Problems of Expansion. As Considered in Papers and Addresses

II

WAS IT TOO GOOD A TREATY?

This speech was made at a dinner given in New York by the Lotos Club in honor of Mr. Reid, who had been its president for fourteen years prior to his first diplomatic service abroad in 1889. It was the first public utterance by any one of the Peace Commissioners after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris.

Among the many letters of regret at the dinner, the following, from the Secretary of State and from his predecessor, were given to the public:

I received your note in due time, and had hoped until now to be able to come and join you in doing honor to my life-long friend, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid; but the pressure of official engagements here has made it impossible for me to do so. I shall be with you in spirit, and shall applaud to the best that can be said in praise of one who, in a life of remarkable variety of achievement, has honored every position he has held.

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your invitation to attend the dinner to be given to the Hon. Whitelaw Reid on the evening of the 11th inst. Nothing would afford me more pleasure than to join the members of the Lotos Club in doing honor to Mr. Reid. It is a source of much regret that circumstances compel me to forego the privilege. His high character and worth, leadership in the best journalism of the day, eminent services, and wide experience long since gave him an honorable place among his contemporaries. The Commission to negotiate the treaty concluded at Paris on December 10 had no more valued member. His fellow-Commissioners were fortunate in being able to avail themselves of Mr. Reid's wide acquaintance with the leading statesmen and diplomats residing in Paris. His presence as a member of the Commission rendered unnecessary any further introduction to those who had known him as our Minister to France. He gave to the work of the Commission in unstinted measure the benefit of his wisdom in council, judgment, and skill in the preparation and presentation of the American case at Paris. Permit me to join you in congratulations and best wishes to Mr. Reid, and to express the hope that there are in store for him many more years of usefulness and honor.

Obviously the present occasion has no narrow or merely personal meaning. It comes to me only because I had the good fortune, through the friendly partiality of the President of the United States, to be associated with a great work in which you took a patriotic interest, and over the ratification of which you use this means of expressing your satisfaction. It was a happy thing for us to be able to bring back peace to our own land, and happier still to find that our treaty is accepted by the Senate and the people as one that guards the honor and protects the interests of the country. Only so should a nation like ours make peace at all.

I shall make no apology—now that the Senate has unsealed our lips—for speaking briefly of this work just happily completed.

The only complaint one hears about it is that we did our duty too well—that, in fact, we made peace on terms too favorable to our own country. In all the pending discussion there seems to be no other fault found. On no other point is the treaty said by any one to be seriously defective.

It loyally carried out the attitude of Congress as to Cuba. It enforced the renunciation of Spanish sovereignty there, but, in spite of the most earnest Spanish efforts, it refused to accept American sovereignty. It loaded neither ourselves nor the Cubans with the so-called Cuban debts, incurred by Spain in the efforts to subdue them. It involved us in no complications, either in the West Indies or in the East, as to contracts or claims or religious establishments. It dealt liberally with a fallen foe—giving him a generous lump sum that more than covered any legitimate debts or expenditures for pacific improvements; assuming the burden of just claims against him by our own people; carrying back the armies surrendered on the other side of the world at our own cost; returning their arms; even restoring them their artillery, including heavy ordnance in field fortifications, munitions of war, and the very cattle that dragged their caissons. It secured alike for Cubans and Filipinos the release of political prisoners. It scrupulously reserved for Congress the power of determining the political status of the inhabitants of our new possessions. It declared on behalf of the most Protectionist country in the world for the policy of the Open Door within its Asiatic sphere of influence.

With all this the Senate and the country seemed content. But the treaty refused to return to Spanish rule one foot of territory over which that rule had been broken by the triumphs of our arms.

Were we to be reproached for that? Should the Senate have told us: "You overdid this business; you looked after the interests of your own country too thoroughly. You ought to have abandoned the great archipelago which the fortunes of war had placed at your country's disposal. You are not exactly unfaithful servants; you are too blindly, unswervingly faithful. You haven't seized an opportunity to run away from some distant results of the war into which Congress plunged the country before dreaming how far it might spread. You haven't dodged for us the responsibilities we incurred."

That is true. When Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, and General Merritt captured the Spanish army that alone maintained the Spanish hold on the Philippines, the Spanish power there was gone; and the civilization and the common sense and the Christianity of the world looked to the power that succeeded it to accept its responsibilities. So we took the Philippines. How could men representing this country, jealous of its honor, or with an adequate comprehension either of its duty or its rights, do otherwise?

A nation at war over a disputed boundary or some other material interest might properly stop when that interest was secured, and give back to the enemy all else that had been taken from him. But this was not a war for any material interest. It was a war to put down a rule over an alien people, which we declared so barbarous that we could no longer tolerate it. How could we consent to secure peace, after we had broken down this barbarous rule in two archipelagos, by agreeing that one of them should be forced back under it?

There was certainly another alternative. After destroying the only organized government in the archipelago, the only security for life and property, native and foreign, in great commercial centers like Manila, Iloilo, and Cebu, against hordes of uncivilized pagans and Mohammedan Malays, should we then scuttle out and leave them to their fate? A band of old-time Norse pirates, used to swooping down on a capital, capturing its rulers, seizing its treasure, burning the town, abandoning the people to domestic disorder and foreign spoliation, and promptly sailing off for another piratical foray—such a band of pirates might, no doubt, have left Manila to be sacked by the insurgents, while it fled from the Philippines. We did not think a self-respecting, civilized, responsible Christian Power could.

There was another side to it. In a conflict to which fifty years of steadily increasing provocation had driven us we had lost 266 sailors on the Maine; had lost at Santiago and elsewhere uncounted victims of Spanish guns and tropical climates; and had spent in this war over $240,000,000, without counting the pensions that must still accrue under laws existing when it began. Where was the indemnity that, under such circumstances, it is the duty of the victorious nation to exact, not only in its own interest, but in the interest of a Christian civilization and the tendencies of modern International Law, which require that a nation provoking unjust war shall smart for it, not merely while it lasts, but by paying the cost when it is ended? Spain had no money even to pay her own soldiers. No indemnity was possible, save in territory. Well, we once wanted to buy Cuba, before it had been desolated by twelve years of war and decimated by Weyler; yet our uttermost offer for it, our highest valuation even then, was $125,000,000—less than half the cost of our war. But now we were precluded from taking Cuba. Porto Rico, immeasurably less important to us, and eight hundred miles farther away from our coast, is only one twelfth the size of Cuba. Were the representatives of the United States, charged with the duty of protecting not only its honor, but its interests, in arranging terms of peace, to content themselves with little Porto Rico, away off a third of the way to Spain, plus the petty reef of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific, as indemnity for an unprovoked war that had cost and was to cost their country $300,000,000?

But, some one exclaims, the Philippines are already giving us more trouble than they are worth! It is natural to say so just now, and it is partly true. What they are worth and likely to be worth to this country in the race for commercial supremacy on the Pacific—that is to say, for supremacy in the great development of trade in the Twentieth Century—is a question too large to be so summarily decided, or to be entered on at the close of a dinner, and under the irritation of a Malay half-breed's folly. But nobody ever doubted that they would give us trouble. That is the price nations must pay for going to war, even in a just cause. I was not one of those who were eager to begin this war with Spain; but I protest against any attempt to evade our just responsibility in the position in which it has left us. We shall have trouble in the Philippines. So we shall have trouble in Cuba and in Porto Rico. If we dawdle, and hesitate, and lead them to think we fear them and fear trouble, our trouble will be great. If, on the other hand, we grasp this nettle danger, if we act promptly, with inexorable vigor and with justice, it may be slight. At any rate, the more serious the crisis the plainer our path. God give us the courage to purify our politics and strengthen our Government to meet these new and grave duties!

III

PURPORT OF THE TREATY

This speech was made, two days after the preceding one, on the invitation of the Marquette Club of Chicago, at the dinner of six hundred which it gave in the Auditorium Hotel, February 13, 1899, in honor of Lincoln's birthday.

Beyond the Alleghanies the American voice rings clear and true. It does not sound, here in Chicago, as if you favored the pursuit of partizan aims in great questions of foreign policy, or division among our own people in the face of insurgent guns turned upon our soldiers on the distant fields to which we sent them. We are all here, it would seem, to stand by the peace that has been secured, even if we have to fight for it.

Neither has any reproach come from Chicago to the Peace Commissioners because, when intrusted with your interests in a great negotiation in a foreign capital, they made a settlement on terms too favorable to their own country—because in bringing home peace with honor they also brought home more property than some of our people wanted! When that reproach has been urged elsewhere, it has recalled the familiar defense against a similar complaint in an old political contest. There might, it was said, be some serious disadvantages about a surplus in the national Treasury; but, at any rate, it was easier to deal with a surplus than with a deficit! If we have brought back too much, that is only a question for Congress and our voters. If we had brought back too little, it might have been again a question for the Army and the Navy.

No one of you has ever been heard to find fault with an agent because in making a difficult settlement he got all you wanted, and a free option on something further that everybody else wanted! Do you know of any other civilized nation of the first or even of the second class that wouldn't jump at that option on the Philippines? Ask Russia. Ask Germany. Ask Japan. Ask England or France. Ask little Belgium!1 And yet, what one of them, unless it be Japan, has any conceivable interest in the Philippines to be compared with that of the mighty Republic which now commands the one side of the Pacific, and, unless this American generation is blinder to opportunity than any of its predecessors, will soon command the other?

Put yourselves for a moment in our place on the Quai d'Orsay. Would you really have had your representatives in Paris, the guardians of your honor in negotiating peace with your enemy, declare that while Spanish rule in the West Indies was so barbarous that it was our duty to destroy it, we were now so eager for peace that for its sake we were willing in the East to reëstablish that same barbarous rule? Or would you have had your agents in Paris, the guardians also of your material interests, throw away all chance for indemnity for a war that began with the loss of 266 American sailors on the Maine, and had cost your Treasury during the year over $240,000,000? Would you have had them throw away a magnificent foothold for the trade of the farther East, which the fortune of war had placed in your hand, throw away a whole archipelago of boundless possibilities, economic and strategic, throw away the opportunity of centuries for your country? Would you have had them, on their own responsibility, then and there decide this question for all time, and absolutely refuse to reserve it for the decision of Congress and of the American people, to whom that decision belongs, and who have the right to an opportunity first for its deliberate consideration?

Your toast is to the "Achievements of American Diplomacy." Not such were its achievements under your earlier statesmen; not such has been its work under the instructions of your State Department, from John Quincy Adams on down the honored line; and not such the work your representatives brought back to you from Paris.

They were dealing with a nation with whom it has never been easy to make peace, even when war was no longer possible; but they secured a peace treaty without a word that compromises the honor or endangers the interests of the country.

They scrupulously reserved for your own decision, through your Congress or at the polls, the question of political status and civil rights for the inhabitants of your new possessions.

They resisted adroit Spanish efforts for special privileges and guaranties for their established church, and pledged the United States to absolute freedom in the exercise of their religion for all these recent Spanish subjects—pagan, Mohammedan, Confucian, or Christian.

They maintained, in the face of the most vehement opposition, not merely of Spain, but of well-nigh all Europe, a principle vital to oppressed people struggling for freedom—a principle without which our own freedom could not have been established, and without which any successful revolt against any unjust rule could be made practically impossible. That principle is that, contrary to the prevailing rule and practice in large transfers of sovereignty, debts do not necessarily follow the territory if incurred by the mother country distinctly in efforts to enslave it. Where so incurred, your representatives persistently and successfully maintained that no attempt by the mother country to mortgage to bondholders the revenues of custom-houses or in any way to pledge the future income of the territory could be recognized as a valid or binding security—that the moment the hand of the oppressor relaxed its grasp, his claim on the future revenues of the oppressed territory was gone. It is a doctrine that raised an outcry in every Continental bourse, and struck terror to every gambling European investor in national loans, floated at usurious profits, to raise funds for unjust wars. But it is right, and one may be proud that the United States stood like a rock, barring any road to peace which led to loading either on the liberated territory or on the people that had freed it the debts incurred in the wars against it. If this is not International Law now, it will be; and the United States will have made it.

But your representatives in Paris placed your country in no tricky attitude of endeavoring either to evade or repudiate just obligations. They recognized the duty of reimbursement for debts legitimately incurred for pacific improvements or otherwise, for the real benefit of the transferred territory. Not till it began to appear that, of the Philippine debt of forty millions Mexican, or a little under twenty millions of our money, a fourth had been transferred direct to aid the war in Cuba, and the rest had probably been spent mainly in the war in Luzon, did your representatives hesitate at its payment; and even then they decided to give a lump sum equal to it, which could serve as a recognition of whatever debts Spain might have incurred in the past for expenditures in that archipelago for the benefit of the people.

They protected what was gained in the war from adroit efforts to put it all at risk again, through an untimely appeal to the noble principle of Arbitration. They held—and I am sure the best friends of the principle will thank them for holding—that an honest resort to Arbitration must come before war, to avert its horrors, not after war, to escape its consequences.

They were enabled to pledge the most Protectionist country in the world to the liberal and wise policy of the Open Door in the East.

And finally they secured that diplomatic novelty, a treaty in which the acutest senatorial critics have not found a peg on which inadmissible claims against the country may be hung.

At the same time they neither neglected nor feared the duty of caring for the material interests of their own country;—the duty of grasping the enormous possibilities upon which we had stumbled, for sharing in the awakening and development of the farther East. That way lies now the best hope of American commerce. There you may command a natural rather than an artificial trade—a trade which pushes itself instead of needing to be pushed; a trade with people who can send you things you want and cannot produce, and take from you in return things they want and cannot produce; in other words, a trade largely between different zones, and largely with less advanced peoples, comprising nearly one fourth the population of the globe, whose wants promise to be speedily and enormously developed.

The Atlantic Ocean carries mainly a different trade, with people as advanced as ourselves, who could produce or procure elsewhere much of what they buy from us, while we could produce, if driven to it, most of what we need to buy from them. It is more or less, therefore, an artificial trade, as well as a trade in which we have lost the first place and will find it difficult to regain. The ocean carriage for the Atlantic is in the hands of our rivals.

The Pacific Ocean, on the contrary, is in our hands now. Practically we own more than half the coast on this side, dominate the rest, and have midway stations in the Sandwich and Aleutian Islands. To extend now the authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding position on the other side of the Pacific—doubling our control of it and of the fabulous trade the Twentieth Century will see it bear. Rightly used, it enables the United States to convert the Pacific Ocean almost into an American lake.

Are we to lose all this through a mushy sentimentality, characteristic neither of practical nor of responsible people—alike un-American and un-Christian, since it would humiliate us by showing lack of nerve to hold what we are entitled to, and incriminate us by entailing endless bloodshed and anarchy on a people whom we have already stripped of the only government they have known for three hundred years, and whom we should thus abandon to civil war and foreign spoliation?