Whitelaw Reid

One is that to govern the Philippines without their consent or against the opposition of Aguinaldo is to violate the principle--only formulated, to be sure, in the Declaration of Independence, but, as they say, underlying the whole…

The truth is, all intelligent men know--and few even in America, except obvious demagogues, hesitate to admit--that there are cases where a good government does not and ought not to rest on the consent of the governed.

If men will not govern themselves with respect for civilization and its agencies, then when they get in the way they must be governed--always have been, whenever the world was not retrograding, and always will be.

The notion that such government is a revival of slavery, and that the United States by doing its share of such work in behalf of civilization would therefore become infamous, though put forward with apparent gravity in some eminently…

Instead of vindicating a righteous rebellion in the Declaration, he was called, after a time, to exercise a righteous government under the Constitution.

Did he himself, then, carry his own words to such extremes as these professed disciples now demand?

We held the Philippines first by the same right by which we held our own original thirteen States,--the oldest and firmest of all rights, the right by which nearly every great nation holds the bulk of its territory,--the right of conquest.

Seward bought the Russians and Alaskans, and we have governed them ever since, without their consent.

Is it easy, in the face of such facts, to preserve your respect for an objection so obviously captious as that based on the phrase from the Declaration of Independence?

Otherwise he violated the Constitution he had helped to make and sworn to uphold.

It seems--let it be said with all respect--that we have reached the reductio ad absurdum, and that the constitutional argument in any of its phases need not be further pursued.

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