I implore you, as thinking men, pause long enough to realize the degradation of the Republic thus calmly contemplated by those who proclaim this to be our constitutional duty toward our possessions.
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
The republican institutions I have been trained to believe in were institutions founded, like those of New England, on the Church and the school-house.
They constitute a system only likely to endure among a people of high virtue and high intelligence.
The republican government built up on this continent, while the most successful in the history of the world, is also the most complicated, the most expensive, and often the slowest.
What holds a nation together, unless it be community of interests, character, and language, and contiguous territory?
What would more thoroughly insure its speedily flying to pieces than the lack of every one of these requisites?
Over and over, the clearest-eyed students of history have predicted our own downfall even as a continental republic, in spite of our measurable enjoyment of all of them.
How manifestly, under the incongruous hodge-podge of additions to the Union thus proposed, we should be organizing with Satanic skill the exact conditions which have invariably led to such downfalls elsewhere!
Before the advent of the United States, the history of the world's efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure.
On questions vitally affecting the welfare of this continent it is inconceivable, unthinkable, that even altruistic Massachusetts should tolerate having her two Senators and thirteen Representatives neutralized by as many from Mindanao.
Are we content, for example, with the way we have dealt with the negro problem in the Southern States?
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.