I was invited to give an address before a college
in Pennsylvania, where I took occasion to make an emphatic
declaration of the doctrine on which I meant to act.
Afterward, July 5, 1898, I made a speech in the Senate, on
the joint resolution for the acquisition of Hawaii, in which
I said that I had entertained grave doubts in regard to that
measure; that I had approached the subject with greater hesitation
and anxiety than I had ever felt in regard to any other matter
during the whole of my public life.
I went on to say:
"The trouble I have found with the Hawaiian business is this:
Not in the character of the population of the Sandwich Island,
not in their distance from our shores, not in the doubt that
we have an honest right to deal with the existing government
there in such a matter. I have found my trouble in the nature
and character of the argument by which, in the beginning and
ever since, a great many friends of annexation have sought
to support it ....
"If this be the first step in the acquisition of dominion
over barbarous archipelagoes in distant seas; if we are to
enter into competition with the great powers of Europe in
the plundering of China, in the division of Africa; if we
are to quit our own to stand on foreign lands; if our commerce
is hereafter to be forced upon unwilling peoples at the cannon's
mouth; if we are ourselves to be governed in part by peoples
to whom the Declaration of Independence is a stranger; or,
worse still, if we are to govern subjects and vassal States,
trampling as we do it on our own great Charter which recognizes
alike the liberty and the dignity of individual manhood, then
let us resist this thing in the beginning, and let us resist
it to the death.
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