What are the Philippines?  They are the richest prize of soil and climate that has been at hazard in the world for many years—­one that would be seized, if it could be done without war, by any of the great nations other than our own without hesitation.  The only scruple we need entertain, the sole reason for deliberation, is because it is a duty of the government to be sure when there are imperial considerations to be weighed, that the people should be consulted.  It was on this account distinctly, that the President knew the issue of the permanency of the possession of the Philippines was one of peculiar novelty and magnitude, that he permitted it to exist.  Spain must have been as acquiescent in this as in yielding the independence of Cuba, and the concession to us without any intermediate formality of Porto Rico.  It is not inconsistent with the policy of magnanimity that is generally anticipated after the victory of a great power over a lesser one, that we should hold the Philippines.  We have only to keep the power we have in peace, and let it work as a wholesome medicine, and all the islands of the group of which Manila is the central point, will be ours without conflict.  In our system there is healing for wounds, and attraction for the oppressed.  The holding of the islands by Spain would signify the continued shedding of blood, and drainage of the vital resources of the peninsula.  As against Spain the Philippines will be united and desperate unto death, while they would without coercion walk hand in hand with us, and become the greatest of our dependencies—­not states, but territories.

It would be an act of mercy to Spain to send her soldiers and priests from the Philippines, home.  Even if we consent that she may keep her South Sea possession, she will lose it as she has all the rest, for the story of the Philippines is that of Spanish South and Central America, and the modern story of Cuba is the old one of all countries South and West of the Gulf of Mexico and around by way of the Oceans to Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Chili, and the rest had the same bloody stream of history to trace, and sooner or later the tale must all be told.  Since Spain has already surrendered Cuba and Porto Rico, the record of the Philippines is the last chapter of her colonial experiences, by which she has dazzled and disgusted the world, attaining from the plunder of dependencies wealth that she invested in oppressive warfare to sustain a depraved despotism and display a grandeur that was unsound, sapping her own strength in colonial enterprises that could not be other than without profit, because the colonies were the property of the crown, and the prey of caste.

The Spanish nation was forbidden by their government, not of the people or for the people, to profit by the colonies, and the viceroys, the captain-generals, and the whole official class were corrupted, and inefficient in all things, except methods of tyranny to procure a harvest of gold and silver not from the mines of the metals alone, but from the industries, whatever they were.  The people at large were allowed no share in their own earnings, beyond a subsistence so scanty that deep humiliation and grievous hardship were the fateful rewards of labor.