Have we not a better and more urgent use for our time now than in showing why some of us would have liked them settled differently?
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.
gutenberg.org
I want to suggest to those who dislike the past of the Philippine question that there is more important work pressing upon you at this moment than to cuss the court.
You cannot change the past, but you may prevent some threatened sequences which even in your eyes would be far greater calamities.
They are the property of the United States by an immutable title which, whatever some of our own people say, the whole civilized world recognizes and respects.
There is no use talking about getting rid of them--giving them back to Spain, or turning them over to Aguinaldo, or simply running away from them.
They have not been persuaded and they cannot be persuaded that this is an inferior Government, incapable of any duty Providence (through the acts of a wicked Administration, if you choose) may send its way--duties which other nations could…
They do not and will not believe that it was any such maimed, imperfect, misshapen cripple from birth for which our forefathers made a place in the family of nations.
Nor are they misled by the cry that, in a populous region, thronged by the ships and traders of all countries, where their own prosecution of a just war broke down whatever guaranties for order had previously existed, they are violating…
The American people know they are thus proceeding to do just what Jefferson did in the vast region he bought from France--without the consent, by the way, either of its sovereign or its inhabitants.
They know they are following in the exact path of all the constructive statesmen of the Republic, from the days of the man who wrote the Declaration, and of those who made the Constitution, down to the days of the men who conquered…
Nor am I here to apologize for my part in making the nation that was in the wrong and beaten in the late war pay for it in territory.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.