our sense of justice; it was the spectacle of the President and the Secretary of War abandoning for some reason their emphatic declarations of “plain duty.” It was, indeed, all this, but it was something more. It was the fact that this Porto Rican business appeared like the lifting of a curtain behind which the people saw the figures of a group of men trying to control, and to a large extent actually controlling, our government to enrich themselves by manipulating our colonial policy. What impression do you think that such a scene must produce upon the popular mind at a time when “plutocracy” is a word in everybody's mouth?
Far more than any other kind of government does a democracy working through universal suffrage need the conservative influence of high principles and ideals of right and justice, and of popular beliefs founded upon such principles and ideals; for when they disappear the evil passions of covetousness and of selfish ambition take their place and become the only motive power of action, there remaining nothing higher to appeal to. And that is the direction in which the imperialistic policy is driving us. Nothing can be more dangerous in a democracy like ours than the prevalance of the notion that might is right—a notion involving the worst kind of anarchy, above and below. And that principle is preached and proclaimed every day by this imperialistic policy. Is it not high time that the American people, sobered from the debauching intoxication of victory, should rise up again to a just appreciation of the true responsibility of this great republic? That true responsibility is its responsibility for the maintenance of the great principles upon which it was founded. It is its responsibility for the great lesson it is to administer to mankind that true democracy means not only the assertion of one’s own rights, but also a just respect for the rights of others, and that this democracy of ours is able to resist the temptations which might seduce it from its fidelity to that high obligation. It is its responsibility for the fulfilment of the great promise expressed by Abraham Lincoln on the
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