Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/205

Rh of the young Senator from Indiana, recently delivered in the Senate, a picture of the wealth of the Philippine Islands was unrolled gorgeous enough to make the mouth of the most virtuous pirate water. He looked down with the loftiest pity upon every one who would be so blind as not to lay hold of that wealth if he had a chance; and to make sure that our chance should be fully used, he proposed a system of government for the Philippines so absolutely despotic—a despotism so entirely undiluted with any American idea of human rights—that it would more than satisfy the sternest Russian autocrat. No more brutal appeal to sordid greed, no appeal so utterly hostile to the vital principles of our free institutions, expressed in the most high-sounding verbiage of American patriotism, has ever been addressed to our people. If this be the spirit animating the youth of America, then the great American Republic will soon cease to be an encouragement to the progress of political liberty and become a warning example to all the world.

And this is the spirit of imperialism. I am well aware that some imperialists have protested against the cynicism with which others have appealed to sordid motives, and that the Commission has framed a plan to give the Philippine Islanders a share in their government under American sovereignty. But who will deny that if the motive of pecuniary profit were taken out of the imperialist movement, that movement would lose its vital impulse and speedily collapse? When Colonel Denby, the most influential of the Philippine Commissioners, some time ago publicly declared that we wanted the Philippines for our own profit, and not for their good, and that if we found their possession unprofitable we would drop them and let the Filipinos cut each other's throats if they liked—when he said that, was he not only a little more brutally candid than most of his friends? And can any sane man doubt