Whitelaw Reid

I profoundly regret this fact;... but it is a fact, nevertheless, and, as such, must weigh in determining my conduct as a citizen....

With the ratification of the Peace of Paris, our Continental Republic has stretched its wings over the West Indies and the East.

Shall we quit ourselves like men in the discharge of this immediate duty; or shall we fall to quarreling with each other like boys as to whether such a duty is a good or a bad thing for the country, and as to who got it fastened upon us?

There may have been a time for disputes about the wisdom of resisting the stamp tax, but it was not just after Bunker Hill.

Nothing in human power can ever restore the United States to the position it occupied the day before Congress plunged us into the war with Spain, or enable us to escape what that war entailed.

Whithersoever we turn now, we must do it with the burden of our late acts to carry, the responsibility of our new position to assume.

When the sovereignty which Spain had exercised with the assent of all nations over vast and distant regions for three hundred years was solemnly transferred under the eye of the civilized world to the United States, our first…

Till that is secured, any hindrance to the effort is bad citizenship--as bad as resistance to the police; as much worse, in fact, as its consequences may be more bloody and disastrous.

But when the task is accomplished,--when the Stars and Stripes at last bring the order and peaceful security they typify, instead of wanton disorder, with all the concomitants of savage warfare over which they now wave,--we shall then be…

It is a problem that calls for our soberest, most dispassionate, and most patriotic thought.

From these still regions of cloistered thought may well come the white light of pure reason, not the wild, whirling words of the special pleader or of the partizan, giving loose rein to his hasty first impressions.

It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.