Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/197

Rh perialists are so anxious to make the American people believe that there would have been no fight in the Philippines had there been no speeches made in the United States against the policy of conquest and subjugation, and that the authors of such speeches are therefore traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Has it been forgotten that the Filipinos have more than once risen against Spanish tyranny long before we took any interest in those islands and their people? Does not this show them capable of rising without any such outside encouragement?

But we are told that to rise against the Americans is quite a different thing; that a majority of the Filipinos really are fond of us, and hail American sovereignty as the satisfaction of a long-felt want; and that there are only a few mischievous leaders whose “sinister ambition,” as the President calls their desire for freedom and independence, has stirred up disorder, and who would soon have desisted had not the speeches of American anti-imperialists encouraged them. I hardly could trust my eyes when I read in the President's annual message this amazing statement: “I had every reason to believe, and I still believe, that this transfer of sovereignty was in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino people.” And this in the face of the fact that we need there for the enforcement of that sovereignty the largest Army this Republic has ever had in active field service, except during our civil war—an Army twice or three times as large as any we had in the Revolutionary war, or in the War of 1812, or in the Mexican war, or in Cuba in the late war—an Army ten times as large as that which is thought necessary to keep order in Cuba now.

Why do we need so tremendous a force? To beat the Filipino army which as our Secretary of War told us, in a speech at Chicago, represented almost too infinitesimally small a portion of the Filipino people to be mathematically