Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/206

182 that, whatever plans of imperial government may be devised, the rule of our race over another which we consider inferior will always be essentially arbitrary and consistently beneficent only when selfish interest permits it?

Listen to the wail of misery and despair coming from the Porto Ricans who were promised liberty and happiness under the American flag! Do not now powerful interests demand a policy which means to them poverty and oppression? Now, was there ever a sound reason why we should have wanted that possession, unless it were to get a naval station which we might easily have had on some other little island without much population? May we not well ask whether it would not be much better for our own comfort, as well as for the Porto Ricans, to let them go free and help them form a confederation of the Antilles with Cuba, Hayti and San Domingo?

And can you be blind to the effects which the tendencies of imperialism are already exercising among ourselves upon the popular mind? Do you not hear the scoffing levity with which the Declaration of Independence and the high ideals of liberty and human rights which so long have been sacred to our people, are made sport of; how the teachings of Washington and Lincoln are derided as antiquated nursery rhymes, and how the Constitution, when it stands in the way of grasping schemes, is lightly brushed aside with the flippant word, that constitutions are made for men and not men for constitutions?

It cannot be repeated too often that there are things which may be done by monarchical or aristocratic governments without making them less strong as monarchies or aristocracies, but which cannot be done by a democracy based upon universal suffrage, without fatally demoralizing it as a democracy; and that one of those things is the arbitrary ruling of foreign populations as subjects. By