But your representatives in Paris placed your country in no tricky attitude of endeavoring either to evade or repudiate just obligations.
Whitelaw Reid
The Public Record
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, diplomat and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history.
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They recognized the duty of reimbursement for debts legitimately incurred for pacific improvements or otherwise, for the real benefit of the transferred territory.
They protected what was gained in the war from adroit efforts to put it all at risk again, through an untimely appeal to the noble principle of Arbitration.
They held--and I am sure the best friends of the principle will thank them for holding--that an honest resort to Arbitration must come before war, to avert its horrors, not after war, to escape its consequences.
They were enabled to pledge the most Protectionist country in the world to the liberal and wise policy of the Open Door in the East.
And finally they secured that diplomatic novelty, a treaty in which the acutest senatorial critics have not found a peg on which inadmissible claims against the country may be hung.
At the same time they neither neglected nor feared the duty of caring for the material interests of their own country;--the duty of grasping the enormous possibilities upon which we had stumbled, for sharing in the awakening and…
That way lies now the best hope of American commerce.
It is more or less, therefore, an artificial trade, as well as a trade in which we have lost the first place and will find it difficult to regain.
Practically we own more than half the coast on this side, dominate the rest, and have midway stations in the Sandwich and Aleutian Islands.
To extend now the authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding position on the other side of the Pacific--doubling our control of it and of the…
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.