They offer you the best of all commerce--that with people less advanced, exchanging the products of different zones, a people awakening to the complex wants of a civilization that is just stirring them to a new life.
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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Have you considered what urgent need there will be for those new fields?
It is no paltry question of an outlet for the surplus products of a mere nation of seventy-five millions that confronts you.
Is it the part of statesmanship--is it even the part of every-day, matter-of-fact common sense--to reject or despise these Oriental openings for the products of this people of three hundred million souls the Twentieth Century would need to…
That would be a commerce of the gross amount of six and two third cents for each inhabitant of our country in the next century, with that whole vast region adjoining you, wherein dwell one fourth of the human race!
But would a wise man kick the stepping-stone away?
What has crowded your docks, filled your streets, quickened your markets, rented your stores and dwellings, sent all this new blood pulsing through your veins--made you like the worn Richelieu when, in that moment, there entered his spent…
Was it the forgetfulness that muscles grow strong only with exercise; that it is the duties of manhood that take the acrid humors out of a youth's blood; that it is great responsibility, manfully met, not cowardly evaded, that sobers and…
What Duty requires us to take, an enlightened regard for our own interests will require us to hold.
The American people have made up their minds on that point, if on nothing else.
Are they to be our wards, objects of our duty and our care; or are they to be our full partners?
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.