But though the Constitution has not reached the Islands, while the flag has, it may in time reach them.  Meantime no mocking of that perambulating and capricious instrument!  It contains the power to acquire islands, or the whole of China, by conquest or treaty; and the power to govern them as we choose, limited only by our ideas of Justice.  It would not do to let them have popular sovereignty, any more than it would have done in Douglas’ day to let Kansas have popular sovereignty.  The right to prohibit or allow slavery in a territory goes with the right to extend the Constitution with its XIV Amendment to the Philippine Islands, or not to extend it—­and we have chosen not to extend it.  Thus the extra constitutional foundations of the Republican party have led to colonialism.

Douglas, in bronze, looks over the lake to the east—­to what?  Perhaps to the hills of Vermont and his youth, when no forecasting angel could have told him what could come to him and his country.  Perhaps he knows now that free souls are better than free soil, since he never had much use for the kind of free soil that was shouted at him.

This morning’s paper has long dispatches about the progress of our troops in the Philippines.  Perhaps that is the reason why Douglas’ back is to the west.  Surely he does not mean that he turns his back upon the domain of Mexico and Oregon.  It must be only upon the conquests of the new capitalism.  I am glad, and more than glad, that negro slavery was abolished.  It was nothing but a wooden plow anyway.  Our new steel plows work much better and they have this advantage:  they accomplish more, they are in themselves more of slaves, and they are creators of time and of greater wealth.

There are strikes over the land.  Why?  Are not men free?  Yes, they are free to choose their work if they know how to do more than one thing, or if they are able to move from the place where they have been employed.  But they are not free to organize, to agitate for better wages, or to strike.  What is this matter of freedom after all?  It reminds me of the steps of a stairway.  A step consists of a horizontal board and a vertical board and then another horizontal board.  The first horizontal board is the present condition, and the second horizontal is the liberty that is desired, the vertical board is the difficulty in the way.  One must overcome resistance to step up.  When he does he has achieved the liberty to which he aspires.  But he is standing on the same sort of a level that he did before.  This stairway goes up indefinitely, and at last becomes lost in the sky of the future, like the beanstalk of Jack the Giant-killer.  All this sounds quite materialistic, and as if I was without hope, but I am not materialistic, or despairing of the future.  I know that matter cannot be explained without resorting to such concepts as force, causation, action, and reaction.  And these are the ideas of the mind.  And I think of matter and of history in terms of action