Problems of Expansion Part 10

This address was delivered on Charter Day at the University of California, on March 23, 1900.

OUR NEW INTERESTS

My subject has been variously stated in your different newspapers as "Current National Questions," or "The Present National Question," or "General Expositions; Not on Anything in Particular." When your President honored me with his invitation to a duty so high and so sudden that it might almost be dignified by the name of a draft, he gave me nearly equal license. I was to speak "on anything growing out of the late war with Spain."

How that war resembles the grippe! You remember the medical definition by an authority no less high than our present distinguished Secretary of State. "The grippe," said Colonel Hay, "is that disease in which, after you have been cured, you get steadily worse every day of your convalescence"! There are people of so little faith as to say that this exactly describes the late war with Spain.

If one is to speak at all of its present aspects, on this high-day of your University year, he should do so only as a patriot, not as a partizan. But he cannot avoid treading on ground where the ashes are yet warm, and discussing questions which, in spite of the present intermingling of party lines and confusion of party ideas, will presently be found the very battle-ground of campaign oratory and hostile hosts. You will credit me, I hope, with sufficient respect for the proprieties of this platform to avoid partizan arguments, under the warrant of your distinguished President to discuss national questions from any point of view that a patriot can take. It is profoundly to be regretted that on these questions, which pure patriotism alone should weigh and decide, mere partizanship is already grasping the scales. One thing at least I may venture to promise before this audience of scholars and gentlemen on this Charter Day of your great University: I shall ask the Democrat of the present day to agree with me no farther than Thomas Jefferson went, and the Republican of the day no farther than Abraham Lincoln went. To adapt from a kindred situation a phrase by the greatest popular orator of my native State, and, I still like to think, one of the greatest of the country in this century,--a phrase applied by him to the compromise measures of 1848, but equally fitting to-day,--"If we are forced to part company with some here whom it has been our pleasure and pride to follow in the past, let us console ourselves by the reflection that we are following in the footsteps of the fathers and saviors of the Republic, their garments dyed with the blood of the Red Sea, through which they led us out of the land of bondage, their locks still moist with the mists of the Jordan, across which they brought us to this land of liberty."[16]

[16] Thomas Corwin of Ohio, in United States Senate, 1848.

[Sidenote: To be Taken for Granted now.]

Yet, even with those from whom we must thus part company there are elemental truths of the situation on which we must still agree. Some things reasonable men may take for granted--some that surely have been settled in the conflict of arms, of diplomacy, and of debate since the spring of 1898. Regret them if you choose, but do not, like children, seek to make them as though they were not, by shutting your eyes to them.

The new territories in the West Indies and the East are ours, to have and to hold, by the supreme law of the land, and by a t.i.tle which the whole civilized world recognizes and respects. We shall not speedily get rid of them--whoever may desire it. The American people are in no mood to give them back to Spain, or to sell them, or to abandon them.

We have all the power we need to acquire and to govern them. Whatever theories men may quote from Mr. Calhoun or from Mr. Chief Justice Taney, the uniform conduct of the National Administration throughout a century, under whatever party, justifies the triumphant declaration of Daniel Webster to Mr. Calhoun, over half a century ago, and the consenting opinions of the courts for a long term since, down to the very latest in the line, by your own Judge Morrow, to the effect, in a word, that this Government, like every other one in the world, has power to acquire "territory and other property" anywhere, and govern it as it pleases.[17]

[17] Over a month after the above was delivered came the first recent judicial expression of a contrary view. It was by Judge William Lochren of the United States Circuit Court at St. Paul, in the case of habeas corpus proceedings against Reeve, warden of the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, for the release of a Porto Rican named Ortiz. He was held for the murder of a private soldier of the United States, sentenced to death by a Military Commission at San Juan, and, on commutation of the sentence by the President of the United States, sent to this State Prison for life. Judge Lochren denied the writ on the ground that the conviction took place before the Treaty of Paris, by which Spain ceded sovereignty in Porto Rico to the United States, had been ratified by the Senate. The Judge went on, however, to argue that Ortiz could not have been lawfully tried before the Military Commission after the ratification of the treaty, because the island of Porto Rico thereby became an integral part of the United States, subject to the Const.i.tution and privileged and bound by its provisions. As this point was not involved in the case he was deciding, this is, of course, merely a dictum--the expression of opinion on an outside matter by a Democratic judge who was recently transferred by Mr. Cleveland from a Washington bureau to the bench. It clearly shows, however, what would be his decision whenever the case might come before him. His argument followed closely the lines taken by Mr. Calhoun in the Senate and Mr. Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision.

On these points I make bold to repeat what I felt warranted in saying a fortnight ago within sight of Bunker Hill--that there is every evidence that the American people have distinctly and definitely made up their minds. They have not been persuaded and they cannot be persuaded that this is an inferior government, incapable of any duty Providence may send its way--duties which other nations could discharge, but we cannot. So I venture to affirm the impossibility that any party in power, whether the present one or its opponent, could soon, if ever, abandon one foot of the territory gained in the late war.

We are gathered on another old Spanish territory taken by our country in war. It shows what Americans do with such acquisitions. Before you expect to see Porto Rico given back to Spain or the Philippines abandoned to Aguinaldo, wait till we are ready to declare, as Daniel Webster did in the Senate, that this California of your pride and glory is "not worth a dollar," and throw back the worthless thing on the hands of unoffending Mexico. Till then, let us as practical and sensible men recognize that what is past is settled.

[Sidenote: Duty First; but then Interest also.]

Thus far have we come in these strange courses and to these unexpected and unwelcome tasks by following, at each succeeding emergency, the path of clear, absolute, and unavoidable duty. The only point in the whole national line of conduct, from the spring of 1898 on to this March morning of 1900, at which our Government could have stopped with honor, was at the outset. I, for one, would gladly have stopped there.

How was it then with some at the West who are discontented now? Shake not your gory locks at me or at my fellow-citizens in the East. You cannot say we did it. In 1898, just as a few years earlier in the debate about Venezuela, the loudest calls for a belligerent policy came not from the East, "the cowardly, commercial East," as we were sometimes described, but from the patriotic and warlike West. The farther West you came, the louder the cry for war, till it reached its very climax on what we used to call the frontier, and was sent thundering Eastward upon the National Capital in rolling reverberations from the Sierras and the Rockies which few public men cared to defy. At that moment, perhaps, if this popular and congressional demand had not pushed us forward, we might have stopped with honor--certainly not later. From the day war was flagrant down to this hour there has been no forward step which a peremptory national or international obligation did not require. To the mandate alone of Duty, stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d, the American people have bowed, as, let us hope, they always will. It is not true that, in the final decision as to any one step in the great movement hitherto, our interests have been first or chiefly considered.

But in all these const.i.tutional discussions to which we have referred, one clause in the Const.i.tution has been curiously thrust aside. The framers placed it on the very forefront of the edifice they were rearing, and there declared for our instruction and guidance that "the people do ordain and establish this Const.i.tution ... to promote the general welfare." By what right do statesmen now venture to think that they can leave our national interests out of the account? Who and where is the sentimentalist who arraigns us for descending to too sordid a level when we recognize our interest to hold what the discharge of duty has placed in our hand? Since when has it been statesmanship to shut our eyes to the interests of our own country, and patriotism to consider only the interests or the wishes of others? For my own part, I confess to a belief in standing up first for my own, and find it difficult to cherish much respect for the man who won't: first for my own family rather than some other man's; first for my own city and State rather than for somebody else's; first for my own country--first, please G.o.d! for the United States of America. And so, having in the past, too fully, perhaps, and more than once, considered the question of our new possessions in the light of our duty, I propose now to look at them further, and unblushingly, in the light of our interests.

[Sidenote: The Old Faith of Californians.]

Which way do your interests lie? Which way do the interests of California and the city of San Francisco lie?

Three or four days ago, when your President honored me with the summons I am now obeying, there came back to me a vague memory of the visions cherished by the men you rate the highest in California, your "Pioneers" and "Forty-Niners," as to the future of the empire they were founding on this coast. There lingered in my mind the flavor at least of an old response by a California public man to the compliment a "tenderfoot" New-Yorker, in the innocence of his heart, had intended to pay, when he said that with this splendid State, this glorious harbor, and the Pacific Ocean, you have all the elements to build up here the New York of the West. The substance of the Californian's reply was that, through mere lack of knowledge of the country to which he belonged, the well-meaning New-Yorker had greatly underrated the future that awaited San Francisco--that long before Macaulay's New-Zealander had transferred himself from the broken arches of London Bridge to those of Brooklyn, it would be the pride and boast of the denizens of those parts that New York had held its own so finely as still to be fairly called the San Francisco of the East!

While the human memory is the most tenacious and nearest immortal of all things known to us, it is also at times the most elusive. Even with the suggestions of Mr. Hittell and the friendly files of the Mechanics'

Library, I did not succeed in finding that splendid example of San Francisco faith which my memory had treasured. Yet I found some things not very unlike it to show what manner of men they were that laid the foundations of this commonwealth on the Pacific, what high hopes sustained them, and what radiant future they confidently antic.i.p.ated.

Here, for example, was Mr. William A. Howard, whom I found declaring, not quite a third of a century ago, that San Francisco would yet be the largest American city on the largest ocean in the world. At least, so he is reported in "The Bulletin" and "The Call," though "The Alta" puts it with an "if," its report reading: "If the development of commerce require that the largest ocean shall have the largest city, then it would follow that as the Atlantic is smaller than the Pacific, so in the course of years New York will be smaller than San Francisco."

And here, again, was Mr. Delos Lake, maintaining that the "United States is now on a level with the most favored nations; that its geographical position, its line of palatial steamers established on the Pacific Ocean by American enterprise, and soon to be followed by ocean telegraphs, must before long render this continent the proper avenue of commerce between Europe and Asia, and raise this metropolis of the Pacific to the loftiest height of monetary power."

There was a reason, too, widely held by the great men of the day, whose names have pa.s.sed into history, for some such faith. Thus an old Californian of high and happy fame, Major-General Henry W. Halleck, speaking of San Francisco, said: "Standing here on the extreme Western verge of the Republic, overlooking the coast of Asia and occupying the future center of trade and commerce of the two worlds,... if that civilization which so long has moved westward with the Star of Empire is now, purified by the principles of true Christianity, to go on around the world until it reaches the place of its origin and makes the Orient blossom again with its benign influences, San Francisco must be made the abutment, and International Law the bridge, by which it will cross the Pacific Ocean. The enterprise of the merchants of California has already laid the foundation of the abutments; diplomacy and steam and telegraph companies are rapidly acc.u.mulating material for the construction of the bridge." Thus far Halleck. But have the Californians of this generation abandoned the bridge? Are we to believe those men of to-day who tell us it is not worth crossing?

Here, again, was Eugene Ca.s.serly, speaking of right for the California Democracy of that date. Writing with deliberation more than a quarter of a century ago, he said: "We expect to stand on equal grounds with the most favored of nations. We ask no more in the contest for that Eastern trade which has always heretofore been thought to carry with it the commercial supremacy of the globe. America asks only a fair field, even as against her oldest and most formidable rivals. Nature, and our position as the nearest neighbors to eastern Asia, separated from her only by the great highways of the ocean, have placed in our hands all the advantages that we need.... Favored by vicinity, by soil and climate on our own territory, with a people inferior to none in enterprise and vigor, without any serious rivals anywhere, all this Pacific coast is ours or is our tributary.... We hold as ours the great ocean that so lately rolled in solitary grandeur from the equator to the pole. In the changes certain to be effected in the currents of finance, of exchange, and of trade, by the telegraph and the railroads, bringing the financial centers of Europe and of the United States by way of San Francisco within a few weeks of the ports of China and of the East, San Francisco must become at no distant day the banker, the factor, and the carrier of the trade of eastern Asia and the Pacific, to an extent to which it is difficult to a.s.sign limits." Are the people now lacking in the enterprise and vigor which Mr. Ca.s.serly claimed for them? Have the limits he scorned been since a.s.signed, and do the Californians of to-day a.s.sent to the restriction?

Take yet another name, treasured, I know, on the roll of California's most worthy servants, another Democrat. Governor Haight, only a third of a century ago, said: "I see in the near future a vast commerce springing up between the Chinese Empire and the nations of the West; an interchange of products and manufactures mutually beneficial; the watchword of progress and the precepts of a pure religion uttered to the ears of a third of the human race." And addressing some representatives of that vast region, he added, with a burst of fine confidence in the supremacy of San Francisco's position: "As Chief Magistrate of this Western State of the Nation, I welcome you to the territory of the Republic,... in no selfish or narrow spirit, either of personal advantage or seeking exclusive privileges for our own over the other nations; and so, in the name of commerce, of civilization, of progress, of humanity, and of religion, on behalf not merely of California or America, but of Europe and of mankind, I bid you and your a.s.sociates welcome and G.o.d-speed."

Perhaps this may be thought merely an exuberant hospitality. Let me quote, then, from the same man, speaking again as the Governor of the State, at the Capitol of the State, in the most careful oration of his life: "What shall be said of the future of California? Lift your eyes and expand your conceptions to take in the magnitude of her destiny. An empire in area, presenting advantages and attractions to the people of the Eastern States and Europe far beyond those presented by any other State or Territory--who shall set limits to her progress, or paint in fitting colors the splendor of her future?... Mismanagement may at times r.e.t.a.r.d her progress, but if the people of California are true to themselves, this State is destined to a high position, not only among her sister States, but among the commonwealths of the world,... when her ships visit every sh.o.r.e, and her merchant princes control the commerce of the great ocean and the populous countries upon its borders."

Was Governor Haight alone, or was he in advance of his time? Go yet farther back, to the day when Judge Nathaniel Bennett was a.s.signed by the people of San Francisco to the task of delivering the oration when they celebrated the admission of California into the Union, on October 29, 1850: "Judging from the past, what have we not a right to expect in the future? The world has never witnessed anything equal or similar to our career hitherto.... Our State is a marvel to ourselves, and a miracle to the rest of the world. Nor is the influence of California confined within her own borders.... The islands nestled in the embrace of the Pacific have felt the quickening breath of her enterprise....

She has caused the hum of busy life to be heard in the wilderness where rolls the Oregon, and where until recently was heard no sound save his own dashings. Even the wall of Chinese exclusiveness has been broken down, and the children of the Sun have come forth to view the splendors of her achievements.... It is all but a foretaste of the future.... The world's trade is destined soon to be changed.... The commerce of Asia and the islands of the Pacific, instead of pursuing the ocean track by the way of Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, or even taking the shorter route of the Isthmus of Darien or the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, will enter the Golden Gate of California and deposit its riches in the lap of our city.... New York will then become what London now is--the great central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America.... The responsibility rests upon us whether this first American State of the Pacific shall in youth and ripe manhood realize the promise of infancy. We may cramp her energies and distort her form, or we may make her a rival even of the Empire State of the Atlantic.

The best wishes of Americans are with us. They expect that the Herculean youth will grow to a t.i.tan in his manhood."

Nor was even Judge Bennett the pioneer of such ideas. Long before he spoke, or before the Stars and Stripes had been raised over Yerbabuena, as far back as in 1835, the English people and the British Government had been advised by Alexander Forbes that "The situation of California for intercourse with other countries and its capacity for commerce--should it ever be possessed by a numerous and industrious population--are most favorable. The port of San Francisco for size and safety is hardly surpa.s.sed by any in the world; it is so situated as to be made the center of the commercial relations which may take place between Asia and the western coast of America.... The vessels of the Spanish Philippines Company on their pa.s.sage from Manila to San Blas and Acapulco generally called at Monterey for refreshments and orders.... Thus it appears as if California was designed by nature to be the medium of connecting commercially Asia with America, and as the depot of the trade between these two vast continents, which possess the elements of unbounded commercial interchange; the one overflowing with all the rich and luxurious commodities always characteristic of the East, the other possessing a superabundance of the precious metals and other valuable products to give in exchange.... If ever a route across the Isthmus shall be opened, California will then be one of the most interesting commercial situations in the world; it would in that case be the rendezvous for all vessels engaged in the trade between Europe and Asia by that route. It is nearly mid-voyage between these two countries, and would furnish provisions and all naval supplies in the most ample abundance, and most probably would become a mart for the interchange of the commodities of the three continents."

[Sidenote: Has the State Lost Heart and Shriveled?]

Let no man fancy that these sometimes exuberant expressions of a n.o.ble and far-seeing faith by your own predecessors and by a prescient foreigner have been revived in derision or even in doubt. Those were the days when, if some were for a party, at any rate all were for the State. These were great men, far-seeing, courageous, patriotic, the men of Forty-nine, who in such lofty spirit and with such high hope laid the foundation of this empire on the Pacific. Distance did not disturb them, nor difficulties discourage. There sits on your platform to-day a man who started from New York to California by what he thought the quickest route in December, 1848; went south from the Isthmus as the only means of catching a ship for the north, and finally entered this harbor, by the way of Chile, in June, 1849. He could go now to Manila thrice over and back in less time. And yet there are Californians of this day who profess to shrink in alarm from the remoteness and inaccessibility of our new possessions! Has the race shriveled under these summer skies? Has it grown old before its time; is its natural strength abated? Are the old energy and the old courage gone? Has the soul of this people shrunk within them? Or is it only that there are strident voices from California, sounding across the Sierras and the Rockies, that misrepresent and shame a State whose sons are not unworthy of their fathers?

The arm of the Californian has not been shortened, that he cannot reach out. The salt has not left him, that he cannot occupy and possess the great ocean that the Lord has given him. Nor has he forgotten the lesson taught by the history of his own race (and of the greatest nations of the world), that oceans no longer separate--they unite.

There are no protracted and painful struggles to build a Pacific railroad for your next great step. The right of way is a.s.sured, the grading is done, the rails are laid. You have but to buy your rolling-stock at the Union Iron Works, draw up your time-table, and begin business. Or do you think it better that your Pacific railroad should end in the air? Is a six-thousand-mile extension to a through line worthless? Can your Scott shipyards only turn out men-of-war? Can your Senator Perkins only run ships that creep along the coast? Is the broad ocean too deep for him or too wide?

[Sidenote: New Fields and the Need for them.]

Contiguous land gives a nation cohesion; but it is the water that brings other nations near. The continent divides you from customers beyond the mountains; but the ocean unites you with the whole boundless, mysterious Orient. There you find a population of over six hundred millions of souls, between one fourth and one third of the inhabitants of the globe. You are not at a disadvantage in trading with them because they have the start of you in manufactures or skill or capital, as you would be in the countries to which the Atlantic leads.

They offer you the best of all commerce--that with people less advanced, exchanging the products of different zones, a people awakening to the complex wants of a civilization that is just stirring them to a new life.

Have you considered what urgent need there will be for those new fields? It is no paltry question of an outlet for the surplus products of a mere nation of seventy-five millions that confronts you. Your mathematical professors will tell you that, at the ratio of increase established in this Nation by the census returns for the century just closing, its population would amount during the next century to the bewildering and incomprehensible figure of twelve hundred millions. The ratio, of course, will not be maintained, since the exceptional circ.u.mstances that caused it cannot continue. But no one gives reasons why it should not be half as great. Suppose it to turn out only one fourth as great. Is it the part of statesmanship--is it even the part of every-day, matter-of-fact common sense--to reject or despise these Oriental openings for the products of this people of three hundred million souls the Twentieth Century would need to nourish within our borders? Our total annual trade with China now--with this customer whom the friendly ocean is ready to bring to your very doors--is barely twenty millions. That would be a commerce of the gross amount of six and two third cents for each inhabitant of our country in the next century, with that whole vast region adjoining you, wherein dwell one fourth of the human race!

Even the Spanish trade with the Philippines was thirty millions. They are merely our stepping-stone. But would a wise man kick the stepping-stone away?

[Sidenote: The New Blood Felt.]

San Francisco is exceptionally prosperous now. So is the State of California. Why? Partly, no doubt, because you are sharing the prosperity which blesses the whole country. But is that all? What is this increase in the shipping at your wharves? What was the meaning of those crowded columns of business statistics your newspapers proudly printed last New Year's?--what the significance of the increase in exports and imports, far beyond mere army requirements? Why is every room taken in your big buildings? What has crowded your docks, filled your streets, quickened your markets, rented your stores and dwellings, sent all this new blood pulsing through your veins--made you like the worn Richelieu when, in that moment, there entered his spent veins the might of France?

Was it the rage you have witnessed among some of your own leaders against everything that has been done during the past two years--the warning against everything that is about to be done? Was it the proof of our unworthiness and misdeeds, to which we all penitentially listened, as so eloquently set forth from the high places of light and leading--the long lamentation over how on almost every field we had shown our incapacity; how unfit we were to govern cities, unfit to govern territories, unfit to govern Indians, unfit to govern ourselves--how, in good old theological phrase, we were from head to foot a ma.s.s of national wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, and there was no health in us? Was it the demonstration that what we needed was to sit under the live-oaks and "develop the individual man," nor dare to look beyond? Was it the forgetfulness that muscles grow strong only with exercise; that it is the duties of manhood that take the acrid humors out of a youth's blood; that it is great responsibility, manfully met, not cowardly evaded, that sobers and steadies and enn.o.bles?

Some one has lately been quoting Lincoln's phrase, "We cannot escape history." It is a n.o.ble and inspiring thought. Most of us dare not look for a separate appearance at that greatest of human bars--may hope only to be reckoned in bulk with the mult.i.tude. But even so, however it may be with others on this coast, I, for one, want to be counted with those who had faith in my countrymen; who did not think them incapable of tasks which duty imposed and to which other nations had been equal; who did not disparage their powers or distrust their honest intentions or urge them to refuse their opportunities; to be counted with those who at least had open eyes when they stood in the Golden Gate!

[Sidenote: Wards or Full Partners.]

I do not doubt--you do not doubt--they are the majority. They will prevail. What Duty requires us to take, an enlightened regard for our own interests will require us to hold. The islands will not be thrown away. The American people have made up their minds on that point, if on nothing else.

Well, then, how shall the islands be treated? Are they to be our wards, objects of our duty and our care; or are they to be our full partners?

We may as well look that question straight in the face. There is no way around it, or over or under or out of it; and no way of aimlessly and helplessly shuffling it off on the future, for it presses in the legislation of Congress to-day. Wards, flung on our hands by the shipwreck of Spain, helpless, needy, to be cared for and brought up and taught to stand alone as far as they can; or full partners with us in the government and administration of the priceless heritage of our fathers, the peerless Republic of the world and of all the centuries--that is the question!

Men often say--I have even heard it within a week on this coast--that all this is purely imaginary; that n.o.body favors their admission as States. Let us see. An ounce of fact in a matter of such moment is worth tons of random denial. Within the month a distinguished and experienced United States Senator from the North has announced that he sees no reason why Porto Rico should not be a State. Within the same period one of the leading religious journals of the continent has declared that it would be a selfish and brutal tyranny that would exclude Porto Rico from Statehood. Only a few weeks earlier one of our ablest generals, now commanding a department in one of our dependencies, a laureled hero of two wars, has officially reported to the Government in favor of steps for the admission of Cuba as a State.

On every hand rise cries that in any event they cannot and must not be dependencies. Some of these are apparently for mere partizan effect, but others are the obvious promptings of a sincere and high-minded, however mistaken, conviction.

I shall venture, then, to consider it as a real and not an abstract question,--"academic," I think it is the fad of these later days to say,--and I propose again (and again unblushingly) to consider it from what has been called a low and sordid point of view--so low, in fact, so unworthy the respect of latter-day altruistic philosophers, that it merely concerns the interests of our country!

For I take it that if there is one subject on which this Union has a right to consult its own interests and inclinations, it is on the question of admitting new States, or of putting territory in a position where it can ever claim or expect admission; just as the one subject on which n.o.body disputes the right of a mercantile firm to follow its own inclinations is on that of taking in some unfortunate business man as a partner; or the right of an individual to follow his own inclinations about marrying some needy spinster he may have felt it a duty to befriend. Because they are helpless and needy and on our hands, must we take them into partnership? Because we are going to help them, are we bound to marry them?