CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
cal institutions was the same that he had employed in the Santo Domingo debate and on many an occasion since. He dwelt on the practical certainty that the islands, if annexed, would be proposed for admission as States of the Union. The acquisition of Porto Rico would lead, he prophesied, to that of Santo Domingo, Hayti and probably Cuba. “But we shall hardly stop there. Being once fairly started in the career of aggrandizement regardless of consequences, our imperialists will find an open ear when they tell us that our control of the Nicaraguan Canal cannot possibly be safe unless that canal be bordered on both sides by United States territory, and that therefore we must have the whole country down to that canal and a good piece beyond. That would bring us another lot of about 13,000,000 of Spanish-Americans mixed with Indian blood, and perhaps some twenty Senators and fifty or sixty Representatives, with seventy to eighty votes in the electoral college, and with them a flood of Spanish-American politics, notoriously the most disorderly, tricky and corrupt politics on the face of the earth. What thinking American who has the future of the Republic at heart will not stand appalled at such a prospect?”
On the question of our commercial interest, he argued with much statistical data that we should get far better results in direct and open competition with other nations than in monopolizing the trade of the islands taken from Spain. Porto Rico, like Cuba, should be made an independent republic, and the Philippines, under a guarantee of economic freedom, should be turned over to some such state as Holland or Belgium for political administration. “If American diplomacy is not skillful enough to bring about such results in the final settlement, it would certainly not be skillful enough to handle the more thorny problems which it would surely have
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