At nearly every stage in that long story of expansion the Little Americans have either denied the constitutional authority to acquire and govern, or denounced the acquisitions as worthless and dangerous.
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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It was no vulgar lust of power that inspired the statesmen and soldiers of the Republic when they resisted the halting counsel of the Little Americans in the past.
But this is no longer a child-nation, irresponsible in its nonage and incapable of comprehending or assuming the responsibilities of its acts.
Are we to plead the baby act, and claim that we can flounce around the world, breaking international china and burning property, and yet repudiate the bill because we have not come of age?
Who dare say that a self-respecting Power could have sailed away from Manila and repudiated the responsibilities of its victorious belligerency?
After going into a war for humanity, were we so craven that we should seek freedom from further trouble at the expense of civilization?
If we did not want those responsibilities we ought not to have gone to war, and I, for one, would have been content.
But having chosen to go to war, and having been speedily and overwhelmingly successful, we should be ashamed even to think of running away from what inexorably followed.
We thus broke down Spanish means for controlling the Philippines, and were left with the Spanish responsibility for maintaining order there--responsibility to all the world, German, English, Japanese, Russian, and the rest--in one of the…
But why not turn over that commercial center and the island on which it is situated to the Tagals?
Secondly, as the legitimate and necessary consequence of our own previous acts, it has become our national and international duty to do it.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.