ADDRESS BY HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, U. S. SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS, UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE UNION LEAGUE, AT The Academy of Music, Philadelphia, OCTOBER I, 1900. ADDRESS. ADDRESS BY HON, HENRY CABOT LODGE. U. S. SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS, UNDER THE AUSPICES OF • ■■••• THE UNION LEAGUE, AT The Academy of Music, Philadelphia, OCTOBER I, 1900. "f. a\;ClL.^^v*l.J^' ADDRESS, President Darlington: Ladies and gentlemen, one of the most encouraging signs of the times is the deeper interest which the women of our land are taking in public and national affairs. (Applause.) I cannot confess to be a very ardent admirer of that new type of woman- hood styled " the modern woman," but I am a very enthusiastic admirer of the woman who makes herself familiar with affairs which affect the welfare, the prosperity and the honor of her country. (Applause.) Possessed of an inherent power which she scarcely realizes, and which we fail to fully appreciate, if she will make herself familiar with public and national affairs, so that she can converse on them intelligently and with understand- ing, she wields a power and an influence which creates public thought and indirectly suggests wise legislation. Her presence at a meeting of this character is elevating, inspiring and in every way to be desired. In the name of The Union League of Phil- adelphia, I most heartily welcome the women who honor us by their presence this evening. (Applause.) In pursuance of a duty and an obligation, not only to the peo- ple of Philadelphia, but to the great ReiJublican party, with 5 6 which we are associated, this meeting has been called for the purpose of presenting for your consideration matters of national importance, regarding which there is much ignorance, much misunderstanding, but withal a very earnest desire for infor- mation. Among all the brilliant and gifted men who to-day are recognized as statesmen of the highest order, I know of no man more familiar with every event of recent occurrence, and in every way qualified to speak to us, than is the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts. (Cheers.) Personally familiar with every event of our national history in recent years, a gen- tleman of profound learning, a man of careful and close observa- tion, an intelligent, wise and patriotic statesman, whose voice is always heard in the highest legislative hall of the land in ad- vocacy of every measure which tends to maintain the national honor and secure the prosperity of every section of our country, and possessing the power and ability to impart intelligently and clearly the knowledge which he possesses, it is with very great pleasure that I present to you the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge. Senator Lodge : Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I gather from the cor- dial reception which you have been kind enough to accord me that there are more Republicans in this good old city than in one which I recently visited, and where I did not have the privilege of speaking. (Laughter.) There do not seem to be as many persons in this audience interested in "16 to 1 " as in some audiences I have seen. There is one difficulty that I have found in this campaign, and that is to exactly define our opponents. It is customary to refer to them as Democrats. I think this is very unfair to the Democratic party. (Laughter.) The Democratic party has had a long history, and has been a great party. I have differed, I think, historically and practically, with almost all its beliefs and policies, but nevertheless it has had a great past and a great his- tory. Among other things, it has been in the past the party of expansion, and the addition which it has made to our national territory is the greatest monument which it has raised. (Ap- plause.) It was also, many years ago, the party of hard money, " the money of the Constitution." It has slipped away from that a good deal. (Laughter.) Ever since the war the Democratic party has fallen into the unfortunate habit of bidding for the support of any detachment of Republicans who were dissatisfied, or any third party who happened to be around — with one exception. I do not think they ever appealed to the Prohibition party. (Laughter.) You will remember that, after the war, they went in for pay- ing bonds in paper. Then they went after the Greenback party, and for a time they were all Greenbackers. One of them still survives in the person of their present candidate for Vice-Presi- dent. (Laughter.) Then they went after the Silver party. That was their most unfortunate expedition, for the Silver party swallowed them, and now they are running after the Anti-Im- perialists, the smallest party they have ever hunted, I think. (Laughter). Therefore I think it is only fair to the party that has been (and I say it with all seriousness) a great party, with a past of great traditions — I think it is only fair not to use their name in describing the present aggregation. I prefer to refer to Mr. Bryan as the candidate of the mixed tickets. You will remem- ber that Mr. Bryan, in his anxiety about one man power, and the coming of imperialism in the United States, after he had re- luctantly caused himself to be nominated at Kansas City, pro- ceeded further in his great care to prepare a platform for them ; and he not only did that, but he selected the issue which the American people were to discuss, and he called it paramount. It was said at the time that it was received with wild cheering by the Convention. I dare say a good many of them felt like the old lady who liked to hear the word " Mesopotamia " men- tioned. She did not know where it was or what it was, but she liked the sound of the word ; but I think, with a good many among the more intelligent of the thinkers who constituted that gathering, that the word awakened a great many tender recollec- tions. Let me explain what I mean. Some years ago Presi- dent Harrison sent into the Senate a treaty annexing the Ha- waiian Islands to the United States. Then he went out of power, and his successor, Mr. Cleveland, withdrew the treaty. He wasn't satisfied with that. He sent out a commissioner to Hawaii to take down the flag, which somebody had incautiously raised there, and he called the commissioner " Paramount. " Well, the commissioner went out, and he took down the flag, and he came back, and he went into retirement, and he is still there — " the world forgetting, by the world forgot" — and by the time we have come to the end of this campaign, we will relegate the " para- mount issue " to the same obscurity as that now enjoyed by the " Paramount Commissioner." But, as Mr. Bryan says this is the paramount issue, I am only too delighted to discuss it. I wish there was no other issue, at least in the West. If there was no other issue in the West, we should sweep every State high and dry; but out there some of them seem to think that the paramount issue is 16 to 1. Let us discuss it, however, as Mr. Bryan puts it forward. He broke his silence again yesterday and talked about it, and it is worth while to consider what he says. By imperialism, as I un- derstand it, he means the conversion of the United States into an empire, through the medium of the Philippine Islands. (Laughter.) We are not going to be converted into an empire by Puerto Rico, which we took in exactly the same way, but by the Philippines. Now, how did we come by the Philippine Islands ? We got into a war with Spain. If I remember rightly, all the Demo- crats in Congress voted for that war, and were at some pains to try to find fault with the President for what they considered his needless delay. We entered on the war with Spain, and the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, was charged with the duty of conducting that war. It was of course the obvious military measure to attack the Spaniards wherever we could, and we did so in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philip- pines. They had a fleet in the Philippines. We had one at Hong Kong, and the President sent word to Admiral Dewey to find out the Spanish fleet and fight it. That was a good military measure. Nobody found fault with it then. All these wise criticisms we have heard since were not heard then. So Dewey went to Manila ; he found the Spanish fleet and he destroyed it, and he took possession of Manila. A good many people have since said that they wished he had sailed away then. Well, there were two objections to that. In the first place, he had no- where to go. He was seven thousand miles from home, and all 10 the other places were shut up. He had no harbor, no coal pile, no anchorage, except that which he had thoughtfully provided for himself in Manila. The other objection was that nobody at that time— none of these wise men— suggested for a moment that he should go away. On the contrary, I remember very well in the Senate that when I suggested, as I did on the floor, that the delay made by the Democratic party in annexing Hawaii tended to hinder sending relief to Dewey, they resented it, and they went further. They criticised the Administration for delays in sendmg troops. We sent the troops, and Manila fell before the signing of the protocol was known in the East. Then came the negotiations in Paris. What should be done with the Philippines? Spanish sovereignty was gone. Ours was the only sovereignty that existed in those islands. We were the only barrier between those islands and absolute anarchy. Our troops were all that stood between that great city and the horde of insurrectionists outside the wall. What, under those circumstances, should we do ? Should we give them back to Spain? Nobody suggested that. Aguinaldo, Agoncillo, and the rest of them were begging that we should not hand them back to Spain. There was no man, no American, who suggested that we should turn these people over to a tyranny from which we had just rescued them. That door was closed. Should we hand them over to some other power, and say, " We have got this on our hands. It is too big a job for us. Won't you kindly undertake it?" Well, there seemed to be too much self-respect m the American people for that. Nobody sucrsested it, at all events. The other alternative was to hand it all over to Aguinaldo — Aguinaldo, the Chinese half-breed, at the head of a motley force of some ten thousand men, gathered entirely from other Chinese half-breeds, and from the Tagal tribe. He did not represent a nation. He represented nobody but himself. There was no Filipino nation, and there never has been. Those islands stretch over the ocean for a thousand miles. They are utterly separated geographically. There are eighty-three diiferent tribes in the islands. They speak over fifty diiferent languages. There are three entirely different race stocks there. The inhabitants of the southern islands are Mohammedans, and are at perpetual war with the inhabitants of the principal islands of the north, who are Christians. Then there is a vast body of tribes, principally wild tribes, who are in a state of low barbarism, without any re- lio-ion. No one then thought it conceivable that we should hand over to a fraction of one tribe, led by a half-breed adventurer, who had raised his own standard, these eight or ten million people. Nothing remained except to take the islands ourselves, and solve the great problem they presented as best we could. We took the islands. Among the Commissioners who signed that treaty was Senator Gray of Delaware, a most distinguished member of the Democratic party, a man identified with the Cleveland administration, a learned lawyer, a gentleman of the highest integrity, and he went to Paris utterly opposed to taking the Philippine Islands ; but you may read his name at the bottom of the treaty, and the reason he put it there, as he afterwards told the Senate, was that there was nothing else he could do. It was the only thing that could be done. The President made the treaty, but that did not make it 12 law. To make it law, it had to be ratified by the Senate of the United States. It takes two thirds to ratify a treaty. The Ee- publicans did not have even a majority in the Senate. We had forty-three members, and two of them voted against the treaty. We had forty-one Kepublican votes for the treaty. There were sixty votes for the treaty in all. Where did the other nmeteen come from ? They came out of the Democratic-Populist party, out of the supporters of Mr. Bryan, and they came there be- cause he came to Washington, and urged that they should ratify that treaty. (Applause.) Now, I am not saying any part of this to avoid responsibility. I am only too glad to take the whole responsibility for the Re- publican party, for I think it was a great deed, but I want to trace out th«iliistory of this event, and show who was concerned in it. ITow, one of two things: when Mr. Bryan urged his fol- lowers to support the treaty, he either acted like a broad-minded patriot in taking the Philippines, or he did it for political ends. Either he did it because he thought it was right, or he did it be- cause he thought it was wrong. There is no escape from that. What does he say himself? He says, "We had to ratify a treaty of peace." Very true ; we did have to ratify a treaty of peace ; nobody wanted to keep the war open. But a treaty of peace can be amended just as well as any other treaty. He has shifted his ground to-day. He says he wanted the treaty rati- fied so that we could give the Filipinos independence. Worse and worse. He has forgotten that a treaty can be amended. He has forgotten the amendment offered by Senator Vest, which provided that the Philippine clause should be so modified as to put the Philippine Islands on precisely the same basis as Cuba, which is what they say now they want to have done. That 13 amendment provided that Spain should simply relinquish sovereignty, and that the islands should pass to us in trust, as Cuba passed to us in trust, to be handed back to the people. That amendment was offered. Spain would have accepted it. Spain would have accepted, I think, almost anything just then ; but it certainly would have accepted that. What became of Vest's amendment? It was beaten. Beaten by Republican votes ? Yes, wisely beaten, I think ; but Republicans were not the only ones that voted against the Vest amendment. I find on the list the following names : Allen of Nebraska voted against it — the next friend of the candidate; Butler of North Carolina voted against the Vest amendment. He is chairman of the National Committee of the Populists. Harris, also a Populist, and a supporter of the mixed ticket; Kyle, also a Populist then, now returned to the fold. Democrats, Faulkner, Gray, Lindsay of Kentucky, McHenry of Louisiana, Morgan of Alabama, Pettus of Alabama, Sullivan of Mississippi, and the following Silver Republicans, Mantle of Montana (he has come back), Stewart of Nevada (he has come back), and Teller, who has not come back. (Laughter.) The Republicans did not have a majority in the Senate, and it only requires a majority to carry an amendment. It does not require a two thirds vote, as in the case of the ratification of a treaty. It requires only a majority, and there were several Republicans who voted for the Vest amendment. It was defeated by the aid of those gentlemen whose names I have read. Therefore, when they had their opportunity to amend the treaty, and give inde- pendence to the Filipinos by the terms of the treaty, they failed to do it. No ; the thing was intended to make a political issue, and as 14 such we are perfectly ready to meet it, for we did not vote to ratify that treaty because we wanted to make or unmake politi- cal issues, but because, in the judgment of the Republican party, and the Republican President, it was the wise and the right thing to do. (Applause.) But these islands are going to convert us into an empire ; we are going to have an emperor, because we have got the Philip- pine Islands. Well, now, emperors do not make themselves; they have to have somebody to help them. They cannot do it alone. Even a political local emperor like Croker cannot do it all alone ; he has to have a pretty stout body of men with him in order to do it. A man cannot make himself emperor, or Cfesar, or whatever you choose to call it, unless he has an in- strument to do it with, and they find that instrument in the army of the United States, the regular army of the United States, sixty-five thousand men, eighty-four one hundredths of a man, and eighty-four one hundredths of a gun to every thousand of the American population. If that fraction — eighty-four one hundredths — of a soldier is to be the instrument of tyranny, and the little Republic of Switzerland has forty-seven soldiers to the thousand of her population, and yet is not afraid, I think we can say to our Democratic and Populist brothers that, if they are really afraid, the Republican party is strong enough to protect them from any such tyranny. (Laughter.) We will not allow our liberties to be threatened by sixty-five thousand men in the Philippines. But there is something very much more serious to that mili- tary proposition than that charge, which is ridiculous on its face, and that is the implication against the soldiers of the United States. What is there in all our history to justify such an attack 15 as this upon the men who wear the uniform of the United States ? Have they ever shown themselves less devoted to the freedom of the country and the greatness of the Republic than their brethren at home ? After the Civil War there were a mil- lion men in arms in this country on the Northern side, veterans tried on a hundred fields, the finest army then in the world. (Applause.) There was an instrument of tyranny, if you will, and there were Democrats in the land where the Knights of the Golden Circle flourished who said that Abraham Lincoln (applause) meant to make himself a C?esar, and that was the reason the country ought to vote against him in 1864. But the country did not believe them then, and won't believe them now ; and if any man had proposed to those million men in arms that they should make an attack on the institutions of the Republic, he would have suffered at their hands first of all. That great army disappeared silently in the great body of the people and became the first citizens and most devoted and loyal sons the country has. Is there any reason to suppose that the sons of those men, the generation of to-day, are any less devoted than their fathers ? I, for one, will not believe it. " It is a bad thing," says Mr. Bryan, " to have these soldiers idling about." Capron was killed in Cuba " idling about ; " Lawton was killed in the Philippines "idling about." They have all been " idling ahout " under those tropic skies, defending our flag and our honor. " Idling about ! " Was there ever such an insult to the uniform of the United States ? Is there any man who does not know that those men, Avho risked so much and faced so much, are just as devoted and just as loyal to the flag which they follow as anybody in the whole country ? We are proud of our soldiers who have never failed us. The Republican 16 party does not fear them. It has put at the head of its ticket a man who earned his straps at Antietam, and they have associated with him a man who won his promotion on another hard-fought field. We are not afraid of the volunteer soldiers of the Re- public, and you and I and all of us would just as lief trust our lives to men like Lawton and Capron, and the rest of them, who have been standing up for the flag, as we would to some of these glib gentlemen who are standing up for office. You may think that these are new, these predictions about the evils which will flow from expansion. I have here a remon- strance which was passed in 1813 by the Legislature of Massa- chusetts. There are not so many of these Cassandras in exist- ence to-day. The anti-imperialists in these days are very few in Massachusetts now. They are vocal, but not numerous. But see what they said then. You would think that some of these clauses emanated from Kansas City, only they are a good deal better written. (Laughter.) " The Legislature of Massachusetts, deeply impressed with the sufferings of their constituents, and incited by the prospect of still greater evils in prospect, feel impelled by a solemn sense of duty to lay before the national government their view of the public interest, and to express in plainness of form the senti- ments of the people of this ancient and extensive commonwealth. Were not the territories of the United States sufficiently exten- sive before any acquisition of Louisiana, the projected reduction of Canada and the seizure of Florida ? Had we not millions upon millions of uncultivated wilderness, scarcely explored by civilized man? Can these acquisitions be held as conquered provinces without powerful standing armies ? And will they not, like other infant colonies, serve as perpetual drains upon the 17 blood and treasure of these United States ? Or is it seriously intended to adopt the dangerous project of forming them into new States and admitting them into the Union, without the express consent of every member of the original confederacy ? Would not such a measure have a direct tendency to destroy the obligations of the compact by which alone our Union is main- tained ? Or have we to witness the formation of States beyond the territorial limits of the United States, and this, too, in opposi- tion to the wishes and eiforts, as well as in violation of the rights and interests of some of the parties to that compact, and with a determination to extend our Republic to regions hitherto unex- plored, to be peopled by inhabitants whose habits, language, reli- gion and laws are repugnant to the genius of our government?" It sounded very dreadful then ; it looks very silly now. Some of the utterances we have heard and seen within the last few months sound very dreadful now, but they will look very silly by and by. Danger to the Republic by expansion ? Why, out of the ter- ritory that that remonstrance condemned, and which was denounced in Congress, out of that territory have arisen nine or ten great American States — great, flourishing States — and all of that land of Louisiana was taken without the consent of the gov- erned. Nobody's consent was asked. Mr. Jefferson bought it from Napoleon, and there were fifty thousand white people at the mouth of the Mississippi, too. Jefferson governed it by Act of Congress, with powers larger than were enjoyed by the Spanish governor. To-day I do not think that the people of Iowa, Kansas and the rest of these great commonwealths want to go away any more than we want to have them go. They seem free, they seem contented. K 18 Danger to the Republic by expansion ? Expanding as the laws of growth demand ? No. The life of the Republic was never in danger but once. It was in danger for four years when the very life of the nation was at stake. Men were not trying to expand it then ; they were trying to divide it and make it smaller. (Applause.) It all comes down to one thing. When you come to discuss this question and analyze the opposition, it all grows out of one proposition: that we are not able to trust ourselves; that we can- not trust ourselves to deal with the Philippine islands, that we distrust the good intent of the American people. Imperialism and militarism are rubbish, and ought to be sent to the rubbish heap. What we ought to do with these islands, how we shall govern them, that indeed is a great question of national policy ; it is a question which cannot be too much discussed by the American people. I am very sorry that it should be other than an American question, and if all parties had the same faith in the future of the country and the future of the people, and the capacity and the courage and the honesty of the people, that we have, it would not be a political question at all. (Applause.) It ought not to be, for by ratifying that treaty we made those islands ours, because a treaty ratified is the supreme law of the land. But now the leader of the mixed ticket and his follow- ers are making it a question of creating sympathy for Aguinaldo. He had attacked the troops of the United States, and the authority of the United States in Manila under that treaty was as rightful and as righteous as it is here in Philadelphia. The President had no choice in the matter. He was put there to execute the laws. He followed the conception of duty which Washington held when he put down the whisky rebellion in 19 this State. He held the conception of duty which Lincoln held when he crushed out the rebellion against the United States author- ity in eleven States. (Applause). He holds the only conception of duty that an American President ought to hold — that he is to sustain the laws of the United States and uphold its authority wherever attacked ; and it will be an ill day indeed for the Republic when we get a President who departs from the teach- ings of Washington and Lincoln, and claims that the authority of the United States is not to be upheld everywhere and at all times. The President did his plain and simple duty. Congress, men of all parties, voted to give him the money and the men to meet that exigency. He met it. The rebellion has melted away. )(^ Robber bands are all that remain. Aguinaldo, the head of it, cannot be found ; and most of the members of his cabinet are in jail, except those of them that have landed here to be received by the anti-imperialists. (Laughter.) That war — I say it deliberately — has been maintained and kept alive by the encouragement it has received here. Only the other day, our soldiers captured the papers of Sandico, who was Aguinaldo's Secretary of the Interior w^hen he had one, and among them was found a deliberate statement that the orders of Aguinaldo were to keep it up until the 6th of November, and that if McKinley was elected, they were then to stop. I have abundant testimony — I will not weary you by reading it — in letters that have come from soldiers out there, private letters and letters that have been published in the newspapers all over the country. I will read one single letter, which is a specimen of them all, from one of the men who is "idling about" in Luzon. This letter was written by Lieutenant Ryan, Avho went out there in the First Nebraska, from quite near Bryan's home, but 20 who is now lieutenant in the Forty-fifth United States Vohm- teers. After speaking of the attacks by the natives, he says, " I am sorry to say that the strongest attacks are those which come from the United States. The insurgents continue fighting be- cause certain traitors have, by their speeches and acts, given them to understand that if they just hold out a little longer, the next Presidential election will bring a change of power and a with- drawal of troops. I have been told everywhere by the peaceful natives how the insurgent soldiers have robbed their homes, taken their clothes and made them work for them ; and I cannot pick up an insurgent paper without seeing translations of speeches made at home against our government, and it is said that some of them were even cheered by our fellow-countrymen. Surely such a cheer would be music to a soldier dying on the field of Luzon. Here we have a bullet for the enemy in front, and a bayonet for those that creep up in the rear; but how can we reach those who stab us in the back from home? When the fact is settled that the United States will uphold the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, then will the war be ended; but just so long as the American papers repeat these insurrectionary speeches against our Commander, just so long will there be some robber leader with a band of thieves around him." Now I believe that the first thing to be done in the Philip- pine Islands is to restore peace and order. There are a great many of these people there who have said this. Our friends are attacked, our soldiers fired on, and it seems to me that there is but one thing for all Americans now to do, and that is to leave politics alone until the fight is ended. If we do not do so, it will be the basest betrayal of the friendly Filipinos ever made by a great nation. 21 I know it is very easy to preach virtue to your opponents, but I beg to say that a great many of us have acted on these prin- ciples not so very long ago. Mr. Cleveland became involved in a serious controversy with England. He sent in his Venezuela message, and it looked rather stormy. He was a Democrat, and I was as strong a Republican as I knew how to be, and I had no love for his administration ; but it seemed to me, when he was en- gaged in a controversy with a foreign power, that it was my plain duty as an American citizen, occupying a place in the Senate, to stand by him, and I did, and the Republicans generally did. It was the right thing to do, and I think now it is better to have the American flag respected first and then discuss Philippine pol- icies afterwards. We have heard a great deal about hauling down the flag, and the Constitution following the flag, and all that. Where the flag has been placed as an act of war and conquest, as it was placed in the city of Mexico, or the other day in the city of Pekin, everybody knows that it is going to be removed, that the Con- stitution did not go with it and won't stay there after it has gone But where the United States flag has been raised rightfully over territory belonging to it by the laws of the United States and by its own laws, it never has been hauled down (applause), and cer- tainly it never has been hauled down when it was being fired upon. (Applause.) We have written a good many things on that flag in our one hundred years, but there are two words that we have never written thereon — retreat and surrender (cheers) — and we are not going to begin now. They pour out denunciations on the President. I look them over and I find nothing but these vague attacks : That he ought not to have taken the islands; that he has mismanaged the X 22 islands; that he brought on the rebellion, and so on; but every- body knows, who reads the record, that the war was brought on by Aguinaldo; that they were plotting against us even before they left Hong Kong ; that they were dealing with the Spaniards while pretending to be our allies ; that they were preparing to attack us, mistaking our kindness for weakness, and that they did attack us to their own great loss. Everybody knows these facts, and what better policy could be pursued than to maintain peace and order, and establish civil government as rapidly as pos- sible? We sent there the best possible men to do it, among them Judge Taft of Ohio, a man against whose high character and ability not one word has ever been said. With him went General Wriffht of Tennessee, a Confederate veteran. Men were chosen from all parties to make the Commission, and every man who went there. Democrat or Republican, and looked the situation in the face, saw that there was no other policy to be pursued. What more could you have or would you have ? Restore order, give them the largest liberty they have ever known, lead them along the road to self-government as rapidly as possible, give them all the benefits of peace, keep them under the flag of the United States. Should we bring them within the tariflf ? No ; let us be honest. We do not want to bring these ten million Filipinos within our tariff, and make them a competing part of our labor. No- body means that. We mean to hold them, control them, guide them, keep them under the flag, and save them from the anarchy which threatens them. And what, after all, is Bryan's plan ? He says that first he would call Congress together. That is easily done. Then he would promise them independence — when? It is all right, LofC. 23 according to him, to hold the islands and give them the right to self-government after a little while — time not fixed. But we must go on like honest men and meet the daily prob- lems as they arise, and not grasp at the future which no man can read. I am not able to say what should be done ultimately with the Philippines. No man is wise enough to say to-day what is best to do three years hence, or five years hence. We must deal with the problems as they arise. The first thing is peace and order, the next thing is to give civil government. That is our duty to these people. Then there is also a duty to ourselves, for I do not propose to shirk the material side. These islands are the key to the great markets of the East. We want those great markets, and we will have them. We make in six months all we can consume at home in a year. We made the home market our own by a pro- tective tariff. We want our share of the markets of the world ; we want an open door, and that door is Manila. Sliall we give it up because some one comes along and tells us that we are not to be trusted, that we cannot do our duty to that people ? No ; the people who struck the shackles from four million slaves will not put them on anybody else. Why don't they look at home ? Where would they be with- out those disfranchised States of the South ? They have all this anxiety for the Filipinos, but they are silent about the black American citizens. With all his inimitable and unlimited powers of conversation, you cannot get Bryan to say a single word about the constitutional amendment which disfranchised the blacks of the South because they were black. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a very great question, and there are many sides to it. It is of immense importance to us ; it is of 24 immense importance to these people who have come into our hands. I believe that the American people can be trusted to deal with this great problem. What is more, they are going to deal with it. They will make mistakes ; we all make mistakes ; there will be errors, there will be stumblings ; but we shall rise as we have risen in greater trials, and we shall carry this through to a triumphant conclusion. The paramount issue ! Every issue is paramount. There are many issues, but all of them are alike momentous. Behind the so-called paramount issue, and all this phantasm of imperialism and militarism, there is free silver. In the country where I have been travelling, I never heard a word about imperialism; it is all "sixteen to one." And my friends, if Bryan should be elected next November, the Philippine Islands would still be ours, and silver would be wide awake and alive. It would then be a live issue ; it is only dead now in the East. It is wide awake in the South and West to-day, and wherever it is, it strikes at the great medium of exchange, and it affects the prosperity and the well-being of every man ; for change the standard of currency in this great country, and you set on foot a panic the like of which the world has never seen. (Applause.) Bryan also assails the tariff and attacks the Dingley bill. If he has a chance to alter that, where will it end? Every industry in my State is affected by the tariff, for my State is a great manufacturing State, like this. From this attack on the tariff all other evils flow, and free silver lurks behind, and not very far behind out West, either. If they come, all the prosperity of the last four years will go. Is it worth while to try an experiment like that ? The train is running pretty well now. Perhaps not quite so well as we 25 could wish, but still pretty well, much better than it was run- ning four years ago. (Applause.) Is it worth while to tear up a rail to see what the train will do ? "VVhy not let it alone ? I have said that there was no paramount issue. I went all through the campaign with this idea, until a few days ago ; but now I think there is a paramount issue, and it involves a great many things. It involves a great deal more than the Philip- pines, more in my judgment than the tariif, more than the silver question. It is the question of order and liberty, whether we are to turn this government over to the men who preach hatred between man and man, who set class against class, capital against labor, and labor against capital — men whose only hope is to tear down, who assail everything, who never have a word of hope. Are we to turn the government over to these men? I have seen what these teachings are, but when they once break loose, no man can tell what the result will be. It means a denial of free speech; it means tyranny of the worst kind; it means breeding everything that is most hateful, according to my ideas, to American liberty. I do not believe in imperialism as they preach it. There is no imperialism, fellow-citizens, in the Philippines. There is no danger of empire while the great bulwarks of American liberty stand, while we are true to the teachings of Washington and Lincoln, and to the Constitution of the United States. There is but one way to imperialism. There never has been but one path, and that path is through disorder, anarchy and social chaos. (Applause.) When you set man against man; when you preach envy and discontent ; when you pass all your time in denunciation, you are paving the way. And it is a way that is travelled with great rapidity when once it is opened, and 26 it is all false to American ideas. This great country is not going to break down now. It has had great troubles in the past, but it has come out of them all. There is no use of preaching a gos- pel of despair yet to America. America is still young. There are many evils, many wrongs ; let us meet them like men and correct them. Do not let us whine, or curse, or cry. The gos- pel of America is hope, not despair, and the Republican party, strong in its faith in the great people of the United States, ap- peals now, as it has always appealed, to all that is greatest in its past and brightest in its future ; the Republican party appeals to hope, and it will not appeal in vain. (Applause.) Mr. Daelington, advancing to the front of the platform, said : Ladies and gentlemen, I am perfectly sure that I voice the sentiments of every one in this vast audience when, in the name of The Union League of Philadelphia, I express our grateful acknowledgments to Senator Lodge for his most able and bril- liant address.