"The United States has already a great and splendid mission in building up between the oceans a free, happy and prosperous nation of two hundred millions of people.... The policy of creating great armaments and of annexing territories beyond the sea would be an un-American policy and a complete departure from the maxims--approved by long experience--of the illustrious founders of the Republic." But I fancy the illustrious founders of the Republic would see the wisdom, were they living to-day, of securing that advantage which the fortunes of war has thrown into our lap. I doubt if even their wisdom could have pointed a way whereby we could relinquish the Philippines without also letting go our prestige, if not also our honor. How can we abandon them, either to internecine strife and anarchy, or, more probably, to the cupidity of the powers whose statesmen recognize the value of the islands, and have no compunctions of conscience as to how they may be secured? But I appeal to the founders of the Republic for another and yet a stronger argument for holding fast to all our new possessions, whether in the Pacific or in the Carribean Sea. In the society of the illustrious dead let us go back for a little space over the years that have elapsed since the civil war. I am no pessimist; on the contrary, I see in every man and every thing, however evil--so that the Lord gives them a place in His own great scheme--an agency for good. But I do not find it easy to look back with pride or even patience upon the last five and thirty years of this century. To me they appear the most inglorious in our history. They have been years of unequalled material growth, but, I think, they have been years of unequalled moral deterioration also. We have waxed fat, arrogant and ungodly. We have lost respect for the law. We have learned to wink at corruption in high places. The tongue of scandal wags unrebuked at the great, the exalted. Greater fortunes than were ever known before have been piled up; but if wealth and extravagance have attained to new forms of luxury, so want has learned a keener edge of suffering. We have seen labor in armed revolt and anarchy showing its ugly head. Our federal Senate reeks with disrepute. The golden calf has been set up in the market place, the forum, even in the sanctuary. This, to be sure, is but one side of the picture; there is another and a brighter side. The period I speak of has been athrill with intense activity, for good as well as evil. If vice has been active, so have the agencies of virtue. Churches, colleges, charitable and reform societies have sprung up and grown as never before. When the call to arms came last year it was answered on every hand--by the pampered favorites of wealth and luxury as well as by the sons of toil.