Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/210

186 These are phantom dangers. Neither have we a right to say that the Philippine people must be held to be incapable of independent government if they cannot form an ideal republic, in which liberty and peace and order and honesty will reign in unclouded sunshine. They may easily be as orderly as Kentucky and as honestly governed as the city of New York. What if they have their troubles and turmoils? They may be like some South American republics, or develop into something like the orderly dictatorship in Mexico. Do we question the title of those countries to their independence? Let us not indeed “scuttle away” from the Philippines, like baffled thieves, but assist and protect them until they stand upon their own feet; and if this is done in perfect good faith, difficulties now deemed ever so formidable will vanish like morning mist.

Besides, it is not the most important question how perfect their government will be. More important is it that their government should be their own, and more important still that the American people should not become unfaithful to the fundamental principles of their democracy; that they should not lose their high ideals of liberty, right and justice, and that they should wash from the escutcheon of the Republic the foul blot with which the great perfidy to our late allies has defiled it.

I entreat you soberly to contemplate the alternative now before us. If we permit the great wrong attempted by the Administration to be consummated, our moral credit with the world will be gone forever. Having started in our Spanish war with the solemn proclamation that this would be a war of liberation and not of conquest, and then having turned that war into one of land-grabbing and self-confessed “criminal aggression,” nobody will ever again believe in any profession of virtue or generosity we may put forth. It will be hooted down the world over