The Springfield Republican
June 9, 1899
There is a disposition among the weaker spirits of the anti-imperialist party to believe that the “game is up.” They speak through Charles Francis Adams and Charles J. Bonaparte, and say that we are in for it and must make the best of it. The country has been committed to a colonial policy beyond recall, they maintain, and now the problem is to make it a good colonial policy instead of a bad one.
Of all positions taken in this controversy by any party, faction or individual, this seems to us to be the most untenable. Why, not eve the president himself will venture to assert the irrevocableness of the scrape he has got the nation into. The Ohio republican platform, undoubtedly written under the president’s eye, treats the question of colonialism as an open one, and refers its settlement to the “master guidance” of our great and good president. And Mr. McKinley spoke of it as an open one, at least so far as concerns the retention of the Philippines, the last time he was heard on the subject. While the Ohio republicans would refer it to him to decide, he would refer it to Congress and the people, though evidently disposed to give Congress and the people no chance at it.
We do not know what his designs may be. That is another question. He may design to commit the country to the imperialist policy and fasten it there so far as he is able. Some method of this sort may be traced in his policy of apparent drift and certain blundering. But he will not venture to avow any such design. He will not admit that the question is closed. His ministers continue to maintain that it is open and Secretary Long still insists on his behalf that he is engaged only in restoring order in the Philippines—from a disorder we ourselves have created,--after which the question of the ultimate disposal of the islands will be open for the consideration of all factions and parties. How inexplicable, therefore, that men like Mr. Adams should be the first of all to presume that the case is closed.
It cannot be closed until the people in repeated and no uncertain voice close it, and the people have not yet spoken. It is not too late to withdraw from a wicked contest or reverse a mistaken and dangerous policy. The power that ratified the treaty of Philippine annexation also gave pledge that the annexation should not be considered permanent. This is what the Senate resolved, among other things, by a majority vote after the treaty had been ratified:
That by the ratification of the treaty of peace with Spain it is not intended to incorporate the inhabitants of the Philippine islands into citizenship of the United States, nor is it intended to permanently annex said islands as an integral part of the territory of the United States.
It was only upon condition of the Senate’s agreeing to such a declaration that the ratification of the treaty was secured, and when one party to the enactment of the treaty makes proclamation that the question of permanent annexation has not be settled, the other party to the business cannot close that question until the last spark of the spirit of independence in the islands has been snuffed out and the last native among the independent party there has been killed.
Anybody opposed to this business who gives up now, gives up when the contest has hardly begun. He runs, not to be sure, at the sound of the first firing, but at the sight of the first consequence of it. Appalling as those consequences are, they yet fail to turn the tide of contest, and through such voices as Secretary Long’s and the Ohio republican platform we seem to hear the imperialist leaders themselves calling out sardonically to the Adamses and Bonapartes, “Come back, gentlemen; you are not half as badly beaten as you think you are; the question is still open.” And so it is. It is a time above all others for the friends of liberty and democratic institutions to stand firm and continue to strike.
M. Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and Anti-Imperialism, June 24, 2007. 