Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/257

Rh had? Is it not evident to the plainest understanding that all the objects mentioned by President McKinley might have easily been attained—indeed, in some respects more easily—if we, according to the fundamental principles upon which our own Republic is based, had recognized that right?

And why did not President McKinley recognize that right of the Philippine Islanders? Because, as he said in his instruction to his Peace Commissioners reported in his letter of acceptance, “We must either hold the Philippine Islands or turn them back to Spain.” What? Did no other alternative present itself to his mind? Did it never occur to the President of the American Republic, sprung from the Declaration of Independence, that there was another alternative which should at the very start have suggested itself to a Republican President as the most natural namely, to let them, according to our own precedent and that of Cuba, have an independent government of their own? Why should it not, just as in the case of Cuba? Can anybody tell?

Indeed, the spectacle of an American President who, when he had to deal with a people striving for freedom and independence and had so successfully thrown off the Spanish yoke, jumped at the conclusion that there was nothing else to do than either to return them to Spanish foreign rule or to subject them to American foreign rule—foreign rule at all events—but that the freedom and independence they had fought for could not at all be thought of—and this after a war we had with proud profession begun for the liberation of the oppressed—the spectacle presented by such an American President would only three years ago have excited the indignation of the whole American people. Who will gainsay this?

In the third place, President McKinley, in his letter of acceptance, has much to say of mysterious “responsi-