Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/242

218 San Domingo was offered to us, the offer was rejected by an overwhelming public opinion, mainly because it was believed that that tropical country and its present and prospective inhabitants were not fit to come under our Constitution, while they could not be permanently governed outside of it.

“Expansion,” then, in the historical and truly American sense, means the extension of our Constitutional system together with the extension of our territorial area. In this sense we are all expansionists, provided the expansion be honorably effected. And if in the course of events our northern neighbors, a people like our own and practiced in self-government, should express a wish to join this Union—a consummation which our present policy of imperialistic adventure is apt rather to put off than to bring on—we all would welcome them with heart and hand.

But when we annex to this Republic foreign territory, especially territory in the tropics which, owing to climatic conditions, can never be settled by our own or homogeneous people, with the intent and expectation that such territory shall never come into our Constitutional system, but shall as to the civil, political and economic status permanently depend upon the will of our central Government in which they are to have no determining share, those countries thus being vassal provinces, and their people subject populations, that is not mere expansion, in the historic American sense, but that is imperialism. And when such countries are annexed and such populations are subjected by force of arms—by what President McKinley has very properly called “criminal aggression”—it is imperialism in its worst form. Whoever calls this imperialism a mere bugbear is either grossly deceived or a gross deceiver.

Will anybody deny that this applies to our rule over