By this the conquest of the Philippine Islands, virtually accomplished when the Spanish capacity for resistance was destroyed by Admiral Dewey's victory of May 1st, was formally sealed. [64] Admiral Dewey contemplated that we should merely remain masters of the situation out where he was until the end of the war. President McKinley set about to effect "the conquest of the Philippine Islands." The naval victory of Manila Bay having made it certain that at the conclusion of our war against a decadent monarchy we would at last have an adequate coaling station and naval base in the Far East, the sending of troops to the Philippines, in appropriate prosecution of the war, to reduce and capture Manila, the capital and chief port, raised the question at once "And then what?" The genesis of the idea of taking over the archipelago is traceable to within a few days after the destruction of the Spanish fleet. Within a few days after the official news of the battle of Manila Bay reached Washington, the Treasury Department set a man to work making a "Report on Financial and Industrial Conditions of the Philippine Islands." [65] The Interior Department also awoke, about the same time to possibilities of an El Dorado in the new overseas conquest. "In May, 1898," says Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss, in a letter intended for the Peace Commissioners who met at Paris that fall, "by arrangement between the Secretary of War with this Department"--Mr. Bliss's grammar is bad, but his meaning is plain--"a geologist of the United States Geological Survey accompanied the military expedition to the Philippines for the purpose of procuring information touching the geological and mineral resources of said islands." [66] This report, which accompanies the Bliss letter, reads like a mining stock prospectus. That summer an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, presumably echoing the sentiments of the Administration, came out in one of the great magazines of the period, the Century, with an article in which he said: "We see with sudden clearness that some of the most revered of our political maxims have outlived their force. * * * A new mainspring * * * has become the directing force * * * the mainspring of commercialism." [67] Of course, the writer did not mention that Manila is an out-of-the-way place, so far as regards the main-travelled routes across the Pacific Ocean, and also forgot that, as has been suggested once before, the carrying trade of the world, and the shippers on which it depends, in the contest of the nations for the markets of Asia, would never take to the practice of unloading at Manila by way of rehearsal, before finally discharging cargo on the mainland of Asia, where the name of the Ultimate Consumer is legion. Nevertheless "Expansion"--of Trade, mainly--was the slogan of the hour, and any one who did not catch the contagion of exuberant allusion to "Our New Possessions" was considered crusty and out of date.