The New York Times/1900/9/29/Mr. Schurz's Plea for Aguinaldo

MR. SCHURZ'S PLEA FOR AGUINALDO.

Mr. Carl Schurz grows more truculent as he perceives the waning of the people's interest in his anti-imperialist alarms. In his Cooper Union speech last night he dared and defied a good deal. He challenged the world to show that his way was not the only way to defend liberty, right, and justice and preserve the Republic. As for those who disagree with him, why, they are engaged in “the hugest confidence game ever practiced upon a free people.” The President is a deceiver, tricky, and unworthy of confidence. President Schurman's assertion that the Filipinos, “in spite of their mental gifts and domestic virtues, are unfit for independent self-government” is dismissed as “an afterthought brought forward since the Administration resolved that they should not be independent.” That is, the President of Cornell has stooped to a peculiarly disgraceful form of lying to serve Mr. McKinley's purposes. Mr. Schurz clings desperately to Admiral Dewey's early declaration that the Filipinos were better than the Cubans. That remark suits his purpose. He spurns with an insult to its author the mature conclusion of President Schurman, founded upon careful study and observation. That does not at all suit his purpose. If a defender of the policy of the Administration should do this sort of thing he would probably be set down by Mr. Schurz as a hypocrite and confidence man.

If Mr. Schurz did not talk so much about morality and high ideals in his speeches we should be deeply pained by this passage: “I will ask this simple question: Did our victory at Manila create for us responsibilities essentially different from those that were created for us by our victory at Santiago de Cuba? Nobody will pretend that it did.” In a speech by Mr. Hanna or Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt we should set that down as campaign claptrap, intended to deceive the people. These men all know that the responsibilities we assumed in driving the Spaniards out of Cuba had been defined with precision in advance. No foreign nation was in the least likely to mistake our intentions there. If we had not made known our intention to assume the responsibilities that fell to us by the result of the Manila fight anybody might and somebody would have taken steps, possibly disagreeable, to find out or determine what was to be done with those islands. But Mr. Schurz is self-deceived.

Again, what is to be said of a mind and a man capable of this utterance: “I stand here now to defend these principles against an attack even more crafty and dangerous than that which in days gone by was made upon them by the power of domestic slavery”? Mr. Shepard said that a panic would be a small price to pay for the uprooting of imperialism. Mr. Schurz says the work in which President McKinley is at present engaged constitutes an attack on the principles of the Constitution “more crafty and dangerous” than the work in which Jefferson Davis was engaged in 1860 and the following years. It is not strange that when men talk in this violent, irrational way other men cease to attend to them.

Mr. Schurz's speech, in its essence and substance, is a plea for Aguinaldo. He sets at defiance law, precedent, the immemorial usage of nations and common humanity in his attempt to prove that we have become obligated to that rebel and his Tagalos in such wise that we have no right to enforce the laws in territory that is ours by a just title, and that we must permit murder, pillage, and arson out of respect for commitments that official reports assure us are quite imaginary.

But Gen. Otis's short speech at the dinner of welcome given to him on Thursday night made in advance a complete and convincing answer to the plea of Mr. Carl Schurz in behalf of Aguinaldo.

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