Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/259

Rh or kill our Filipino allies! A war without glory, without enthusiasm, a war for which even those who defend it, have nothing but regret and shamefaced apology. And that war has caused us to keep on foreign soil, under the most noxious climatic influences, breeding disease and death, and under conditions in the most repulsive degree demoralizing, an army more than three times as large as any we had in active field service in the Revolutionary war, in the war of 1812, in the Mexican war or in active operations on the island of Cuba—in short, in any of our wars except our great civil conflict. That war has now lasted more than eighteen months, and no end in sight. The cry is still for more soldiers—100,000 of them, good military authorities say, five times as many as we ever had actively employed in any of our foreign wars; a war costing our taxpayers many scores of millions a year, gradually to mount into the hundreds, besides thousands of American lives and the wreck of the mental and physical as well as the moral health of many more thousands—a war which, the more successful it is, the more it will be demoralizing, disgraceful and dangerous to the American people.

Let me impress it upon your mind. The more successful we are in making the Filipinos our subjects by force of arms, the more will our triumph corrupt our morals, tarnish our honor and undermine our free institutions of government. It is a war not merely against the Filipinos but a war against our own Republic—a war against the principles, the ideals, the beliefs and the conservative influences which hold this democracy together; a war against ourselves as a free people. Never was there a truer word spoken than that of James Russell Lowell—a wise man—when he said that this Republic would endure only so long as it faithfully adhered to the principles of those who had founded it. What he meant was