Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/268

244 obtained without any criminal aggression, without the atrocities of the Filipino war, simply by treating those people as we have promised to treat the Cubans.

And what is the excuse for this policy of wickedness and blunder? That it was the President's duty to act as he did. Let us see. We will charge him with no undue personal responsibilities. But Senator Lodge, in his speech presenting the nomination, said to him: “The peace you had to make alone. Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, you had to assume alone the responsibility of taking them all from Spain.” Well, then. Was it President McKinley's duty to pervert the war of liberation and humanity which had been so solemnly proclaimed by Congress into a war of conquest, land-grabbing and “criminal aggression”? Was it his duty to betray the Filipinos by using them as serviceable allies, then brutally excluding them from the peace negotiations, and then buying them like a flock of sheep from the defeated “common enemy”? Was it his duty to issue his “benevolent assimilation” order weeks before the ratification of the peace treaty by which, committing a flagrant usurpation of power, he declared war against the Filipinos, and thus provoked that bloody and disgraceful conflict? His duty, indeed! A truly republican President, a President after the pattern of Washington and Lincoln, would unerringly have felt it to be his first duty to remain faithful to the fundamental principles of the Republic; to set his face like flint against any influence demanding their violation; to respect the resolutions put forth by Congress as a morally binding direction to make the Spanish war in truth a war of liberation and humanity, and not a war of selfish aggrandizement; and to treat all the populations with which that war brought us into contact, with that justice and good faith with which we wish to be treated ourselves.