Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/400

376 autocratic rule is wrapped—how it is all for the benefit of our subjects, how we intend to make them free and rich and contented, if they behave themselves. It is the talk of autocrats from time immemorial. I will not question the good faith of the rulers of to-day. But the rulers of to-day will not be the rulers of to-morrow or the day after. The fact remains that this is autocracy, that this autocracy is to determine how much freedom and what kind of government the subject is to have, and that it will determine this according to its own changing pleasure and its temporary conception of its own interests. And when the strugglers for free government—or for “government by the consent of the governed,” which is the same thing—look from their fields of endeavor throughout the world to this Republic for example, guidance and encouragement, our Republican leaders will tell them that we have bravely got over that baby talk about the “consent of the governed,” and that we are lustily engaged in exercising arbitrary government, the powers of which are derived from musketry and cannon.

Some time ago a most imposing array of the intelligence and moral sense of the country coming from the universities, the churches, the bench, the bar, the learned professions and other honorable callings petitioned the Republican National Convention that it should declare itself in favor of an early promise of independence to the people of the Philippines. The petition was not deemed worthy of respectful consideration. Ever since the spokesmen of the Republican party, the President at their head, have been busy hunting up reasons for not making that promise. Had they been equally intent upon finding reasons for making it, they would have discovered that it would be no less easy to recognize the independence of the Philippines than it was to recognize the independence of Cuba; that the cry that the