The Senate, more conservative on the question of annexation than the House of Representatives composed of men freshly elected in the stirring campaign of 1896, was deliberate about ratification of the treaty.  The Democrats and Populists were especially recalcitrant.  Mr. Bryan hurried to Washington and brought his personal influence to bear in favor of speedy action.  Patriotism required ratification, it was said in one quarter.  The country desires peace and the Senate ought not to delay, it was urged in another.  Finally, on February 6, 1899, the requisite majority of two-thirds was mustered, many a Senator who voted for the treaty, however, sharing the misgivings of Senator Hoar as to the “dangers of imperialism.”  Indeed at the time, the Senators passed a resolution declaring that the policy to be adopted in the Philippines was still an open question, leaving to the future, in this way, the possibility of retracing their steps.

=The Attitude of England.=—­The Spanish war, while accomplishing the simple objects of those who launched the nation on that course, like all other wars, produced results wholly unforeseen.  In the first place, it exercised a profound influence on the drift of opinion among European powers.  In England, sympathy with the United States was from the first positive and outspoken.  “The state of feeling here,” wrote Mr. Hay, then ambassador in London, “is the best I have ever known.  From every quarter the evidences of it come to me.  The royal family by habit and tradition are most careful not to break the rules of strict neutrality, but even among them I find nothing but hearty kindness and—­so far as is consistent with propriety—­sympathy.  Among the political leaders on both sides I find not only sympathy but a somewhat eager desire that ’the other fellows’ shall not seem more friendly.”

Joseph Chamberlain, the distinguished Liberal statesman, thinking no doubt of the continental situation, said in a political address at the very opening of the war that the next duty of Englishmen “is to establish and maintain bonds of permanent unity with our kinsmen across the Atlantic....  I even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may be, even war would be cheaply purchased if, in a great and noble cause, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.”  To the American ambassador he added significantly that he did not “care a hang what they say about it on the continent,” which was another way of expressing the hope that the warning to Germany and France was sufficient.  This friendly English opinion, so useful to the United States when a combination of powers to support Spain was more than possible, removed all fears as to the consequences of the war.  Henry Adams, recalling days of humiliation in London during the Civil War, when his father was the American ambassador, coolly remarked that it was “the sudden appearance of Germany as the grizzly terror” that “frightened England into America’s arms”; but the net result in keeping the field free for an easy triumph of American arms was none the less appreciated in Washington where, despite outward calm, fears of European complications were never absent.