"The interests of the people who gain their living and manual labor are among the first to be considered and jealously guarded. Fortunately the far greater part of these in America are engaged in employments which will be benefited by annexation. A fresh and unrestrained market is to be opened for our products, and the indigenous products of these regions are to be brought here free of duty to give added employment to our factories. No competitions of labor are to arise." As to our new acquisition of new colonies by the United States, Theodore S. Wolsey, Professor of International Law at Yale University, has this to say, and every word he utters is pregnant with meaning, for no one could be a more capable judge: "It has already been said that England learned the lesson of the American Revolution, while Spain has never heeded it nor the loss of her own colonies. Yet it really was not until fifty years ago that their methods sharply diverged. As early as 1778 Spain had begun to open her dependencies to Foreign trade, and early in this century they were allowed to trade with one another. So, likewise, although great changes had been earlier made in the English colonies, the spirit of monopoly and of a restrictive policy was in force until about 1815. So far as relates to the evils of the colonial system, then, the two were not very unlike. But into the field of administrative reform and the grant of autonomous powers to her colonies, Spain never has entered. The abuses of the early part of the century characterize also its later years. Discrimination against the native-born, even of the purest Spanish stock; officials who regard the colony as a mine to be worked, not a trust to be administered; forced dependence upon the mother country for manufactures, even for produce, so far as duties can effect it; self-government stifled; representation in the Cortes denied or a nullity; a civil service unprogressive, ignorant, sometimes corrupt--compare these handicaps with the growth, the prosperity, the independence, above all, the decent and orderly administration, of the colonies of England. One of the wonderful things in this half century is that army of British youth, with but little special training or genius, or even, perhaps, conscious sympathy for the work, learning to administer the great and growing Indian and colonial empire honestly and wisely and well, with courage and judgment equal to emergencies, animated by an every-day working sense of duty and honor, but not very often making any fuss or phrases about it. It is not that Spanish colonial government is worse than formerly, which is costing it now so dear, but that it is no better, while the world's standard has advanced and condemns it. Never yet has Spain looked at her colonies with their own welfare uppermost in her mind. She has never outgrown the old mistaken theories. Her fault is medievalism, alias ignorance.