Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/399

Rh selfish scheme in the background. How glorious would it have been had this incipient belief in our disinterested magnanimity been sustained and strengthened by what followed! What a pity that while we kept our promise in point of form by not seizing Cuba, we straightway violated it in spirit by making that Spanish war a war of conquest after all, in which, excepting Cuba, we grabbed for ourselves pretty much everything we could lay our hands on! We went even so far as to present to the world the appalling spectacle of shooting down in the Philippines those who had been our allies in the war against Spain, in order to get possession of their country and to subject them to our arbitrary rule, and we called the process in unctuous phrase “benevolent assimilation.” In the war we made upon these late allies hundreds of thousands of them lost their lives, and their homes were burnt and their lands devastated far and wide; and this we pretended to be necessary to keep them from hurting one another in anarchical convulsions which would—as we said, and now say—certainly follow if they were left free. And then we established our colonial system, in which we govern alien and subjected populations by our autocratical rule—foreign rule to them—regulating for them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as it may please us, their foreign conquerors, their sovereign lords and masters. And all this while we know, and hardly any one disputes, that almost every man, woman and child in the Philippines at heart hates the foreign ruler and yearns for independence.

Thus the Republican party, which owed its existence to its belief in the Declaration of Independence, has before all the world hauled down that banner of our faith and has hoisted in its stead the flag of conquest and arbitrary dominion over subject populations. I am well aware of the philanthropic cloak in which this