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statehood will be determined by the character of the men and not by their distance from our shores. I do not believe they will be States ever. The time may come when we can say "Accept full sovereignty. Take care of yourselves. Go to the world and proclaim your nationality, put up your own flag." But they can not do it now. They must have our fostering care for a time, with kindness and justice. The American flag to them should always represent something besides the majesty of this Government. It should represent that always, wherever it floats, but it should represent to those people freedom, protection, participation in the benefits of the greatest and freest people in the world.

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CHAPTER XXII.

WHAT WILL THEY DO TO US?

BY HON. GEORGE FRANKLIN EDMUNDS,

EX-UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM VERMONT.

1. These 1,200 islands, more or less, are in the heart of the tropics and occupy a region of seas nearly 1,000 miles long north and south and about 300 miles wide. They are about 7,000 miles distant from our Pacific coast and are about 14,000 miles distant from our Atlantic coast via the Suez Canal, controlled by a foreign power. Only a few of the islands are large enough to play any important part in the problem. These are Luzon, Camarines, Mindoro, Samar, Leyte, Panay, Mindanao and Palawan. The latest encyclopædias estimate the area at about 114,000 square miles and the population at 7,000,000.

2. They have all the climatic evils and diseases of tropical countries and are frequently afflicted by violent hurricanes and earthquakes. They are, as all human experience has proved, absolutely incapable of being colonized and built up into communities of Americans or of any of the people of cool climates.

3. They are already inhabited, as already stated, by about 7,000,000 of people-being more than sixty to the square mile of the whole area of all the islands. The population, therefore, is already denser than that of the State of Michigan. The population is composed of Spaniards, other Europeans, English and Americans, half-castes, Chinese, Malays, Japanese and aboriginal natives. Of the total of all this conglomerate of races the Europeans and Americans compose less 481

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than 2 per cent after more than two hundred years of European occupation, and very few of these were born there. Even in Manila, the capital, 67 per cent of the inhabitants are Malays, 30 per cent are Chinese and half-breeds, Spaniards; Spanish half-breeds and creoles 3 per cent only, and of other white men only a trace and of white women substantially none.

4. The five or six islands of the group of any considerable size are already fully populated by the races and mixtures above mentioned.

5. They are people who never have been and never can be in need of or the consumers of American productions to any appreciable extent.

6. The islands are very fertile and produce principally the fibre known as Manila hemp, coarse tobacco, coffee, sugar and tropical fruits; and they have extensive forests of tropical woods analogous to those of the vast forests of Central and South America.

7. These resources comprise the only value of the islands except that of furnishing a location for fortresses and naval stations for a nation ambitious to become the political and military mistress of the world, A new Alexander or Napoleon, if he possessed inexhaustible resources of men and money, might wish for them for this purpose.

8. The sincerely professed and sole purpose of the war was to make Cuba a free and independent state. Admiral Dewey did not go to Manila for purposes of conquest at all. He went there with his gallant little fleet to capture or destroy, if he could, the Spanish fleet. He did it in a way that astonished the naval powers of the world. But he only acquired military control of the bay and city of Manila and its environments. Nearly all beyond that was in possession of an organized rebellion against Spain.

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