OF THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

CALIFOSING

CHAPTER I.

Imperialism To Bless the Conquered.

The demand for absorbing the Philippines is so gross a departure from American principles, a revolution of our national purposes so singular and complete, that it is well to probe down to its real cause. Three motives are offered to sanction the change: Blessing for the peoples absorbed, Duty to the World, and Markets. It can be shown that the first two are but forms of the third -avarice for markets. The commercial market-seekers are adroitly using philanthropic sentiments to win the philanthropic over to their side in order to secure new fields to exploit.

Let us realize the reach of this. It is the culminating stroke of Plutocracy. Even so late as a few years ago it could not have been safely proposed. But Plutocracy is master now, and makes no pause. Imperialism cancels the Constitution and takes the life of popular government: the very ends that plutocracy aims at. The fact of plutocracy has worked enfeeblement of the general mind. Expansion will create the formerly dreaded standing army: Plutocracy foresees and desires it, universal monopoly will need an army against the people. Would this army have been voted five years ago?

Let us consider the three grounds for expansion. Blessing to the people annexed. The leading feature of the blessing will be our capitalists. Do capitalists go out to bless? We have had some opportunities to lift the lowly. Here are our southern blacks. Our blessing there takes the form of denials of the ballot and of ballotbox massacres. What degree of friendly assimilation.

have we achieved?

Is there not ground to fear a general

race war one of these days? Whites of opposite political creeds are obliged to bury their divergences and vote together to prevent negro domination. Current events in the South indicate that there is to be no compromise: "The North Carolina Democrats are trying to find a way to constitutionally disfranchise the negro. A new election law will be passed next year, and the Democrats of the State are endeavoring to frame a constitutional amendment restricting the suffrage as the result of the race strife at the last election. These Democrats are studying the bill for the annexation of the Hawaiian islands. That bill does not grant universal suffrage. By imposing property qualifications, it practically disfranchises the natives, and places the government in the hands of the whites and a few others. The North Carolina Democrats say if Congress can constitutionally adopt this legislation in independent States, they can do the same."

This state of things does not suggest that we are gifted to raise inferior peoples. It would be a delicate question to ask if we shall prepare the Cubans and Filipinos for self-government-the high purpose of which our statesmen are ever speaking-by ballot restrictions denying them a vote. But why not? We do it with "childish' races nearer home. And if we refuse them the practice of self-government how many centuries will it take them to learn it?

Our Indians, too, are a second lesson. Our rule of them has bloomed in robbery and progressive extermination, and behind the swindling officials have stood the moral and military forces of the nation. We may say that it is good for the world that the breath of civilization exterminates such races-some assert this but it shakes the argument of philanthropy. Is it good for them to be exterminated? Does blessing them mean exterminating them? Is this what we mean by saying that we shall lift them up and confer free institutions upon them? Why not be clear on this point before we go out

to reclaim the Filipinos? We should then prove to them, in the altered words of William McKinley, 'that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent extermination, substituting the mild sway of civilizing extinction for arbitrary rule.' They have a very searching right to know what form our blessing is to take, one would think, and to decide whether they care to be blessed in our way.

There is another side-the effect of extermination upon the exterminator. It may be well meant, but is the consciousness of dealing civilizingly with lower human beings in order to obliterate them without crime morally healthy? Surely not. Slave owners were degraded by their relation to the slave; it made them brutal in character and domineering in other relations of life. Any form or degree of domination has a like tendency. It fosters the degrading sense of superiority, contempt, arrogance, aloofness, the domineering spirit, all of which canker the superior man's nature. It prevents the growth of brotherliness-the highest idea of civilization; of equality—the basis of Democratic evolution; of the American spirit—the essence of the American spirit being equal opportunity of development for all.

The influence of an alien race upon the growth of American liberty and the success of our weighty trial in popular government is therefore grave. We ought to see from experience that we have no fitness for governing, assimilating, or uplifting 'derelict' races, and that contact with them in the alleged attempt to do so depraves us.

Hawaii carries the demonstration another step. Have we consulted the will of the native, the real Hawaiian? No. We have listened to the voice of American capitalists who grasped the Hawaiian government and insolently claimed to represent the population of the islands. The will and well-being of the native have influenced our decisions no more than the will of the beasts roaming the Hawaiian jungles.

With this record our solemn concern for the good of