fantastic and wicked attempt to revolutionize our Government and substitute the principles of our hereditary enemies for the teachings of Washington and his associates.

[Extract of speech delivered December 12, 1898.]

OUR GOVERNMENT AS IT WAS INTENDED.

BY GEORGE F. HOAR,

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That under the Constitution of the United States no power is given to the Federal Government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies.

The colonial system of European nations can not be established under our present Constitution, but all territory acquired by the Government, except such small amount as may be necessary for coaling stations, correction of boundaries, and similar governmental purposes, must be acquired and governed with the purpose of ultimately organizing such territory into States suitable for admission into the Union.

I am quite sure that no man who will hear or who will read what I say will doubt that nothing could induce me to say it but a commanding sense of public duty. I think I dislike more than most men to differ from men with whom I have so long and so constantly agreed. I dislike to differ from the President, whose election I hailed with such personal satisfaction and such exulting anticipations for the Republic. I dislike to differ from so many of my party associates in this chamber, with whom I have for so many years trod the same path and sought the same goal. I am one of those men who believe that little that is great or good or permanent for a free people can be accomplished without the instrumentality of party. And I have believed religiously, and from my soul, for half a century, in the great doctrines and principles of the Republican party. I stood in a humble capacity by its cradle. I do not mean, if I can help it, to follow its hearse. I am sure

I render it a service; I am sure I help to protect and to prolong the life of that great organization, if I can say or can do anything to keep it from forsaking the great principles and doctrines in which alone it must live or bear no life. I must, in this great crisis, discharge the trust my beloved Commonwealth has committed to me according to my sense of duty as I see it. However unpleasant may be that duty, as Martin Luther said, "God help me. I can do no otherwise."

I am to speak for my country, for its whole past, and for its whole future. I am to speak to a people whose fate is bound up in the preservation of our great doctrine of constitutional liberty. I am to speak for the dead soldier who gave his life for liberty that his death might set a seal upon his country's historic glory. I am to speak for the Republican party, all of whose great traditions are at stake, and all of whose great achievements are in peril.

No man can ever justly charge me with a lack of faith in my countrymen, or a lack of faith in the principles on which the Republic is founded. If during thirty years' service within these walls, or during fifty years of constant, active, and absorbed interest. in public affairs, there has ever come from my lips. an utterance showing lack of faith in the people, in the Republic, in country, in liberty, or in the future, let them be silent now. I thank God that if I have no other Christian virtue, I have at least in the fullest measure that which stands as the central figure in the mighty group which the Apostle says is forever to abide-Hope. I thank God that as my eyes grow dim they look out on a fairer country, a better people, a brighter future.

I have in my humble way, poor enough I know, but it was my best, defended the character of the

American people, their capacity for self-government, the character of the great legislative bodies through which that government is exercised, whenever and by whomsoever assailed. I do not distrust them now. But the strongest frame may get mortal sickness from one exposure; the most vigorous health or life may be destroyed by a single drop of poison, and what poison is to the human frame the abandonment of our great doctrine of liberty will be to the Republic.

After all, I am old-fashioned enough to think that our fathers, who won the Revolution and who framed the Constitution, were the wisest builders of states the world has yet seen. I think that they knew where to seek for the best lessons of experience and they knew how to lay down the rules which should. be the best guides for their descendants. They did not disdain to study ancient history. They knew what caused the downfall of the mighty Roman Republic. They read, as Chatham said he did, the history of the freedom, of the decay, and the enslavement of Greece. They knew to what she owed her glory and to what she owed her ruin. They learned from her the doctrine that while there is little else that a democracy can not accomplish it can not rule over vassal states or subject peoples without bringing in the element of death into its own constitution. The Americans have been aptly called the Greeks of modern times. The versatile, enterprising, adventurous Yankee has been likened to the people of Athens, who were of the Ionian race, and the brave, constant, inflexible men of the South to the brave, constant, and inflexible Sparta, whose people were Dorians.

There are two lessons our fathers learned from the history of Greece which they hoped their children would remember-the danger of disunion and do