Exit Anti-Imperialism
The Independent 55 (Sept. 24, 1903).


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A few American newspapers still play the role of anti-Imperialistic organs, and there is a grim humor in the fact that the most dutiful ones are journals which in the early days of "independent journalism" took endless delight in applying the word "organ" to their partisan contemporaries. The men who then conducted the newspapers to which we refer have passed to the beyond, one long ago, the other recently. Mr. Godkin lived to see the war with Spain and the annexation of the Philippine Islands, and to disapprove; Mr. Samuel Bowles died while Springfield, Mass., was still a better known town than Manila. Mr. Godkin had an almost unequaled command of sarcasm. Mr. Bowles had a sense of humor. Were he living now it is safe to say that the "boys," as he used to call them, in the Springfield Republican office would see through his eyes a great light which their own optics have not yet discerned.

During the Franco-Prussian war, as the story goes, Mr. Bowles spent a few weeks in Europe. A gentleman widely known as a student of charities and as a disciple of the gentle Emerson occupied the editorial chair. With admirable learning he demonstrated the hopelessness of the German cause and the overwhelming victories that awaited the French at Gravelotte and Sedan. One morning Mr. Bowles appeared unexpectedly in the sanctum. The temporary editor was summoned into his presence. The greeting was not unkind. Mr. Bowles had had the pleasure of reading the columns of his newspaper among acquaintances in English club rooms who had been so inconsiderate as to ask him where he got his information. " Well, young man," he remarked, as his blushing lieutenant stood before him, "I don't know whether you are a military genius or not, but you have given me a ------ interesting summer." We wish the genial Mr. Bowles could drop into the Springfield Republican office again in the same unexpected way.

These well-known organs, with a few newspapers printed in Boston and not well-known elsewhere, will doubtless continue to harp indefinitely upon the downfall of the American political system, and the "atrocities" which, according to their exclusive information, our soldiers are daily perpetrating upon the helpless natives of the Pacific Islands; but nothing could be deader as an issue than the ideas which they represent. The almost imperceptible accommodation of the American mind to the new order of things has been one of the most interesting and significant facts in our history. In 1900 it was still possible to try to make party capital out of the Treaty of Paris. To-day an anti-Imperialistic plank in the Democratic platform would be as useless a bit of lumber as the quadrennial compliment to the ever-blessed memory of Thomas Jefferson.

We have been governing the Philippine Islands now for seven years. Civil order has been restored, the natives live on terms of peace with one another to a degree never before attained, educational and sanitary reforms are being quietly but very resolutely carried forward, and the outlook of the archipelago for commercial prosperity and general happiness and intelligent self-government is brighter than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the American republic has not fallen into ruin. It goes on its way, rejoicing in vigorous life and commanding the respect of the nations of the earth as never before in its history.

Anti-Imperialism has thus become a dead issue because of the singularly sure discernment which the American people seem always to have of the essential truth in bewildering masses of contradictory stories about all things political which the newspapers put before us. The average man has no way of sifting the material that has been published upon our rule in the Pacific, as an expert might sift it. He cannot summon and cross-question witnesses who have been on the ground. Much less can he himself make long journeys to view the situation with his own eyes. Nevertheless, he gets at the facts. Representatives of the average man from every section of the country have been at Manila, and their reports have come back in unstudied letters to kindred or friends. In almost every hamlet some soldier or school teacher who is living or who has lived in the islands is personally known. His or her testimony is accepted at the same value it would have "among the neighbors" if it pertained to matters of home interest. In almost every instance it has given a radically different account of the situation in the East from that which the anti-Imperialistic organs have set forth. Usually it has contained allusions to the blood-curdling narratives of the organs and has shown them up as without foundation or as ridiculous. This testimony, unheralded in the press, and little remarked upon, has quietly converted the American people to a thoroughly sane view of our policy, and has laid the bugbear of "Imperialism."

It is an essentially sound and practical people which thus forms its judgment upon great questions from the testimony of the common man. In saying this we do not undervalue the work of the expert, but there is always danger of forgetting that great social or political questions are not those which call for expert investigation. They are questions of simple fact, open to the observation of thousands; of simple expediency, upon which the concurrence of thousands of minds is better than the refined opinions of a few; of plain right and wrong, upon which the unsophisticated conscience is qualified to speak. The question of our ownership and administration of the Philippine Islands is such an issue, and on this broad, common-sense basis the people have decided it.