Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/191

Rh ingly while we accepted their aid as our allies, constituted a promise so complete and morally so binding that it is difficult to understand how any honest man can so forget himself as to question it.

And thus when the Spaniards were thoroughly defeated everywhere, and Manila was taken, and our Filipino allies were of no further practical use to us, the Administration instructed our Peace Commissioners in Paris to obtain from Spain the cession of her sovereignty over the Philippines, not to the people of those islands, but to the United States. Now I shall show, I trust, to the satisfaction of every candid mind, that this proceeding involved on our part the grossest betrayal of our own professed principles, and one of the most glaring self-stultifications ever committed by any government. When we made war upon Spain for the liberation of Cuba, we could not, and did not, deny that Spain, historically, possessed the sovereignty of Cuba. But we maintained that Spain by her tyrannical and oppressive misgovernment had morally forfeited that sovereignty; that she had ceased to possess it as a matter of right, and that, although the Spanish forces were still in actual occupation of the principal cities and harbors, and of a very large portion of the interior of the island, the people of Cuba, having risen up against Spanish misrule, had won the right of sovereignty for themselves. We therefore solemnly declared in that famous resolution of Congress, not merely that Spain must be driven out of Cuba, but that the people of Cuba “of right ought to be and are free and independent”—that is, that the sovereignty of Spain over Cuba was no longer valid, but of right ought to be possessed, and actually was possessed, by the Cuban people themselves.

How does this bear upon the case of the Philippines? It is a fact, not questioned by anybody, that Spanish sovereignty was historically no better founded in the