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WAS IT TOO GOOD A TREATY?

This speech was made at a dinner given in New York by the Lotos Club in honor of Mr. Reid, who had been its president for fourteen years prior to his first diplomatic service abroad in 1889. It was the first public utterance by any one of the Peace Commissioners after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris.

Among the many letters of regret at the dinner, the following, from the Secretary of State and from his predecessor, were given to the public:

Washington, D.C., February 9, 1899.

To John Elderkin, Lotos Club, New York:

I received your note in due time, and had hoped until now to be able to come and join you in doing honor to my life-long friend, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid; but the pressure of official engagements here has made it impossible for me to do so. I shall be with you in spirit, and shall applaud to the best that can be said in praise of one who, in a life of remarkable variety of achievement, has honored every position he has held.

Faithfully yours,

John Hay.

Canton, Ohio, February 8, 1899.

To Chester S. Lord, Lotos Club, New York:

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your invitation to attend the dinner to be given to the Hon. Whitelaw Reid on the evening of the 11th inst. Nothing would afford me more pleasure than to join the members of the Lotos Club in doing honor to Mr. Reid. It is a source of much regret that circumstances compel me to forego the privilege. His high character and worth, leadership in the best journalism of the day, eminent services, and wide experience long since gave him an honorable place among his contemporaries. The Commission to negotiate the treaty concluded at Paris on December 10 had no more valued member. His fellow-Commissioners were fortunate in being able to avail themselves of Mr. Reid's wide acquaintance with the leading statesmen and diplomats residing in Paris. His presence as a member of the Commission rendered unnecessary any further introduction to those who had known him as our Minister to France. He gave to the work of the Commission in unstinted measure the benefit of his wisdom in council, judgment, and skill in the preparation and presentation of the American case at Paris. Permit me to join you in congratulations and best wishes to Mr. Reid, and to express the hope that there are in store for him many more years of usefulness and honor.

Very truly yours,

William R. Day.

WAS IT TOO GOOD A TREATY?

Obviously the present occasion has no narrow or merely personal meaning. It comes to me only because I had the good fortune, through the friendly partiality of the President of the United States, to be associated with a great work in which you took a patriotic interest, and over the ratification of which you use this means of expressing your satisfaction. It was a happy thing for us to be able to bring back peace to our own land, and happier still to find that our treaty is accepted by the Senate and the people as one that guards the honor and protects the interests of the country. Only so should a nation like ours make peace at all.

Come, Peace, not like a mourner bowed

For honor lost and dear ones wasted,

But proud, to meet a people proud,

With eyes that tell of triumph tasted.

I shall make no apology—now that the Senate has unsealed our lips—for speaking briefly of this work just happily completed.

The only complaint one hears about it is that we did our duty too well—that, in fact, we made peace on terms too favorable to our own country. In all the pending discussion there seems to be no other fault found. On no other point is the treaty said by any one to be seriously defective.

It loyally carried out the attitude of Congress as to Cuba. It enforced the renunciation of Spanish sovereignty there, but, in spite of the most earnest Spanish efforts, it refused to accept American sovereignty. It loaded neither ourselves nor the Cubans with the so-called Cuban debts, incurred by Spain in the efforts to subdue them. It involved us in no complications, either in the West Indies or in the East, as to contracts or claims or religious establishments. It dealt liberally with a fallen foe—giving him a generous lump sum that more than covered any legitimate debts or expenditures for pacific improvements; assuming the burden of just claims against him by our own people; carrying back the armies surrendered on the other side of the world at our own cost; returning their arms; even restoring them their artillery, including heavy ordnance in field fortifications, munitions of war, and the very cattle that dragged their caissons. It secured alike for Cubans and Filipinos the release of political prisoners. It scrupulously reserved for Congress the power of determining the political status of the inhabitants of our new possessions. It declared on behalf of the most Protectionist country in the world for the policy of the Open Door within its Asiatic sphere of influence.

With all this the Senate and the country seemed content. But the treaty refused to return to Spanish rule one foot of territory over which that rule had been broken by the triumphs of our arms.

Were we to be reproached for that? Should the Senate have told us: "You overdid this business; you looked after the interests of your own country too thoroughly. You ought to have abandoned the great archipelago which the fortunes of war had placed at your country's disposal. You are not exactly unfaithful servants; you are too blindly, unswervingly faithful. You haven't seized an opportunity to run away from some distant results of the war into which Congress plunged the country before dreaming how far it might spread. You haven't dodged for us the responsibilities we incurred."

That is true. When Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, and General Merritt captured the Spanish army that alone maintained the Spanish hold on the Philippines, the Spanish power there was gone; and the civilization and the common sense and the Christianity of the world looked to the power that succeeded it to accept its responsibilities. So we took the Philippines. How could men representing this country, jealous of its honor, or with an adequate comprehension either of its duty or its rights, do otherwise?

A nation at war over a disputed boundary or some other material interest might properly stop when that interest was secured, and give back to the enemy all else that had been taken from him. But this was not a war for any material interest. It was a war to put down a rule over an alien people, which we declared so barbarous that we could no longer tolerate it. How could we consent to secure peace, after we had broken down this barbarous rule in two archipelagos, by agreeing that one of them should be forced back under it?

There was certainly another alternative. After destroying the only organized government in the archipelago, the only security for life and property, native and foreign, in great commercial centers like Manila, Iloilo, and Cebu, against hordes of uncivilized pagans and Mohammedan Malays, should we then scuttle out and leave them to their fate? A band of old-time Norse pirates, used to swooping down on a capital, capturing its rulers, seizing its treasure, burning the town, abandoning the people to domestic disorder and foreign spoliation, and promptly sailing off for another piratical foray—such a band of pirates might, no doubt, have left Manila to be sacked by the insurgents, while it fled from the Philippines. We did not think a self-respecting, civilized, responsible Christian Power could.

Indemnity.

There was another side to it. In a conflict to which fifty years of steadily increasing provocation had driven us we had lost 266 sailors on the Maine; had lost at Santiago and elsewhere uncounted victims of Spanish guns and tropical climates; and had spent in this war over $240,000,000, without counting the pensions that must still accrue under laws existing when it began. Where was the indemnity that, under such circumstances, it is the duty of the victorious nation to exact, not only in its own interest, but in the interest of a Christian civilization and the tendencies of modern International Law, which require that a nation provoking unjust war shall smart for it, not merely while it lasts, but by paying the cost when it is ended? Spain had no money even to pay her own soldiers. No indemnity was possible, save in territory. Well, we once wanted to buy Cuba, before it had been desolated by twelve years of war and decimated by Weyler; yet our uttermost offer for it, our highest valuation even then, was $125,000,000—less than half the cost of our war. But now we were precluded from taking Cuba. Porto Rico, immeasurably less important to us, and eight hundred miles farther away from our coast, is only one twelfth the size of Cuba. Were the representatives of the United States, charged with the duty of protecting not only its honor, but its interests, in arranging terms of peace, to content themselves with little Porto Rico, away off a third of the way to Spain, plus the petty reef of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific, as indemnity for an unprovoked war that had cost and was to cost their country $300,000,000?

The Trouble they Give—are they Worth it?

But, some one exclaims, the Philippines are already giving us more trouble than they are worth! It is natural to say so just now, and it is partly true. What they are worth and likely to be worth to this country in the race for commercial supremacy on the Pacific—that is to say, for supremacy in the great development of trade in the Twentieth Century—is a question too large to be so summarily decided, or to be entered on at the close of a dinner, and under the irritation of a Malay half-breed's folly. But nobody ever doubted that they would give us trouble. That is the price nations must pay for going to war, even in a just cause. I was not one of those who were eager to begin this war with Spain; but I protest against any attempt to evade our just responsibility in the position in which it has left us. We shall have trouble in the Philippines. So we shall have trouble in Cuba and in Porto Rico. If we dawdle, and hesitate, and lead them to think we fear them and fear trouble, our trouble will be great. If, on the other hand, we grasp this nettle danger, if we act promptly, with inexorable vigor and with justice, it may be slight. At any rate, the more serious the crisis the plainer our path. God give us the courage to purify our politics and strengthen our Government to meet these new and grave duties!