Whitelaw Reid

Whatever the verdict of the men of Massachusetts to-day, I contentedly await the verdict of their sons.

But, on the other hand, I am not here either to launch charges of treason against any opponent of these policies, who nevertheless loves the institutions founded on these shores by your ancestors, and wishes to perpetuate what they created.

Least of all would it occur to me to utter a word in disparagement of your senior Senator, of whom it may be said with respectful and almost affectionate regard that he bears a warrant as authentic as that of the most distinguished of his…

Let us have a truce to profitless disputes about what cannot be reversed.

But for the duty of this hour, consider if there is not a common meeting-ground and instant necessity for union in a rational effort to avert present perils.

Disagree as we may about the past, let us to-day at least see straight--see things as they are.

Let us suspend disputes about what is done and cannot be undone, long enough to rally all the forces of good will, all the undoubted courage and zeal and patriotism that are now at odds, in a devoted effort to meet the greater dangers that…

Grant that, and instead of reversing engines safely in mid-career, as they vainly hope, they must simply plunge us over the precipice.

At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it.

But make its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a State.

Then behind Porto Rico stands Cuba, and behind Cuba, in time, stand the whole of the West Indies, on whom that law of political gravitation which John Quincy Adams described will be perpetually acting with redoubled force.

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