Senator Beveridge on Imperialism
Senator Albert Beveridge gave this speech on the Senate floor,
arguing in favor of annexing the Philippines and against granting Filipinos
self-rule, an issue that had much importance during President William
McKinley's administration. Beveridge believed the Filipinos, and Asian people
in general, were incapable of governing themselves by democratic rules. He
based this belief on a conviction that Anglo-Saxons were racially superior, an
attitude reflected in this speech. At the same time, Beveridge's views more
generally demonstrate that territorial expansion by the United States at the
beginning of the 20th century was closely related to racial bias and to the
belief that white men had a “burden” to “civilize” a “barbarous” world.
Senator Beveridge's Imperialist Philippines Speech
January 9, 1900
THE FILIPINOS ARE CHILDREN, UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT.
... But, Senators, it would be
better to abandon this combined garden and Gibraltar of the Pacific, and count
our blood and treasure already spent a profitable loss, than to apply any
academic arrangement of self-government to these children. They are not capable
of self-government. How could they be? They are not of a self-governing race.
They are Orientals, Malays, instructed by Spaniards in the latter's worst
estate.
They know nothing of practical
government except as they have witnessed the weak, corrupt, cruel, and
capricious rule of Spain. What magic will anyone employ to dissolve in their
minds and characters those impressions of governors and governed which three
centuries of misrule has created? What alchemy will change the oriental quality
of their blood and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring
through their Malay veins? How shall they, in the twinkling of an eye, be
exalted to the heights of self-governing peoples which required a thousand
years for us to reach, Anglo-Saxon though we are?
Let men beware how they employ the
term “self-government” It is a sacred term. It is the watchword at the door of
the inner temple of liberty, for liberty does not always mean self-government.
Self-government is a method of liberty—the highest, simplest, best—and it is
acquired only after centuries of study and struggle and experiment and
instruction and all the elements of the progress of man. Self-government is no
base and common thing, to be bestowed on the merely audacious. It is the degree
which crowns the graduate of liberty, not the name of liberty's infant class,
who have not yet mastered the alphabet of freedom. Savage blood, oriental
blood, Malay blood, Spanish example—are these the elements of self-government?
...
PEOPLE INDOLENT—NO COMPETITION WITH OUR LABOR.
Example for decades will be
necessary to instruct them in American ideas and methods of administration.
Example, example; always example—this alone will teach them. As a race, their
general ability is not excellent. Educators, both men and women, to whom I have
talked in Cebu and Luzon, were unanimous in the opinion that in all solid and
useful education they are, as a people, dull and stupid. In showy things, like
carving and painting or embroidery or music, they have apparent aptitude, but
even this is superficial and never thorough. They have facility of speech, too.
The three best educators on the
island at different times made to me the same comparison, that the common
people in their stupidity are like their caribou bulls. They are not even good
agriculturists. Their waste of cane is inexcusable. Their destruction of hemp
fiber is childish. They are incurably indolent. They have no continuity or
thoroughness of industry. They will quit work without notice and amuse
themselves until the money they have earned is spent. They are like children
playing at men's work.
No one need fear their competition
with our labor. No reward could beguile, no force compel, these children of
indolence to leave their trifling lives for the fierce and fervid industry of
high-wrought America ...
... we must never forget that in
dealing with the Filipinos we deal with children. And so our government must be
simple and strong. Simple and strong! The meaning of those two words must be
written in every line of Philippine legislation, realized in every act of
Philippine administration ...
OUR ADMINISTRATORS MUST BE EXAMPLES.
I repeat that our government and our
administrators must be examples. You cannot teach the Filipino by precept. An
object lesson is the only lesson he comprehends. He has no conception of pure,
orderly, equal, impartial government, under equal laws justly administered,
because he has never seen such a government. He must be shown the simplest
results of good government by actual example in order that he may begin to
understand its most elementary principles ...
TRUE INTERPRETATION OF DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
The Declaration of Independence does
not forbid us to do our part in the regeneration of the world. If it did, the
Declaration would be wrong, just as the Articles of Confederation, drafted by
the very same men who signed the Declaration, was found to be wrong. The
Declaration has no application to the present situation. It was written by
self-governing men for self-governing men.
It was written by men who, for a
century and a half, had been experimenting in self-government on this
continent, and whose ancestors for hundreds of years before had been gradually
developing toward that high and holy estate. The Declaration applies only to
people capable of self-government. How dare any man prostitute this expression
of the very elect of self-governing peoples to a race of Malay children of
barbarism, schooled in Spanish methods and ideas? And you, who say the
Declaration applies to all men, how dare you deny its application to the
American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at home, how dare you grant
it to the Malay abroad?
PHRASE “CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED” MISUNDERSTOOD.
The Declaration does not contemplate
that all government must have the consent of the governed. It announces that
man's “inalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that
to secure these rights governments are established among men deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that when any form of government
becomes destructive of those rights, it is the right of the people to alter or
abolish it.” “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the important
things; “consent of the governed” is one of the means to those ends.
If “any form of government becomes
destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it,” says the Declaration. “Any forms” includes all forms. Thus the Declaration
itself recognizes other forms of government than those resting on the consent
of the governed. The word “consent” itself recognizes other forms, for
“consent” means the understanding of the thing to which the “consent” is given;
and there are people in the world who do not understand any form of government.
And the sense in which “consent” is used in the Declaration is broader than
mere understanding; for “consent” in the Declaration means participation in the
government “consented” to. And yet these people who are not capable of
“consenting” to any form of government must be governed.
And so the Declaration contemplates
all forms of government which secure the fundamental rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. Self-government, when that will best secure these
ends, as in the case of people capable of self-government; other appropriate
forms when people are not capable of self-government. And so the authors of the
Declaration themselves governed the Indian without his consent; the inhabitants
of Louisiana without their consent; and ever since the sons of the makers of
the Declaration have been governing not by theory, but by practice, after the
fashion of our governing race, now by one form, now by another, but always for
the purpose of securing the great eternal ends of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, not in the savage, but in the civilized meaning of those
terms—life according to orderly methods of civilized society; liberty regulated
by law; pursuit of happiness limited by the pursuit of happiness by every other
man.
If this is not the meaning of the
Declaration, our Government itself denies the Declaration every time it
receives the representative of any but a republican form of government, such as
that of the Sultan, the Czar, or other absolute autocrats, whose governments,
according to the opposition's interpretation of the Declaration, are spurious
governments, because the people governed have not “consented” to them.
CONSTITUTIONAL POWER TO GOVERN AS WE PLEASE.
Senators in opposition are estopped
from denying our constitutional power to govern the Philippines as
circumstances may demand, for such power is admitted in the case of Florida,
Louisiana, Alaska. How, then, is it denied in the Philippines? Is there a
geographical interpretation to the Constitution? Do degrees of longitude fix
constitutional limitations? Does a thousand miles of ocean diminish
constitutional power more than a thousand miles of land?
The ocean does not separate us from
the field of our duty and endeavor—it joins us, an established highway needing
no repair, and landing us at any point desired. The seas do not separate the
Philippine Islands from us or from each other. The seas are highways through
the archipelago, which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct
if they were land instead of water. Land may separate men from their desire,
the ocean never. Russia has been centuries in crossing Siberian wastes; the Puritans
crossed the Atlantic in brief and flying weeks ...
With more extended coast lines than
any nation of history; with a commerce vaster than any other people ever
dreamed of, and that commerce as yet only in its beginnings; with naval
traditions equaling those of England or of Greece, and the work of our Navy
only just begun; with the air of the ocean in our nostrils and the blood of a
sailor ancestry in our veins; with the shores of all the continents calling us,
the great Republic before I die will be the acknowledged lord of the world's
high seas. And over them the Republic will hold dominion, by virtue of the
strength God has given it, for the peace of the world and the betterment of man
...
THE WHOLE QUESTION ELEMENTAL.
Mr. President, this question is
deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the
isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of
coastitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing
the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but
vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the
master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has
given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout
the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer
government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as
this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has
marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the
regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds
for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are
trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The
judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I
will make you ruler over many things.”
What shall history say of us? Shall
it say that we renounced that holy trust, left the savage to his base
condition, the wilderness to the reign of waste, deserted duty, abandoned
glory, forget our sordid profit even, because we feared our strength and read
the charter of our powers with the doubter's eye and the quibbler's mind? Shall
it say that, called by events to captain and command the proudest, ablest,
purest race of history in history's noblest work, we declined that great
commission? Our fathers would not have had it so. No! They founded no paralytic
government, incapable of the simplest acts of administration. They planted no
sluggard people passive while the world's work calls them. They established no
reactionary nation. They unfurled no retreating flag ...
Source: Library of Congress.
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