His argument followed closely the lines taken by Mr. Calhoun in the Senate and Mr. Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision. On these points I make bold to repeat what I felt warranted in saying a fortnight ago within sight of Bunker Hill--that there is every evidence that the American people have distinctly and definitely made up their minds. They have not been persuaded and they cannot be persuaded that this is an inferior government, incapable of any duty Providence may send its way--duties which other nations could discharge, but we cannot. So I venture to affirm the impossibility that any party in power, whether the present one or its opponent, could soon, if ever, abandon one foot of the territory gained in the late war. We are gathered on another old Spanish territory taken by our country in war. It shows what Americans do with such acquisitions. Before you expect to see Porto Rico given back to Spain or the Philippines abandoned to Aguinaldo, wait till we are ready to declare, as Daniel Webster did in the Senate, that this California of your pride and glory is "not worth a dollar," and throw back the worthless thing on the hands of unoffending Mexico. Till then, let us as practical and sensible men recognize that what is past is settled. [Sidenote: Duty First; but then Interest also.] Thus far have we come in these strange courses and to these unexpected and unwelcome tasks by following, at each succeeding emergency, the path of clear, absolute, and unavoidable duty. The only point in the whole national line of conduct, from the spring of 1898 on to this March morning of 1900, at which our Government could have stopped with honor, was at the outset. I, for one, would gladly have stopped there. How was it then with some at the West who are discontented now? Shake not your gory locks at me or at my fellow-citizens in the East. You cannot say we did it. In 1898, just as a few years earlier in the debate about Venezuela, the loudest calls for a belligerent policy came not from the East, "the cowardly, commercial East," as we were sometimes described, but from the patriotic and warlike West. The farther West you came, the louder the cry for war, till it reached its very climax on what we used to call the frontier, and was sent thundering Eastward upon the National Capital in rolling reverberations from the Sierras and the Rockies which few public men cared to defy. At that moment, perhaps, if this popular and congressional demand had not pushed us forward, we might have stopped with honor--certainly not later. From the day war was flagrant down to this hour there has been no forward step which a peremptory national or international obligation did not require. To the mandate alone of Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God, the American people have bowed, as, let us hope, they always will. It is not true that, in the final decision as to any one step in the great movement hitherto, our interests have been first or