But this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning’s breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one’s own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. Certainly there were far fewer Sunday morning breakfast table talks. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences: No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic. I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how? That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.