Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/32

8 cannot do the work of the tropical zone, they cannot furnish such a constituency. It is an incontestable and very significant fact that the British, the best colonizers in history, have, indeed, established in tropical regions governments, and rather absolute ones, but they have never succeeded in establishing there democratic commonwealths of the Anglo-Saxon type, like those in America or Australia.

The scheme of Americanizing our “new possessions” in that sense is therefore absolutely hopeless. The immutable forces of nature are against it. Whatever we may do for their improvement, the people of the Spanish Antilles will remain in overwhelming numerical predominance—Spanish Creoles and negroes, and the people of the Philippines, Filipinos, Malays, Tagals and so on—some of them quite clever in their way, but the vast majority utterly alien to us, not only in origin and language, but in habits, traditions, ways of thinking, principles, ambitions—in short, in most things that are of the greatest importance in human intercourse and especially in political coöperation. And under the influences of their tropical climate they would prove incapable of becoming assimilated to the Anglo-Saxon. They would, therefore, remain in the population of this Republic a hopelessly heterogeneous element—in some respects much more hopeless than the colored people now living among us.

What, then, shall we do with such populations? Shall we, according, not indeed to the letter, but to the evident spirit of our Constitution, organize those countries as territories with a view to their eventual admission as states? If they become States on an equal footing with the other states they will not only be permitted to govern themselves as to their home concerns, but they will take part in governing the whole Republic, in governing us,