As soon as we had once blundered into the colonial business, the rock-bottom frankness with which we so dearly love to deal with one another, let carping Europe deny it as she will, was superseded by a systematic effort on the part of the statesmen responsible for the blunder to conceal it. It soon became clear to those on the inside that the sovereign American people had "bought a gold brick," that is to say, had made a grievous mistake and had done wrong. But as it is not expedient for courtiers to tell the sovereign he has done wrong, because "The king can do no wrong," thereafter all the courtiers,--i. e. persons desiring to control the "sovereign" while seeming to obey him--instead of risking loss of the "royal" favor by boldly telling the people they had done wrong and ought to mend the error of their ways, began to fill their ears and salve their conscience with mediaeval doctrines about salvation of the heathen through governmental missions maintained by the joint agencies of Cross and Sword. For the foregoing and cognate reasons, Senator Lodge's description of Spain's last thirty years in Cuba fits our first six or seven in the Philippines, beginning in 1899 with the original Otis press censorship policy of "not letting anything go that will hurt the Administration," and coming on down to a certificate made in 1907 by the Philippine Commission for consumption in the United States, to the effect that a state of general and complete peace had prevailed throughout the islands for a stated period preceding the certificate, when, as a matter of fact, during the period covered by the certificate, an executive proclamation formally declaring a state of insurrection had issued, and the Supreme Court of the islands had upheld certain drastic executive action as legal because of the state of insurrection recognized by the proclamation. The Taft civil government of the Philippines set up in 1901 was an attempt to answer the question which, during the crucial period of our country's history following the Spanish War, rang so persistently through the public utterances of both Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison: "Mr. President, how are you going to square the subjugation of the Philippines with the freeing of Cuba?" Mr. McKinley's answer had been, in effect: "Never mind about that, Grover; you and Benjamin are back numbers. I will show you 'the latest thing' in the consent-of-the-governed line, a government not 'essentially popular,' it is true, nor indeed at all 'popular,' in fact very unpopular, but 'essentially popular in form.' You lads are not experts on the political trapeze." Accordingly, as Senator Lodge said concerning the dreary years of continuous public disorders in Cuba under Spain, which we finally put a stop to in 1898: We were to go on pretending that the war was not there, etc.