Problems of Expansion: As Considered in Papers and AddressesReid, Whitelaw
History
Problems of Expansion: As Considered in Papers and Addresses
Reid, Whitelaw
United States -- Colonial question
"But you cannot fit people for freedom. They must fit themselves, just
as we must do our own crawling and stumbling in order to learn to
walk." The illustration is unfortunate. Must the crawling baby, then,
be abandoned by its natural or accidental guardian, and left to itself
to grow strong by struggling, or to perish, as may happen? Must we turn
the Tagals loose on the foreigners in Manila, and on their enemies in
the other tribes, that by following their instincts they may fit
themselves for freedom?
Again, "It will injure us to exert power over an unwilling people, just
as slavery injured the slaveholders themselves." Then a community is
injured by maintaining a police. Then a court is injured by rendering a
just decree, and an officer by executing it. Then it is a greater
injury, for instance, to stop piracy than to suffer from it. Then the
manly exercise of a just responsibility enfeebles instead of developing
and strengthening a nation.
"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed." "No man is good enough to govern another against his will."
Great truths, from men whose greatness and moral elevation the world
admires. But there is a higher authority than Jefferson or Lincoln, Who
said: "If a man smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also." Yet he who acted literally on even that divine injunction toward
the Malays that attacked our Army in Manila would be a congenital idiot
to begin with, and his corpse, while it lasted, would remain an
object-lesson of how not to deal with the present stage of Malay
civilization and Christianity.
Why mourn over our present course as a departure from the policy of the
fathers? For a hundred years the uniform policy which they began and
their sons continued has been acquisition, expansion, annexation,
reaching out to remote wildernesses far more distant and inaccessible
then than the Philippines are now--to disconnected regions like Alaska,
to island regions like Midway, the Guano Islands, the Aleutians, the
Sandwich Islands, and even to quasi-protectorates like Liberia and
Samoa. Why mourn because of the precedent we are establishing? The
precedent was established before we were born. Why distress ourselves
with the thought that this is only the beginning, that it opens the
door to unlimited expansion? The door is wide open now, and has been
ever since Livingston in Paris jumped at Talleyrand's offer to sell him
the wilderness west of the Mississippi instead of the settlements
eastward to Florida, which we had been trying to get; and Jefferson
eagerly sustained him. For the rest, the task that is laid upon us now
is not proving so easy as to warrant this fear that we shall soon be
seeking unlimited repetitions of it.
[Sidenote: Evasion by Embrace.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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