which they are compelled to follow, so as not to arouse suspicion... Spies never call at the Prefecture, and for this reason the Chiefs of Division have private offices all over Paris in houses exclusively inhabited by police inspectors and employees. The janitor, even, is always a police inspector on the retired list... To give an idea of the magnitude of this system, I can vouch for the fact that each newspaper has its spies; there are spies in all secret societies, among senators and deputies also, and more than one Secretary has in former times drawn from the secret fund.... The first thing the chief of the secret police does, when he wants to keep a close watch on any one, is to secure the services of his mistress, if he has one, and of his servants... As may be expected, nowhere is the secret service better organized than in the Secretary of War's office. Into it flows information from many quarters... From the general staff down, every military official collects information from every available source. Of course, they are not called spies, and indeed would be much offended if classified as such, but in an unofficial way, This organization, it is needless to say, is not peculiar to the French War Department; it is characteristic of all well-regulated armies.”

Now Pinkerton Shaw, get yourself ready for work, you know your duties, ferret out a few anti-armyists and have them shot; you shall then have your breast covered with stars of honor and be appointed Brigadier-General. You will get the stars and honest citizens will get the stripes. "Trust the president,' 'Have a united front for the foreign enemy,' culminates in a Military Inquisition. -America at the service of a secret service system in which all the military officers are spies.

3. Destroy to Redeem.

Hunted from hole to hole for their iniquity, this is one of the last covers of the administration fox. Postpone thinking till I have battered the ungrateful savages into

submission, then through your congress (which I will control) you can deliberate and decide what to do with them. So speaks the wily fox. We know the old liar by this time. The position of our criminal president is this: he refuses to consider any form of mediation, or, indeed, any plan of settlement which does not begin with absolute submission of the insurgents to us, and then only on such terms as he may see fit to grant. This sums up the course of this government in the Philippines, as steered by the executive. Dilating on his usual theme, the flag, the president said recently in Plattsburg, “Wherever it is assailed it will be carried to triumphant peace. That means 'actual submission of the enemy to us.' In proclaiming our possession of the Islands (Dec. 21, '98) he said, all persons who do not honestly submit to the United States "will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity so far as may be possible." He used the words, "Within the absolute domain of military authority, which necessarily is and must remain supreme in the ceded territory until &c." On January 4, '99, in the famous Beneficent Assimilation Proclamation, the president promulgated: "In the fulfilment of this high mission,. there will be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings" of et cetera.

From then till now this has been the administration dinner-bell to call the great Yankee people to their banquet on Filipino flesh.· Unconditional surrender has been the terms of the United States, to recover the lost honor of the assailed flag. The N. Y. Herald's Manila cablegram blazoned on April 28, "Gen. Otis declared tonight that he would listen to nothing except unconditional surrender from the rebels. He says that the peace emissaries objected to this, saying that it would be contrary to the dictates of honor, and that a forced peace would

not be permanent.

Gen. Otis said he regarded the move as a play for time." This was the next great pretext for inducing the people to 'wait' and let McKinley fertilize destiny. The newspaper choir sang:

It may almost be said that the establishment of the authority of this government in the Philippines comprises the sum total of our Philippine policy, so far as it has developed. The chastisement of the belligerent Filipinos is a necessary step in the establishment of American authority, and "all Americans of sound mind must agree" that the establishment of our authority is an all-essential preliminary of our future policy, whatever that policy may be.—April 12, '99.

The time has not yet come for agitating the question as to what we are going to do with the Philippines. There is but one problem immediately before us, and that is the problem which our men on the firing line are solving through dogged persistency and indomitable valor. All other problems relating to the Philippines must wait until this problem-the restoration of peace and good order, and the recognition of our authority as supreme-has been solved. After the guns of our soldiers have been silenced in the pæans of victory, there will be time enough for the jaws of the “educators,” the “reformers,” the politicians, the theorists, the college professors, and other garrulous individuals, to get in their deadly work-May 5, '99.

If whoever sings out of tune with McKinley is a garrulous individual doing deadly work, we must be allowed to think that the future policy is very much settled. A cabinet officer stated to a newspaper man that ‘the government would employ every dollar and every man necessary to bring the islands under the dominion of the United States, and that when the insurgents have recognized the power of the United States the question of their future status will be taken up and discussed.' (In April.)

The question which we raise is whether this plea of the duty and necessity of reducing the Filipinos to submission. is made honestly or is one more trick of the artful dodger to install imperialism without consent of the people? As usual we can settle this question and condemn the dodger out of his own mouth. In McKinley's message to congress advising war upon Spain,* reciting his reasons for intervening with force, he reviewed the effort of 'my predecessor to bring about a peace through the media

*Of April 11, 1898.

tion of this government in any way that might tend to an honorable adjustment of the contest between Spain and her revolting colony,' and said: "It failed, through the refusal of the Spanish government, then in power, to consider any form of mediation, or, indeed, any plan of settlement which did not begin with the actual submission of the insurgents to the mother country, and then only on such terms as Spain herself might see fit to grant. The war continued unabated." He reprobates this haughty course on Spain's part and pursues it himself. 'Wherever our flag is assailed,' says he, 'it will be carried to triumphant peace.' Spain stood on the same scaffolding, and, goaded by congress, McKinley knocked out the props. Now he has rebuilt the scaffolding and named it an eternal principle of American liberty.

"The people of the United States are an unselfish people. They have never sought territorial accessions, except to the benefit of the peoples that come with it." This was said by Alger last May at a meeting of Michigan Sons of Revolution. He was applauded, and gen. Merritt, who followed, spoke of him as 'the best Secretary of War the world had ever seen.' If we took the Filipino territory to 'benefit the people are we now whipping them for their benefit, or because we are ‘offended' with them for claiming their own? Here is the causal chain: We seized the Philippines as a property-grab and called it for the people's benefit; that was a very 'thin' excuse, and as soon as the natives resisted us we gladly embraced another reason. The new one is, boiled down, pure and simple revenge. But it is revenge as the needed pretext for hanging on to the stolen goods. The Portland Oregonian expounds it:

"Had they not armed against us and attempted to destroy or expel our forces; hd they claimed national independence in a dignified appeal to us, before the bar of the world, and given us time to make adjustment of affairs in accord with the many obligations into which we had entered; had they shown by their dignity, self-control and forbearance that they were able to establish and maintain a govern

ment, we could not have stayed, we should not have wanted to stay. But their attempt to destroy or to expel our people made another matter of it. A nation like ours has one treatment for those who choose to be its friends; another for aggressive and insolent foes. Now we are going to crush this uprising. The nation, placed in such a position, that would not stand its ground, but flunk and slink away, would present a spectacle fit for the jeers of the world and the vengeance of history. The first thing to do in the Philippines is to punish our assailants and" etc. "For the present the prosecution of the war that was forced upon us is our necessary business there; and we have far greater reason to push this war and to punish our assailants than we had to make war on Spain, for Spain had not done us one-half the injury that has been heaped on us through treachery, insult and ingratitude by these semi savage rascals whom some of our people of peculiar mental constitution so much admire."

For most people the reading of this will be annihilation of respect for the whole framework of our destruction motives for redemption's sake. Revenge is acknowledged. They have insulted us and they shall die. We are punishing them because we now hate them, and we hate them because they resented our bullying and robbing. There is no more 'for their good' about it. Now we are fully justified in robbing them-this is the wonderful finality. We now rob them to punish them for resisting being robbed in the first place. If, says the Oregonian, they had shown dignity and requested us to leave (after McKinley had proclaimed that they must absolutely submit), we should have left, we could not have stayed, we should not have wanted to stay.' But after McKinley had ordered them to hand out all their property unconditionally, and they had refused by resisting, the whole moral situation is altered. Now they must be ground to powder, now they are insolent rascals whom we must not only whip beastially but rob completely, to prove to them that when we set about robbing, anyone who opposes us ungratefully insults us and shall be robbed totally in castigation. Is this a new trick with us? No, the same course was taken when we were thinking of forcible appropriation of Cuba, and it seemed that the Cubans would resist. Then the papers said, "This, it must be confessed, is a highly interesting development of the