Cries are now being uttered of capitalistic America.  Also they say the Supreme Court is always the mouthpiece of the dominant influence.  That was what was said when Taney decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen.  “The courts are tools of Satan, the Constitution is a league with Hell,” said Garrison.  He burned a copy of the Constitution on a public bonfire.  That could be done then, for slavocracy only interfered with free speech in the South.  Now it is not so safe to criticize the Supreme Court anywhere in America.  I myself think that coal and iron and oil are more powerful than cotton ever was, and more permeatingly dominant.  It would not do to burn the Constitution anywhere in this United and Standardized States.  As for mocking the flag, one might be lynched on the spot.

The Filipinos have taken literally the Declaration of Independence, which is the platform upon which Lincoln was elected; and they are fighting us in the name of Lincoln.  We have an army over there sustaining the honor of the flag, under William McKinley, President of the United States and Commander in Chief of its Army and Navy.  Mr. McKinley was a soldier in the war under Lincoln.  He, therefore, knows something about military matters.  He has demonstrated that he has something in his head beyond the theory of protection to American industries.  He is demonstrating that he knows how to lift the United States out of its isolation, and to carry it beyond its place in the Western Hemisphere with nothing but satellites like the West Indies and Hawaii to be trailed by its gravitational movements.  Also he learned how to put down rebellion in the Southern States, and that is the same thing, of course, as putting down rebellion in the Philippine Islands.  We have bought the islands.  They are ours.  They are farther away, to be sure, than Cuba which Douglas wanted for his ocean-bound republic.  But though farther away, civilization, our duty, and the manifest destiny of old compel us to hold them.  When Alcibiades embarked on his Sicilian expedition, it was said that Athens itself was sailing out of the Piraeus, never to return.  And some think that when Admiral Dewey sailed into the harbor of Manila with his fleet he took the old America with him, never to return to these shores; and what was worse, it disappeared there out of his hands and is lost for good.

There is China, where we have set up a Federal judge.  There is the trade of the Orient; the Philippine Islands themselves are rich in hemp.  To get land for hemp is different from getting it for cotton—­for I am sure hemp makes a better rope with which to strangle liberty.