on the consent of the governed was a denial of the Declaration of Independence; that our flag could not float where our Constitution was not in force; and that neither the executive nor Congress, which derived their just powers from the Constitution, could exercise an authority beyond or contrary to its provisions. The Republicans met these objections with a plea for the observance of the spirit rather than the letter of the law. New occasions had taught new duties. The islands had come to us as the result of a righteous war (in which the Democratic leader had held a colonel's commission) and a just treaty (which had been ratified largely by the efforts of that same leader). Thus had devolved upon the United States the solemn obligation of adequate protection for the natives of the islands after the authority of Spain had been extinguished. There was no remotest dream of "imperialism" in the counsels of the Republicans, but there must be no "policy of scuttle." We were liberators and not oppressors, and the self-governed American Republic of seventy-five million would never permit despotism in any government which they fostered and defended. "The Republican party," said McKinley in his speech of acceptance, "broke the shackles of 4,000,000 slaves and made them free, and to the party of Lincoln has come another supreme opportunity, which it has bravely met in the liberation of 10,000,000 of the human family from the yoke of imperialism."

Nevertheless the majority of the Americans who indorsed McKinley's policy in the Philippines were influenced less by his argument for our religious duty than they were by the proud confidence in our "manifest destiny." Since the foundation of the Republic, expansion had been the keynote of its policies. The planting of our flag in new territory had never failed to arouse the enthusiasm of our people, especially in the pioneer regions of the West. "The popular passion for territorial aggrandizement," said William H. Seward, half a century before the Spanish War, "is irresistible." Against this inveterate pas

1 This passage is a paraphrase of a speech of President McKinley's before the Ohio Society of New York on March 3, 1900 (C. S. Olcott, "The Life of William McKinley," Vol. II, 291).

sion a group of men, mostly "intellectuals" in the East, now labored in vain. An Anti-Imperialist League was organized in Boston in November, 1898, under the presidency of the venerable George S. Boutwell, who had been Secretary of the Treasury in Grant's administration. A flood of pamphlets, written by scholars like W. G. Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, Carl Schurz, Moorfield Storey, Felix Adler, Edwin Atkinson, and Herbert Welch, condemned our acquisition of foreign dependencies as a policy of political dishonor, economic folly, and moral delinquency. William James was "nauseated by the cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence," and disgusted to "see a country like the United States, lucky enough to be born outside of it, feverishly rushing to wallow in the mire of imperialism.": The opposition was not confined to the old Mugwump group. Prominent administration Republicans like George F. Hoar and Thomas B. Reed, though not going over to the support of Bryan, broke with McKinley. Reed, who sarcastically spoke of the payment of the $20,000,000 to Spain as "the purchase of Malays at two dollars a head,” announced his retirement from the Speakership. The progress made by the anti-imperialist propaganda in the Eastern states in the summer of 1900 caused considerable alarm in the ranks of the Republicans, and events abroad and at home increased the uneasiness. England was in the midst of her struggle to subjugate the Boers of South Africa. The obvious parallelism between the Boer war and our own operations against the insurgent Filipinos gave point to the charges that we were following Great Britain in the path of imperialism.2

1 "Letters of William James," Vol. II, pp. 94, 141.

2 Secretary Hay, who had been ambassador to Great Britain, was a pronounced advocate of an Anglo-American entente. He had signed a treaty with Lord Pauncefote on February 5, 1900, providing for a revision of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, and had offered his resignation to President McKinley when the Senate had rejected his treaty as too careless of American rights in the Isthmus of Panama. A few weeks before the election he wrote to Assistant Secretary Adee on the situation in China: "If it were not for our domestic politics we could and should join with England, whose interests are identical with ours, and make our ideas prevail. But in the present morbid state of the public mind toward England, that is not to be thought of" (C. S. Olcott, "The Life of William McKinley," Vol. II, 259).

A threatened coal strike in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1900 was quickly patched up by Hanna (who remembered the disastrous effect of the Homestead strike of 1892 on the Republican campaign) before it should "cost the administration 100,000 votes."

The election in November was a generous indorsement of McKinley. His vote fell below the figures of 1896 in all the New England states (where the anti-imperialists were strongest), in Pennsylvania, and eight states of the South. But his popular vote surpassed Bryan's by more than 860,000. He carried all the states of the West except Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and Nevada. He lost Kentucky to Bryan, but in return he gained the states of Washington, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, which Bryan had carried in 1896. The electoral vote was 292 to 155, and the popular vote 7,219,525 to 6,358,737. It was in obedience to the largest vote of confidence given by the American people to any presidential candidate since Grant that William McKinley, on the fourth of March, 1901, for a second time solemnly swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." And Senator Platt came down from New York in high spirits "to see Theodore Roosevelt take the veil.".

DISTANT DEPENDENCIES1

The disparity between the comparatively modest military operations of the Spanish War and the magnitude of their results is remarkable. The war lasted only a few weeks, but it entailed consequences which will last as long as our republic. From whatever point of view we consider our new departure as a colonial power, its epochal significance is apparent. The annexation of Porto Rico and the establishment of a protectorate over Cuba marked the beginnings of a policy in the West Indies which has resulted in the conversion of the Caribbean into an American lake. The acquisition of groups of islands (Hawaii,

1 For the sake of unity the relations of the United States to the foreign dependencies are brought down to recent days in this section.

Guam, the Philippines) which form stepping-stones across the Pacific made us partners or rivals with the powers established in the islands or on the shores of the great ocean, and led directly to the agreements of the Washington Conference of 1921-1922 for the preservation of the balance of power in the Pacific. Until the Spanish War we had no outlying possessions (if we except the unprovocative territory of Alaska) subject to the attack of hostile fleets; but now, with the assets of coaling-stations, new markets, and strategic positions in undeveloped quarters of the globe, we had also acquired the liabilities for policing them against attacks from without and disorder within. Our navy must henceforth be the mobile guaranty of our sovereignty in regions thousands of miles from home.

Our new adventure as a world power was accompanied by an economic revolution as significant as the political one. It was no accident that the urge to overseas expansion came at the close of the decade which marked the official disappearance of the American frontier, or at the moment when our manufactures gained the ascendancy over our agricultural products, or when we passed our nearest competitor, Great Britain, in iron and steel (1897), coal (1899), and the volume of export trade (1901). Just a week before the meeting of the Republican nominating convention of 1896 Joseph Chamberlain had proposed a British customs union, with preferential tariffs for the colonies, in order to bind the empire into a closer economic unit. And the annexation of the island of Madagascar by France in the same year had furnished a convincing demonstration of the truth that "trade follows the flag." Within three years after the annexation our exports to the island had sunk from $500,000 to a little over $1100. The trend of the times was toward the formation of spheres of influence in the undeveloped regions of the earth, where the respective nations, under the protection of their flags and the concessions to their capitalists, could exploit natural resources and develop populous markets for their industrial products. Was the United States, just at the moment when her need for new markets began to be acute, to be left out in the

cold? Could she hope permanently to preserve the open door in Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea, especially when she had closed her own door tightly by the Dingley tariff? If it was vain to expect to maintain the inconsistency of high protection at home with free access to world markets, was not the alternative that we should join in the rivalry for new territories under the national flag?

Furthermore, the aftermath of the Spanish War brought the nation face to face with its first great moral problem since the abolition of slavery. Whether or not it was advantageous to establish our rule over millions of people in the distant parts of the earth was one question; whether or not it was right was another. The opponents of imperialism, like the opponents of slavery, went back again to the ideals on which the Republic was founded, and asked the nation to search its conscience to see whether it was faithful to the Declaration of Independence. If liberty, like life, was, in truth, an "unalienable natural right,” then it belonged to the brown Filipino as well as to the black African or the white American. If the only just government was derived from the consent of the governed, then our rule over several millions of unconsenting orientals was an injustice. We had lost our moral greatness, said the anti-imperialists, and sacrificed our unique opportunity to be a light to the nations on the path of democracy in order to join them in a race for selfish power. We had sold our birthright of liberty for a mess of economic pottage. As Emerson had declared that the other end of the chain which bound the slave was around his master's neck, so Bryan quoted the lines of Edgerton:

Would we tread the paths of tyranny

And reck the tyrant's cost?

Who taketh another's liberty,
His freedom is also lost.

We have seen how these arguments were met by the expansionists. There was no "imperialism," they contended: only the courageous assumption of the burden of civilization. If the Declaration of Independence spoke of the "consent of the gov