Now the words of a United States Senator are much listened to by an army in the field. When a war breaks out, it is usually your Senator who gets your commission for you originally, and has you promoted and made captain, colonel, or general, as the case may be, if you do anything to deserve it, or lifted from the ranks to a commission, if you do anything to deserve it, or sees that something fitting is done if you die in any specially decent way. An army in the field thinks a United States Senator is about one of the biggest institutions going--which, seriously, is not far from the truth, with all due respect to the blase pessimists of the press gallery. Consider then how wholly uninspiring, as a sentiment to die by and kill by, the above senatorial utterance was to the men in the field in the Philippines, who did not even then believe the islands would pay. The "cold, hard, practical" fact was, if the Senator was to be believed, that we were fighting for what is generically called "Wall Street;" that it was primarily a Wall Street war: an expedition fitted out to kill enough Filipinos to make the survivors good future customers--"Ultimate Consumers"--and only incidentally a war to make people follow your way of being happy in lieu of their own. Yet we had most of us, but shortly previously to that, gone trooping headlong to Cuba, in the wake of the most inspiring single personality of this age--Senator Lodge's friend, Colonel Roosevelt--some of our American thoraxes inflated with sentiments thus nobly expressed by the same distinguished Senator in his speech on the resolution which declared war against Spain: "We are there" (meaning in the then Cuban situation), Senator Lodge had said in the Senate, in the matchless outburst of eloquence with which he set the keynote to the war with Spain-- We are there because we represent the spirit of liberty and the new time. * * * We have grasped no man's territory, we have taken no man's property, we have invaded no man's rights. We do not ask their lands. [302]