Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/208

184 of arms and not only to the unscrupulous might of wealth, but also, in a democracy, to the might of numbers becoming unscrupulous? And this is the tendency of imperialism in this democratic republic.

I am by no means blind to the commercial side of the question. I desire the greatest possible commercial expansion, honorably accomplished. And more than once have I argued that all the commercial advantages and naval facilities we can reasonably desire in the Philippines, we might easily have had from the Philippine Islanders if we had faithfully respected their title to independence; and that those advantages would be much more secure with the Filipinos free and friendly than with the Filipinos subjugated and hostile. This argument has never been answered. It never will be. How criminally wanton is it to seek those commercial advantages needlessly at the price of crying injustice to others and fatal demoralization among ourselves—a price we should never pay for anything!

But now I am asked, admitting all this to be true: What can we do, after having gone so far? The case is simple. Indeed, we cannot wake up the dead whose innocent blood has been spilled. We cannot altogether expunge the disgraceful page of history that has been written. But the American people can rise up and declare that the great wrong attempted by misguided men in power in the name of the Republic shall not be consummated; that as we solemnly promised at the beginning of our Spanish war, that war shall stand in history as a war of liberation, and not of conquest; that our government shall recognize the Philippine Islands as free and independent, and that if the present Congress and Executive will not do so, the people will elect a Congress and an Executive who will.

But what will become of the Philippine Islanders if unfit for independent government? Of course, every man