain should cede us the whole. And after a long and arduous wrestle with the representatives of Spain, as described in Senate document no. 62, our Commissioners at last succeeded in extorting from them the cession of what sovereignty Spain had over all those islands, and they agreed that the United States should pay $20,000,000 therefor.

Thus the record shows most conclusively that the conquest of the Philippines was not thrust upon the Administration by a mysterious and overruling power, but that it was deliberately planned with a cool calculation of profit, and that if the business so far has not been as successful as expected, it proves only that the calculation was not quite correct. And when now President McKinley tries to make the American people accept his interpretation that the Philippines were simply “intrusted to our hands by the providence of God,” and that “it is a trust we have not sought,” he has, to say the least, taken liberties with Providence which he may answer for. With the same right Napoleon invading Spain and making one of his brothers king of that country, and Maximilian, made Emperor of Mexico by the bayonets of French invaders, might have piously turned up their eyes, saying that the providence of God had intrusted those countries to their hands, and that it was a trust they had not sought.