human actions. The incidental becomes the principle, the temporary the permanent, and the world bows its head in acquiescence before au fait accompli. More than twenty centuries ago Thucydides remarked that war was the last thing in the world to go according to program. We speak of the purposes of a war and propose to confine and limit its results. But when the floodgates of war are once opened man seems able to do but little more than run for a time along the shore and watch the torrent as it breaks new channels and spreads into the most unexpected places. "I claim not to have controlled events," said Lincoln, "but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now at the end of three years' struggle the nation's condition is not what either party or any man desired or expected." The world is never the same after as before a war. "A stricken field," says Lord Salisbury, "is one of the stages upon the road of history, and the state of things that existed before that stricken field can not be the same as that which exists afterward."2 It is not surprising that the Spanish-American War created unexpected conditions and new problems for solution.

The great question whether the United States should take the Philippines from Spain and assume the burden of governing and developing an alien people was seriously and even acrimoniously discussed almost from the day of Dewey's victory. It is probably true that in the beginning a majority of the thoughtful men in the country instinctively shrank from the adoption of a national policy which seemed so remote from anything in the past history of the country.

Doctor Schurman relates that when he was offered the presidency of the first Philippine Commission by President McKinley, he replied, "To be plain, Mr. President, I am opposed to your Philippine policy. I never wanted the Philippines." "Oh," replied the president, “that need not trouble you; I did not want the Philippines either, and in the protocol to the treaty I kept myself free not to take them, but in the end there was no alternative."

2 The Times, Nov. 11, 1898.

To the suggestion that, after reserving suitable naval stations, the islands should be left in the possession of Spain, the president replied that the American people who had gone to war for the emancipation of Cuba would not after Dewey's victory in Manila Bay consent to leave the Filipinos any longer under the dominion of Spain, and that if Spain were driven out and American sovereignty not set up, the peace of the world would be endangered.3

When a few months later the president asked Judge Taft to become the president of the second Philippine Commission, it is said that he was met with substantially the same reply that he had received from Doctor Schurman.

Many distinguished scholars, educators, statesmen, publicists, literary men, poets and philosophers, were saddened by what seemed to them the proposed abandonment of the primary principles upon which the nation had been founded. Some of the arguments which these men advanced against the policy of expansion seemed unanswerable, and yet they were not effective. The speeches delivered by Senator Hoar in the Senate won the respect and admiration of the entire country, but convinced no one who was not already of the same way of thinking. The powerful addresses of Carl Schurz, Moorfield Storey and others were equally admirable and equally unconclusive. It is possible that they were pitched on too high a key and that the speakers neglected the appeal to certain very human traits. The wise man who tells the people of their incapacity generally has a silent audience, while he who flatters is certain of applause.

The extremists predicted that the new policy would lead to glory ineffable or disaster dire and dreadful. The optimists found in it inspiration and encouragement. But the pessimists questioned the source of the inspiration and drew an inference from the incident recorded in the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew: "The devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of

3 Schurman, Philippine Affairs, p. 2. See Olcott's Life of William McKinley, I, Chap. IX, p. 175.

the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

The arguments on both sides were often carried to such extremes as to seem absurd and hysterical. An emotional patriot sobbing over what he thought was the grave of the Declaration of Independence irresistibly reminded the common man of Mark Twain weeping at the grave of Adam. And the harrowing pictures painted by the expansionists of the confusion and the awful results generally which would follow the withdrawal of American troops, were also overdrawn. "What do you suppose the Filipinos would do," dramatically asked Mr. Choate, "if we should withdraw the American troops?" "Well," drawled Speaker Reed, "I don't suppose they would pursue us farther than San Francisco." Unemotional people were reasonably certain that the United States would continue to prosper under either policy.

It was, after all, merely a question of national policy. Neither national life nor liberty was involved. The people were untrammeled by any precedent or principle which forbade them to acquire and hold dependencies, and they took no stock in the assertion that they, the descendants of successful colonists, were incompetent to develop colonies or govern dependencies, or in the theory that the reaction from the attempt would ruin the home country. They knew instinctively the meaning of their political maxims and realized the implied limitation upon the general statements that all men are created free and equal and that government should rest on the consent of the governed. Every reasonably well-informed person knew that the natives of California, Louisiana, Florida, New Mexico and Alaska had not been asked whether they desired to become citizens or subjects of the United States, and that the people of the southern states had, against their will and by force of arms, been compelled to remain within the Union and continue to hear the Declaration of Independence read on each recurring Fourth of July. They realized, also, that in the United States, as elsewhere, there had always been a wide divergence between the precepts of political

philosophy and the practise of politicians. Their histories told them that the leading statesmen of the East, from Daniel Webster and Josiah Quincy to Senator Hoar and his associates, had opposed the territorial expansion of the United States, and the extension of her boundaries west of the Mississippi, as strenuously as they now opposed its extension beyond the Pacific. In fact, the desire for expansion, for bigness, for new lands to develop was a race inheritance. It existed before the Constitution was adopted, and it exists to-day. Democracies are usually aggressive and sometimes intolerant. The American democracy is, and from its birth has been, one of the aggressive nations of the earth. Its territorial expansion has been one of the marvels of the age. It has recognized no line of sea, river or mountain as a permanent boundary. By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of contiguous and non-contiguous territory had become little more than a mere verbal collocation. Facilities for rapid communication had destroyed all such limitations. All the world was contiguous to a farmer's section of land.

With expansion has always gone some form of colonization. When in contact, a higher generally absorbs or destroys a lower civilization. The Germans would reduce this dangerous lesson of history to a natural law. Mommsen says:*

"By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbors who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbors who are in intellectual nonage-by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity, the ancient Italian nation was entitled to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the East which were ripe for destruction, and to dispossess the people of lower grades of culture in the West by means of its settlers; just so England, with equal right, has in Asia reduced to subjection a civilization of rival standing but

4 History of Rome, V, Chap. 8.

Of course the impulse to obey a natural law need not be selfish. If it is a natural law it must in the end operate for the good of humanity. Nature is constantly sacrificing the individual for the benefit of the race. According to Professor Frank's interpretation of the history of Roman expansion, it was not unlike that of America-forced upon the state by considerations neither selfish nor commercial.

Frank, Roman Imperialism (1904).

politically impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled, and still continues to mark and ennoble extensive barbarian countries with the impress of its nationality.

. It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy or monarchy-for the two coincide-to have correctly apprehended and vigorously realized this, its highest destination."

It is a simple observable fact that virile nations are and always have been colonizing nations, and non-expanding and non-colonizing nations generally fall out of the race. Whether it pleases us or not, these things are regulated by some law which the optimist must believe makes for the uplifting of the human race. As said by the writer of an interesting article in The Spectators

"The great races, when the hour of opportunity arrives, expand greatly that is all we really know; and what, when the momentum is on them, they have to care about is to see that their actions, for which they are only half responsible, benefit the world."

With such nations as England, France, Germany, Japan and Italy actively working outward, seeking new worlds to conquer and new fields for the exercise of the superabundant activities of their people, it ought not to have been expected that the American people would be content with the policy of ingrowing development.

No American statesman ever had a keener sense for detecting the currents and drifts of public opinion than President McKinley. What the people really desired he seems to have wanted them to have, regardless of his own private views as to what was best for them.

Under the pressure of public opinion the president had been forced into the war with Spain against his better judgment. Thereafter, however, until the treaty of peace was signed he controlled men and events with a firm hand. Some of the most drastic provisions of the treaty of peace were inserted, under the orders of the president, against the judgment of

5 Jan. 14, 1899. Of course when the lines of expansion meet it becomes merely a question of strength.