The sum of this episode is that McKinley was merely a political bird out of the same nest as the others, and that when the executive chair is filled by a party politician the country is no safer than a ship with a crazy pilot or a passenger train with a lunatic engineer. Like the rest, the president exhibited himself as a political speculator and nothing more. He held on to his stock of national peace and honor until he thought he would lose if he held it any longer, and then he threw it on the market and stepped from under. The trenchant question to be asked of the American people is why they pay heed to any words of such a political broker when he asserts the benefits and divine destiny of expansion. His acts have already shown that he is merely 'yarning' to fill his political pockets.

Democrats, with usual partisan blindness, may imagine these words to be a partisan attack in their favor. They are not in the least so, but are designed to teach something rather higher than that rusty old saw, 'Turn the old rascals out and put the new rascals in.' In this SpanishPhilippine affair the politician has betrayed his character and given the country a magnificent spectacle of what he is. If the country learns this it will take power out of the politicians' hands, both as congressman and president. Congressmen betrayed us into a needless war because they were politicians, the president succumbed to them at the critical hour and joined them in committing the nation because he was a politician. The personal considerations of these professionals decided that the American people must fight an unnecessary and therefore unjust war, and that they must waste their blood and treasure. Common-sense says that it is ridiculous to give such power into the keeping of such men, and ridiculous to repose it in the care of any men.

On the 19th of April, 1898, the Congress of the United States passed the most remarkable resolution ever adopted by mankind: "First-That the people of the island of Cuba are, and by right ought to be, free and independent." It gave for its reason that Spain was doing the Cubans too much harm in trying to subdue. them, that she was excessively injuring the Cubans in attempting to reimpose her broken sovereignty. Our right to interfere was derived from humanity.

The American executive (McKinley) approved this resolution the next day. It required no struggle of mind for him to see that Cuba was and ought to be free. Congress did not say autonomous, it said independent and McKinley followed. In his message (Dec. 5, 1898,) he explained why congress had a right to declare and make Cuba free. He said: "No alternative, save physical exhaustion of either combatants and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how far distant no one could venture to conjecture." The natives were being exterminated and the island devastated by Spain's military arm, and "the autonomist administration set up in the capital and some of the principal cities appeared not to gain the favor of the inhabitants, nor to be able to extend their influence to the large extent of territory held by the insurgents.' Hence, "In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of

endangered American interests, which give us the right and duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop.'

Thus congress and president took care to erect for themselves a noble monument of humanity and to lay down principles to guide themselves and posterity for all time. They were even more jealous of the breath of suspicion and calumny, and as an invulnerable armor of virtue they projected a fourth resolution into the ear of human selfishness and blood-guiltiness :

"Fourth-That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said island, except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people."

Men could not have bound themselves more inviolably to conduct the war to the end on these principles and to wrest no property from Spain over which an excuse should be found to "exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control." No declaration could have been more absolute and seemingly abiding than that this congress and president would not do unto others as Spain was doing unto us in the body of our brother, Cuba.

Spain of course protested. She believed that the Cubans were unfit for self-government; she thought she was subduing them for their own good, which they or their childrens' children who survived would see; she was confident that her honor demanded that the Cubans should first lay down their arms and unconditionally surrender, before she could treat with them; she regarded Cuba as important for her military and commercial interests; and she held strenuously that no foreign power had a right to interfere with her management of her own. These considerations did not weigh at Washington. They were even considered to be somewhat puerile and fantastic. Washington assured Spain that it wanted

none of her property, but that she could not be allowed to treat her property on those principles; that we must therefore take it away from her, not for ourselves, but for freedom.

There was the possibility that we had omitted the words Porto Rico and Philippines from these sacred principles and promises, so that we might take and keep these provinces, by application of the principles which we refused to allow Spain to apply, and her use of which entitled us to wrest them of her in order to give them freedom and independence. We regarded any one who suspected us of this baseness as an enemy, we said that such libels arose from the vulgar malignity of the Old World mind which could not appreciate any thing generous. One thing impossible for us was to be doublefaced. The general opinion of Europe from the beginning on was finally expressed by W. T. Stead, who had tapped that opinion by wide travel. He gave the Italian idea first, which was unfortunate since that people is so far behind us in liberty and an intelligent comprehension of the sacredness of the plighted word.

"Dislike of the American seizure of the Philippines and a conviction that the humane enthusiasm which made war possible was a mere mask of cant, assumed in order to facilitate conquest, are almost the only sentiments shared in common by the rival camps of the Quirinal and the Vatican. The American declarations are almost universally derided as hideous examples of a worse than English hypocrisy. Uncle Sam, they say, determined in all things to surpass John Bull, has outdone him, even in pharisaism and cant. The friends of America wring their hands in unaffected grief over the fall of the United States, and the temptations of its territorial expansion. Her enemies shoot out the lip and can shriek in derision over what they regard as the unmistakable demonstration which the demand for the Philippines affords of American cupidity, American bad faith, and American ambi

tion. 'We told you so.' they exclaim. That is what the unctuous rectitude of the Anglo-Saxon always ends in. He always begins by calling heaven to witness to his unselfish desire to help his neighbors, but he always ends by stealing their spoons.'... Nor do I think in the whole of our tour through Europe I have met an European who did not receive my protestations as to the genuine sincerity with which the American people entered the war with more or less mocking incredulity.

"It is all very fine,' they say, in effect, 'to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me downstairs? It was all very well to proclaim your disinterestedness, but why did you seize the Philippines?'

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'Mere national brigandage, markedly odious pharisaism,' is a phrase which roughly represents the judgment of the old world on the recent development of the new." This is the opinion of the many. "But there is in every country a minority of thoughtful men who, having for all their lives been the staunchest friends of the American commonwealth, are now confounded and utterly put to shame at what is universally regarded as the apostasy of the United States, the abandonment of their national policy, and the adoption of the world policy of conquest.

It was prophesied by all Europe (fellow-brigand England excepted, and he knew too much to prophesy) that we would do as we did by Spain's possessions, and these opinions of us were in the European air from the date of the first gun. Have we forgotten the intensity with which all these ominous forebodings were scorned and repudiated in Washington? Washington was at that time communing with God. It had its head out of the trapdoor at the apex of cerulean heaven, gazing over the trackless wastes of eternal perfection, its new element, and could not feel these taunting earthly prognostications of its sneaking perfidy. McKinley, Congress

Written by Mr. Stead Nov. 21, 1898.