The calamity of admitting them cannot be overrated. Even in the case of the best of these islands, it would demoralize and degrade the national suffrage almost incalculably below the point already reached. To the Senate, unwieldy now, and greatly changed in character from the body contemplated by the Constitution, it would be disastrous. For the present States of the Union it would be an act of folly like that of a business firm which blindly steered for bankruptcy by freely admitting to full partnership new members, strangers, and non-residents, not only otherwise ill qualified, but with absolutely conflicting interests. And it would be a distinct violation of the clause in the preamble that "we, the people,... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of _America_." There is the only safe ground--on the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. It contemplated a Continental Union of sovereign States. It limited that Union to the American Continent. The man that takes it farther sounds its death-knell. [Sidenote: The General Welfare.] I have designedly left to the last any estimate of the material interests we serve by holding on in our present course. Whatever these may be, they are only a subordinate consideration. We are in the Philippines, as we are in the West Indies, because duty sent us; and we shall remain because we have no right to run away from our duty, even if it does involve far more trouble than we foresaw when we plunged into the war that entailed it. The call to duty, when once plainly understood, is a call Americans never fail to answer, while to calls of interest they have often shown themselves incredulous or contemptuous. But the Constitution we revere was also ordained "to promote the general welfare," and he is untrue to its purpose who squanders opportunities. Never before have they been showered upon us in such bewildering profusion. Are the American people to rise to the occasion? Are they to be as great as their country? Or shall the historian record that at this unexampled crisis they were controlled by timid ideas and short-sighted views, and so proved unequal to the duty and the opportunity which unforeseen circumstances brought to their doors? The two richest archipelagos in the world are practically at our disposal. The greatest ocean on the globe has been put in our hands, the ocean that is to bear the commerce of the Twentieth Century. In the face of this prospect, shall we prefer, with the teeming population that century is to bring us, to remain a "hibernating nation, living off its own fat--a hermit nation," as Mr. Senator Davis has asked? For our first Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Hill, was right when he said that not to enter the Open Door in Asia means the perpetual isolation of this continent. [Sidenote: Have they any Value?]