by authorization of the Spanish court, signed a protocol containing these conditions and the further provision for a peace commission to meet at Paris not later than October 1. A cessation of hostilities was immediately proclaimed. General Miles was halted in the midst of his victorious Porto Rican campaign. The operations of our fleet against the ports of Cuba were suspended. Preparations for the dispatch of Commodore Watson's squadron to Spain were stopped. Only Dewey and Merritt in the Far East, cut off from direct communication with Washington, were without news of the armistice. On the day after the protocol was signed they captured the city of Manila and raised the American flag above the palace (see page 310).

The American delegates to the peace conference were Judge Day, Senators Cushman K. Davis of Minnesota, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, William P. Frye of Maine, George Gray of Delaware, and Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the New York Tribune. It took them more than two months to bring the Spanish negotiators to accept our terms, and it looked at times as if the commissioners would have to return home without a treaty. The Spaniards made a futile attempt to saddle the Cuban debt upon the United States; but the serious hitch in the proceedings came on the question of the Philippines. The Spaniards claimed that since their flag waved over Manila and their sovereignty in the islands was unimpaired on the day when the protocol was signed, the Philippines should remain in their possession. They asked, therefore, that Dewey's "occupation' should cease forthwith. Our demands in regard to the Philippines, on the other hand, underwent considerable modification during the peace conference. President McKinley's original instructions to the American delegates declared that "the luster and the moral strength of our cause" should not, under any illusion of the hour, be dimmed by ulterior designs, which might tempt us into excessive demands or into an adventurous.departure on untried paths." Nevertheless the President continued: "We cannot be unmindful that, without any desire or design on our part, the war has brought us new duties and responsibilities which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation on

whose growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of Nations has plainly written the high command and pledge of civilization." These two irreconcilable positions were reconciled for the moment in the President's mind by the compromise of demanding the cession of the island of Luzon to the United States and the concession of equal commercial rights with Spain in the rest of the Philippine archipelago. But as the weeks passed, McKinley abandoned this untenable position and moved steadily toward the "adventurous departure on untried paths." He talked with General Greene and became convinced that to leave the Philippines to Aguinaldo would mean to abandon them to anarchy, and that to return them to Spain would mean to condemn them to further oppression. He found all the members of his cabinet but two in favor of keeping the islands, and Senator Gray the only one of the peace commissioners who favored unconditional withdrawal. He felt the pressure of the commercial interests, eager to open new markets for our surplus production and to share in the imminent parceling of the Far East among the great powers. He traveled across the continent in his visit to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition (October 10-22), keeping his ear "very close to the ground," and caught the ground-swell of approval for every reference in his speeches to the fulfillment of our responsibility to the people of the Philippines. Above all, and by his own solemn testimony, he received "guidance" in answer to his prayers, bidding him to take the whole archipelago, "to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.'

So the fateful ultimatum went from Secretary Hay to the commissioners at Paris, October 26: "The information which has come to the President since your departure convinces him that the acceptance of the cession of Luzon alone, leaving the rest of the islands subject to Spanish rule or to be the subject of future contention, cannot be justified on political, commercial, or humanitarian grounds. The cession must be of the whole

1 This confession was made in an interview with a delegation of the missionary committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Washington, November 21, 1899. It is quoted in C. S. Olcott's "Life of William McKinley," Vol. II, pp. 109–111.

archipelago or none." The Spanish commissioners made a stubborn resistance; but when President McKinley threw into the scales an offer of $20,000,000 to reimburse Spain for her "public works of a pacific character in the Philippines," they agreed to the "sale" of the island to the United States. The treaty was signed on December 10, 1898. It embodied the terms of the protocol.2

The treaty of peace was sent to the Senate by President McKinley on January 4 and was fiercely debated for more than a month. Its opponents, led by Vest of Missouri and Gorman of Maryland (Democrats), Hoar of Massachusetts and Hale of Maine (Republicans), attacked the annexation of the Philippines as the abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine and a violation of the Declaration of Independence. As the Senate was constituted, the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification could be secured only by Democratic support. It was not till Mr. Bryan came to Washington to persuade the Democratic senators that it was better to ratify the treaty now and end the war, leaving the disposition of the Philippines to the decision of the people in the presidential campaign of the following year, that enough Democratic votes were won. The treaty was ratified on February 6 by the narrowest margin possible (57 to 27). Ten of the thirty-four Democrats voted in the affirmative; three of the forty-six Republicans, in the negative. The Spanish Cortes accepted the treaty, and the formal exchange of ratifications ending the war took place on April 11-a year to a day from the transmission of President McKinley's war message to Congress.

1 Ambassador Hay had written to the President from London on August 2, before he was called home to join the cabinet: "We are watching with great interest the progress of your negotiations for peace. If we give up the Philippines, it will be a considerable disappointment to our English friends, but of course we can consider nothing but our own interests. I have no doubt that Germany has been intriguing both with Aguinaldo and with Spain. They are most anxious to get a foothold there. But if they do, there will be grave complications with other European powers." Germany did actually purchase the Pacific islands (the Carolines, the Ladrones, and the Pelew group) which remained to Spain after the war. 2 The island of the Ladrones selected by the United States was Guam. Our position in the Pacific was further strengthened during the war by the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (July 7) by a joint resolution of Congress.

The United States had taken up "the white man's burden." We had assumed the responsibility for restoring orderly rule in the devastated island of Cuba. We had acquired nearly a million subjects of Spanish and negro blood in Porto Rico. We had planted our flag in the islands of the Pacific. We had become the masters and protectors of seven and a half million of people in the Philippines, ranging from the cultured Tagalogs of Manila to the naked Negrito dwarfs, the savage head-hunting Igorrotes, and the brutish Moros of the Sulu peninsula. We had, indeed, entered "on untried paths," and only time could show how we should walk therein.

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

A brief review of the economic condition of the country on the threshold of the twentieth century is necessary to an understanding of the policies which our leaders adopted and our people supported in dealing with the new problems of American expansion. For while the economic motive is rarely put forward by our statesmen as the ground of public action, it is nevertheless substantially directive. At the close of the nineteenth century the glamour of a foreign war, with its unprecedented victories, obscured to a certain extent the economic issues at home. The country at large, after the bitter sectional and class struggle of the early nineties, felt a relief in turning to other things. Nature and good fortune came to grace McKinley's triumph. The stars in their courses fought for the Republicans. Bounteous crops brought prosperity to the West. The discovery of enormous quantities of gold in the Klondike region of the Yukon and near Cape Nome, Alaska, coinciding with a vastly increased output from the mines of South Africa, took the heart out of the argument of a currency stringency, on which the complaints of the free silverites were based. The "cross of gold" was lowered. In the five years from 1896 to 1902 inclusive, $437,000,000 of gold was coined in the United States, as against an average five-year output of $258,000,000 since 1873. This, with the additional bank-note circulation made possible

by the legislation of March, 1900 (see page 333), raised the circulating medium from $23.85 per capita in 1893 to over $30 per capita in 1900. As the value of money fell, prices rose. The farmers no longer had to sell their wheat at 50 cents a bushel. Prosperity assuaged their discontent. They began to pay off their mortgages, paint their barns, and accumulate balances in the banks.

1

However, it was not the farmers but the great industrialists who were the chief beneficiaries of the renaissance of prosperity which followed the hard times of the middle nineties. The census of 1900 still showed, to be sure, that a larger number of our people were engaged in farming than in any other kind of work. Of the 29,000,000 of our population of 76,000,000 who were engaged in gainful occupations, 10,400,000 were found in agriculture, as against 7,000,000 in manufacturing, mining, and the industrial arts; 4,800,000 in trade and transportation; and 6,800,000 in personal and professional services. Yet, other figures of the census showed the steady growth of manufacture and commerce over agriculture. The population of the cities had increased at a much more rapid rate than that of the rural districts or of the country at large. In 1890 it had reached 33.1 per cent of the total population as against 29.2 per cent a decade before. The farm acreage of the entire country had increased from 4,500,000 to 5,700,000 in the period from 1890 to 1900, and the value of the farms from $14,000,000,000 to $20,500,000,000; but at the latter date only 49.4 per cent of the farm land was improved, as against 57 per cent in 1890. The acreage of improved farm land fell steadily during the last twenty years of the century in every New England state and in New York and New Jersey, while in Pennsylvania and Maryland it just about held its own. The value of the farms fell, too, in all these states, except Massachusetts. For the first century of our national existence we had not done enough manufacturing to supply our own wants. In 1890 our exports of manufactured

1 One hundred and sixty cities of 25,000 inhabitants or over increased in population from 14,880,000 in 1890 to 19,718,000 in 1900-a gain of 32.15 per cent as compared with a gain of 20.7 per cent in the country at large.