Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/241

Rh Constitution. It was therefore not mere expansion of our territorial domain to be perpetually ruled by our arbitrary will, but it was essentially an intended, and in the course of time practical, extension of our Constitutional system in entire accord with the fundamental principles of our democracy.

The only apparent exception to this rule was the annexation of Alaska—but that, too, only apparent, not real; for Alaska may be inhabited by a population of our own; and when the development of that territory has sufficiently progressed and its population becomes numerous enough, its claim to full Constitutional statehood will, no doubt, be readily recognized.

Some imperialists pretend that the purchase of Louisiana by Jefferson and the legislation connected with it furnish a precedent fully covering the principles of Mr. McKinley's policy with regard to Porto Rico and the Philippines. This I emphatically deny. Whatever that temporary legislation may have been, is there anybody brazen enough to assert—and this is the essential, the true point—that it was the spirit and intent of Jefferson's act and of the legislation referring to it, to hold the acquired territory perpetually as a vassal dependency outside of our Constitutional system subject to arbitrary rule by the President or Congress? Does anybody dare to deny that it was the understood intent and expectation that the territory of Louisiana would be filled by people substantially our own who would form out of it American States clothed with the full measure of Constitutional rights? Whoever denies this or equivocates about it, only seeks to falsify history, to slander Thomas Jefferson and to deceive the American people.

Nay, so little did the American people, until recently, mean to expand our territory without purposing correspondingly to extend our Constitutional system that, when