The chief aversion to the vast accessions of territory with which we are threatened springs from the fear that ultimately they must be admitted into the Union as States. No public duty is more urgent at this moment than to resist from the very outset the concession of such a possibility. In no circumstances likely to exist within a century should they be admitted as States of the Union. The loose, disunited, and unrelated federation of independent States to which this would inevitably lead, stretching from the Indian Archipelago to the Caribbean Sea, embracing all climes, all religions, all races,--black, yellow, white, and their mixtures,--all conditions, from pagan ignorance and the verge of cannibalism to the best product of centuries of civilization, education, and self-government, all with equal rights in our Senate and representation according to population in our House, with an equal voice in shaping our national destinies--that would, at least in this stage of the world, be humanitarianism run mad, a degeneration and degradation of the homogeneous, continental Republic of our pride too preposterous for the contemplation of serious and intelligent men. Quite as well might Great Britain now invite the swarming millions of India to send rajas and members of the lower House, in proportion to population, to swamp the Lords and Commons and rule the English people. If it had been supposed that even Hawaii, with its overwhelming preponderance of Kanakas and Asiatics, would become a State, she could not have been annexed. If the territories we are conquering must become States, we might better renounce them at once and place them under the protectorate of some humane and friendly European Power with less nonsense in its blood. This is not to deny them the freest and most liberal institutions they are capable of sustaining. The people of Sitka and the Aleutian Islands enjoy the blessings of ordered liberty and free institutions, but nobody dreams of admitting them to Statehood. New Mexico has belonged to us for half a century, not only without oppression, but with all the local self-government for which she was prepared; yet, though an integral part of our continent, surrounded by States, and with an adequate population, she is still not admitted to Statehood. Why should not the people on the island of Porto Rico, or even of Cuba, prosper and be happy for the next century under a rule similar in the main to that under which their kinsmen of New Mexico have prospered for the last half-century? With some necessary modifications, the territorial form of government which we have tried so successfully from the beginning of the Union is well adapted to the best of such communities. It secures local self-government, equality before the law, upright courts, ample power for order and defense, and such control by Congress as gives security against the mistakes or excesses of people new to the exercise of these rights.