Even if he could persuade himself that rejecting them is morally and internationally admissible, is he at liberty to commit his country irrevocably to their rejection, because they do not wholly please his individual fancy?
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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Would this generation judge that they had been equal to their opportunities or their duties?
The difficulties which at present discourage us are largely of our own creation.
If the bitterest enemy of the United States had sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest trouble in the shortest time, he could have devised for that end no policy more successful than the one we actually pursued.
But as to the effect in Luzon there is no doubt; and because of it we have the right to ask a delay in judgment about results there until the present evil can be undone.
Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of colonizing or of managing colonies; that there is something in our national character or institutions that wholly disqualifies us for the work.
Yet the most successful colonies in the whole world were the thirteen original colonies on our Atlantic coast; and the most successful colonists were our own grandfathers!
Have the grandsons so degenerated that they are incapable of colonizing at all, or of managing colonies?
Is it any one with the glorious history of this continental colonization bred in his bone and leaping in his blood?
Or is it some refugee from a foreign country he was discontented with, who now finds pleasure in disparaging the capacity of the new country he came to, while he has neither caught its spirit nor grasped the meaning of its history?
Has our system been found weaker, then, than other forms of government, less adaptable to emergencies, and with people less fit to cope with them?
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.