Article December 1, 1898 Issue

SENATOR HOAR ON THE NATION'S GREAT DANGER

Extract from a Recent Speech.

In a recent speech Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, thus descanted upon the question of our national policy in the acquisition of territory:—

But yet the first duty of the American people is to themselves. And when I say this, it is in no spirit of selfishness or of indifference to the welfare of mankind. On the contrary, I believe that the highest service the American people can render to mankind and to liberty is to preserve unstained and unchanged and the republic as it came to us from the fathers. It is by example and not by our guns or by bayonets that the great work of America for humanity is to be accomplished. And, in my opinion, we are to-day in a great danger—a greater danger than we have encountered since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, save only the danger that the slave-holding rebellion might succeed.

The danger is that we are to be transformed from a republic founded on the Declaration of Independence, guided by the counsels of Washington—the hope of the poor, the refuge of the oppressed—into a vulgar, commonplace empire founded upon physical force, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which inevitably one class must forever rule and other classes must forever obey.

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