of those islands be turned over to the people thereof; and let this final settlement include agreements with them securing to American citizens on the islands the fullest protection in the right of owning property and of carrying on all kinds of business, and, if you please, of establishing and maintaining churches and educational institutions and whatever other agencies of civilization there may be.
In this way we shall do our full duty to them without disregard of the superior duty which we owe to our own Republic. We shall have delivered them from Spanish misrule and given them a chance to govern themselves. The governments they then receive will indeed not be ideal governments. They will be Spanish-American governments, somewhat tempered and mitigated, perhaps, by the influence which American enterprise may carry there. But those governments will, at any rate, be their own, and if they become disorderly and corrupt, they will at least not infect with that disorder and corruption this Republic of ours. There are people who think that the annexation to the United States of such countries as Porto Rico and Cuba, and whatever else, is as simple a transaction as the acquisition by a rich farmer of a few more acres to enlarge his farm. Those who think so overlook the momentous fact that if we annex those islands, we shall not only have them, but in a very important sense they will have us too. The policy I recommend of making with them the suggested agreements concerning the rights of American citizens in them, and then letting them carry on governments of their own, would offer us all that is to us really desirable in them, without their having us too.
The problem of the future of the Philippines is no doubt much more complicated, and I should hesitate to form an opinion upon several phases of it without more definite
