Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/37

Rh The land greed of the Anglo-Saxon race is still at work. We have absorbed the best part of Mexico, but we have plenty of propagandists, mainly in the Army, and with influential voice near the head of the Government, clamorous for the rest. We have taken a foothold in the West Indies; it will be of God's mercy if we do not find the whole West Indian archipelago crowded upon us to tax an already overloaded digestion. What are we to do with the turbulent, treacherous, ill-conditioned population? They have shown no faculty for self-government hitherto; and are we to precipitate them in a mass into the already sufficiently degraded elements of our National suffrage? We are trying the powers of Anglo-Saxon self-governing digestion upon three millions of slaves; are the gastric juices of the body-politic equal to the addition of the Mexicans, the Santo Domingans, the Cubans, the “Conks” of the Bahamas, the Kanakas and the rest of the inferior mixed races of our outlying tropical and semi-tropical dependencies?

As Mr. Reid now advocates the annexation of Porto Rico and the Philippines, he must have changed his opinion, which he had a right to do. But I think he substantially spoke the truth then, and if he now wants the Philippines, his case clearly illustrates how far people will be carried by the expansion fever when it once fairly takes hold of them.

You may think that the introduction of more than thirty men in our Senate, over eighty in the lower house of our Congress and much over one hundred votes in our Electoral College, to speak and act for the mixture of Spanish, French and negro blood on the West India Islands, and for the Spanish and Indian mixture on the continent South of us—for people utterly alien and mostly incapable of assimilation to us in their tropical habitation—to make our laws and elect our Presidents, and incidentally to help us lift up the Philippines to a higher plane