Under any conditions that exist now, or have existed for three hundred years, a homogeneous native government over the whole archipelago is obviously impossible. Its relations to the outside world must necessarily be assumed by us. We must preserve order in Philippine waters, regulate the harbors, fix and collect the duties, apportion the revenue, and supervise the expenditure. We must enforce sanitary measures. We must retain such a control of the superior courts as shall make justice certainly attainable, and such control of the police as shall insure its enforcement. But in all this, after the absolute authority has been established, the further the natives can themselves be used to carry out the details, the better. Such a system might not be unwise even for a colony to which we had reason to expect a considerable emigration of our own people. If experience of a kindred nation in dealing with similar problems counts for anything, it is certainly wise for a distant dependency, always to be populated mainly, save in the great cities, by native races, and little likely ever to be quite able to stand alone, while, nevertheless, we wish to help it just as much as possible to that end. [Sidenote: The Duty of Public Servants.] Certainly this is no bed of flowery ease in the dreamy Orient to which we are led. No doubt these first glimpses of the task that lies before us, as well as the warfare with distant tribes into which we have been unexpectedly plunged, will provoke for the time a certain discontent with our new possessions. But on a far-reaching question of national policy the wise public man is not so greatly disturbed by what people say in momentary discouragement under the first temporary check. That which really concerns him is what people at a later day, or even in a later generation, might say of men trusted with great duties for their country, who proved unequal to their opportunities, and through some short-sighted timidity of the moment lost the chance of centuries. It is quite true, as was recently reported in what seemed an authoritative way from Washington, that the Peace Commissioners were not entirely of one mind at the outset, and equally true that the final conclusion at Washington was apparently reached on the Commission's recommendation from Paris. As the cold fit, in the language of one of our censors, has followed the hot fit in the popular temper, I readily take the time which hostile critics consider unfavorable, for accepting my own share of responsibility, and for avowing for myself that I declared my belief in the duty and policy of holding the whole Philippine Archipelago in the very first conference of the Commissioners in the President's room at the White House, in advance of any instructions of any sort. If vindication for it be needed, I confidently await the future.