A republic like the United States has not been well adapted hitherto to that sort of work. Congress is apt to be slow, if not also changeable, and under the Constitution the method of government for territories must be prescribed by Congress. It has not yet found time to deal with the Sandwich Islands. Its harsher critics declare it has never yet found time to deal fairly with Alaska. No doubt, Executive action in advance of Congress might be satisfactory; but a President is apt to wait for Congress unless driven by irresistible necessities. He can only take the initiative through some form of military government. For this the War Department is not yet well organized. Possibly the easiest solution for the moment would be in the organization of another department for war and government beyond the seas, or the development of a measurably independent bureau for such work in the present department. Whatever is done, it would be unreasonable to expect unbroken success or exemption from a learner's mistakes and discouragements. But whoever supposes that these will result either in the abandonment of the task or in a final failure with it does not know the American people. VII OUR NEW DUTIES This commencement address was delivered on the campus at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at the celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary, June 15, 1899. OUR NEW DUTIES Sons and Friends of Miami: I join you in saluting this venerable mother at a notable waymark in her great life. One hundred and seven years ago the Congress voted, and George Washington approved, a foundation for this University. Seventy-five years ago it opened its doors. Now, si monumentum quæris, circumspice. There is the catalogue. There are the long lists of men who so served the State or the Church that their lives are your glory, their names your inspiration.[5] There are the longer lists of others to whom kinder fortune did not set duties in the eye of the world; but Miami made of them citizens who leavened the lump of that growing West which was then a sprawling, irregular line of pioneer settlements, and is now an empire. Search through it, above and below the Ohio, and beyond the Mississippi. So often, where there are centers of good work or right thinking and right living--so often and so widely spread will you find traces of Miami, left by her own sons or coming from those secondary sources which sprang from her example and influence, that you are led in grateful surprise to exclaim: "If this be the work of a little college, God bless and prolong the little college! If, half starved and generally neglected, she has thus nourished good learning and its proper result in good lives through the three quarters of a century ended to-day, may the days of her years be as the sands of the sea; may the Twentieth Century only introduce the glorious prime of a career of which the Nineteenth saw but modest beginnings, and may good old Miami still flourish in sæcula sæculorum!"