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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 ballot

box 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 Demo-crats 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.

Any

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. 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

the native Filipinos is hollow and fraudulent. There will be grandiloquent vaporings from the pulpit, press and platform, from Congress and President,—already their pious sound has encircled the globe-but the shaping force below rhetoric and piety will be financial desire. Nothing will have any real weight but that.

This argument of our duty to lower races has been cunningly handled by those whose motive is commercial gain. They first appeal to the conscience of the nation, but when conscience and human instincts have been roused and the people have adopted their counsels for the good of humanity, another side of the case is brought out to congeal the public conscience again and restore apathy, whereupon the commercial class can go ahead and do what they please. They have gained their point, the laws they wanted have been passed, and the people forget to repeal them when the commercialists correct themselves and announce that humanity in that instance would be wasted. To make the case

concrete apply it to Cuba or the Philippines. The first act dwells with ostentation upon the inhumanity of leaving a meritorious race in galling servitude; a passion of sympathy is stirred and the oppressed are freed; the second act discovers and bruits abroad the degradation of the liberated people, the public retires into the shell of its disappointed virtue, turning over the worthless savages to the wise men of commerce to discipline and use according to their deserts. The farce is now finished. A protectorate is established, or annexation, and the unworthy race is taken in tutelage for a nameless period. To nervous objections the reply is that it is improper to consider the preferences of semi-savages.

This pious buncoing is proceeding for the confiscation of Porto Rico, the Philippines, and possibly Cuba -for Hawaii the work is already done. The moral and religious 'gag' of elevating the natives is being worked in the usual way to obtain the vote of the churches. When we have absorbed or established our guardian.ship

of the islands, the inciting commercial class will lay religion and humanity aside and resume its native shape of proprietor, speculator and capitalist. The critical question is whether this will be opposed by the moral and religious uplifters. If the aims of the moral and religious were intelligent and serious, were they people of character and force, the commercial exploiters would be sternly faced and held to their promises: but this will not happen. Adjustment will happen. The rapacious commercialists will pronounce the doctrine of total savage depravity, the lifters-up will appreciate that this is reasonable and will gracefully go about saving the souls of the natives whose bodies the capitalists will break.

The principles proceeded upon by the capitalists will be those always applied to inferior labor by employers -long hours, petty remuneration, and no consideration of their well-being. What is left of the natives after this will be turned over to the missionaries to be prepared for death. And the religious party will accept these fag ends of humanity and recite their formulas of doing good, soul-saving and lifting up, showing that the destroyers and the saviors understood each other from the beginning of the annexation drama. The Hawaiian planters have protested that our government must not prevent the importation of alien labor there because their prosperity depends upon an inflow of cheap coolies. What about the well-being of our American citizens, the Hawaiian natives, who must compete with these coolie importations? Will they develop into the kind of men that we like to imagine our citizens are? And was not one of the strong public motives for Hawaiian annexation-before the war motive dispensed with subterfuge our concern for the good of the natives? Consider then the prospects of the Philippine natives if our commercial exploiters exhaust them so rapidly as to require a new stream of coolie Chinese!

Laying aside cant, let us admit that our commercial

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