Kennan I - The War with SpainGeorge Kennan, American Diplomacy I - THE WAR WITH SPAIN I would like first to say a word about the concept of these six lectures. This concept stems from no abstract interest in history for history's sake. It stems from a preoccupation with the problems of foreign policy we have before us today. A half-century ago people in this country had a sense of security vis-à-vis their world environment such as I suppose no people had ever had since the days of the Roman Empire. Today that pattern is almost reversed - our national consciousness is dominated at present by a sense of insecurity greater even than that of many of the peoples of Western Europe who stand closer to, and in a position far more vulnerable to, those things that arc the main source of our concern. Now, much of that change may be, and doubtless is, subjective - a reflection of the fact that in 1900 we exaggerated the security of our position and had an overweening confidence in our strength and our ability to solve problems, whereas today we exaggerate our dangers and have a tendency to rate our own abilities less than they actually are. But the fact remains that much of this change is also objectively real; in 1900 the political and military realities were truly such that we had relatively little to fear in the immediate sense, whereas today we have before us a situation which, I am frank to admit, seems to me dangerous and problematical in the extreme. What has caused this metamorphosis? How did a country so secure become a country so insecure? How much of this deterioration can be said to be "our fault"? How much of it is attributable to our failure to see clearly, or to take into account, the realities of the world around us? What lessons, in other words, does the record of the external relations of the United States over the last fifty years hold for us, the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers, surrounded by a world part of which seems to be actually committed to our destruction and another part to have lost confidence either in ourselves or in itself, or in both? These are the questions which have taken me back, in the past few months, to a review of some of our decisions of national policy in these fifty years. I certainly cannot hold out to you the hope that this series of lectures will answer all these questions, or will answer any one of them in a manner beyond controversy. But what we can hope, I think, is that it will be useful to turn again to certain of the major phases of national policy over this period and to look at them once more in the light of what seem in retrospect to have been their alternatives and their consequences. We have good reason for doing this. Not only is there much that should be visible to us now that was not visible to people as little as ten years ago; but I would hope that we might bring to such an inquiry a new sort of seriousness - a seriousness induced by our recollection of the vast destruction and the sacrifices we have witnessed in our lifetimes, a seriousness more thoughtful and sadder than most people would have been able to bring to these problems in the days before the two tragic world wars. What I would like to talk about first is the Spanish-American War. Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and the British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has defended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land miss, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter - as in these circumstances it certainly would - on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia. Seeing these things, we can understand that we have had a stake in the prosperity and independence of the peripheral powers of Europe and Asia: those countries whose gazes were oriented outward, across the seas, rather than inward to the conquest of power on land. Now we see these things, or think we see them. But they were scarcely yet visible to the Americans of 1898, for those Americans had forgotten a great deal that had been known to their forefathers of a hundred years before. They had become so accustomed to their security that they had forgotten that it had any foundations at all outside our continent. They mistook our sheltered position behind the British fleet and British Continental diplomacy for the results of superior American wisdom and virtue in refraining from interfering in the sordid differences of the Old World. And they were oblivious to the first portents of the changes that were destined to shatter that pattern of security in the course of the ensuing half-century. There were, of course, exceptions. Brooks Adams, Henry's brother, probably came closer than any American of his day to a sort of an intellectual premonition of what the future had in store for us.1 But even he caught only a portion of it. He saw the increasing vulnerability of England - the increasing "eccentricity," as he called it, of her economic position, her growing economic dependence on the United States - and, conversely, the growing strategic dependence of the United States on England. He sensed the ultimate importance of the distinction between sea power and land power. Vaguely, he felt the danger of political collaboration between Russia and Germany and China. But his thinking was distorted by the materialism of the time - by the overestimation of economics, of trade, as factors in human events and by the corresponding underestimation of psychological and political reactions of such things as fear, ambition, insecurity, jealousy, and perhaps even boredom - as prime movers of events. Mahan, too, was charting new paths at that time in the analysis of international realities - paths which led in the direction of a more profound appraisal of the sources of American security. And there were others who might be mentioned. But altogether they comprised only a tiny coterie of persons. Their efforts were not even followed up by others at the time or in the years that immediately ensued. Those efforts remained suspended, as it were, in the mid-air of history - an isolated spurt of intellectual activity against a background of general torpor and smugness in American thinking about foreign affairs. And all of them - all of these deeper and more observant minds of the turn of the century - stopped short of the projection of their inquiry onto the theater of European Continental rivalries where, as it happened, the events most fateful to American security were destined to occur and where we stood in the greatest need of profound analysis and careful identification of the elements of American interest. It is plain, for this reason, that the incident I am talking about today - our brief war with Spain in 1898 - occurred against a background of public and governmental thinking in this country which was not marked by any great awareness of the global framework of our security. This being the case, it was fortunate that both the situation out of which the war arose and, for the most part, the events and consequences of the war itself were largely local and domestic in their importance. As we proceed with these lectures and advance into the twentieth century, we shall see the global implications of our predicaments and actions growing apace with the passage of the years, until in the case of World War II they are positively overwhelming. But at the time of the Spanish-American War they were hardly present at all - the taking of the Philippines was the closest we came to them. And if a war so colorless from the standpoint of our world relationships is worth discussing at all this afternoon, it is because it forms a sort of preface to our examination of the diplomacy of this half-century, a simple, almost quaint, illustration of some of our national reactions and ways of doing business, and a revelation of the distance we were destined to have to come if we were ever to be a power capable of coping with the responsibilities of world leadership. Our war with Spain, as you will recall, grew out of a situation in Cuba. It was one of those dreadful, tragic, noiseless situations which seem to mark the decline or exhaustion of a colonial relationship. We have seen other such situations since, and some of them not so long ago. Spanish rule on the island was challenged by Cuban insurgents, poorly organized, poorly disciplined, but operating on the classical principles of guerrilla forces everywhere and enjoying all the advantages of guerrillas operating on the home territory against an unpopular foreign enemy. The Spanish attempts to suppress the insurrection were inefficient, cruel, and only partly successful. The situation had been long developing; it had been growing sporadically for decades. President Grant had summed it up very well in a presidential message, over two decades earlier, in 1875: Each party seems quite capable of working great injury and damage to the other, as well as to all the relations and interests dependent on the existence of peace in the island; but they seem incapable of reaching any adjustment, and both have thus far failed of achieving any success whereby one party shall possess and control the island to the exclusion of the other. Under these circumstances, the agency of others, either by mediation or intervention, seems to be the only alternative which must sooner or later be invoked for the termination of the strife.2 There had been some improvement, to be sure, in the two decades between 1875 and 1895. But in that latter year insurrection broke out again, this time on a bloodier and more tragic scale than ever before. And in the years 1896 and 1897 it brought increasing concern and dismay to the government, the press, and the public in our country. Strictly speaking, of course, it would have been possible for us to have said that it was none of our business and to have let things take their course. Our national security, as we think of it today, was not threatened. But American property interests were damaged; the activities of American filibusterers and arms salesmen, on behalf of the insurgents, caused a lot of trouble to our government. And, above all, American public opinion was deeply shocked by the tales of violence and misery from the island. Our sensibilities were not yet jaded by the immense horrors and cruelties of the twentieth century. The sufferings of the Cuban people shocked our sensibilities, aroused our indignation. They gave American statesmen the conviction that a continuation of this situation in Cuba would be intolerable to our interests in the long run and that, if Spain did not succeed in putting an end to it, we should have to intervene in some way ourselves. In the fall of 1897 things looked up a bit. A new and more moderate government came into power in Spain. This government showed a greater disposition to clear tip the unhappy problems on the island than had its predecessor. In his message to Congress in December, 1897, President N4cKinley noted this improvement and recommended that we give the new Spanish government a chance. "I shall not impugn its sincerity," lie said, "nor should impatience be suffered to embarrass it in the task it has undertaken." Certain difficulties, lie said, had already been cleared up; there was reason to hope that, with patience on our part and continued good will on the part of the Spanish government, further progress might be made. Thus the year 1898 began with a renewed hope that the plight of the Cuban people might get better instead of worse. Unfortunately, two things happened during the winter which changed the situation quite drastically. First, the Spanish minister in Washington wrote an indiscreet letter in which he spoke slightingly of President McKinley, calling him "a bidder for the admiration of the crowd" and "a would-be politician . . . who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party."3 This letter leaked; it was published in the New York pipers, causing much indignation and resentment. And a few days later the American public was profoundly shocked and outraged to hear that the battleship "Maine" had been sunk in Havana harbor with the loss of 266 American lives. Now, looked at in retrospect, neither of these incidents seems to have been an adequate cause, in itself, for war. The Spanish government could not help its minister's indiscretion - even diplomats are constantly being indiscreet, this sort of thing happens in the best of families. It promptly removed him from his job and disavowed his offensive statements. And, as for the "Maine," there has never been any evidence that the Spanish government had anything to do with the sinking of the vessel or would have been anything but horrified at the suggestion that it should have anything to do with it. Spanish authorities, as well as our own consul-general in Havana, had begged us not to send the vessel there at that time for the very reason that they were afraid this might lead to trouble. The Spanish government did everything in its power to mitigate the effects of the catastrophe, welcomed investigation, and eventually offered to submit the whole question of responsibility to international arbitration - an offer we never accepted. Nevertheless, it seems to be the judgment of history that these two incidents so affected American opinion that war became inevitable with the sinking of the "Maine." From that time on no peaceful solution was really given serious consideration in the American government. This is particularly significant and unfortunate, because during the nine weeks that intervened between the sinking of the "Maine" and the opening of hostilities the Spanish government came very far in the direction of meeting our demands and desires. It came so far that by April 10 (eleven days before hostilities began) our minister in Madrid - a wise and moderate man who had worked hard to prevent the outbreak of war - was able to report that, if the President could get from Congress authority to deal with the matter at his own discretion, he could have a final settlement before August 1 on one of the following bases: autonomy acceptable to the insurgents, independence, or cession to the United States. On the same day, the queen of Spain ordered a complete armistice on the island, and the Spanish minister in Washington promised to our government the early promulgation of a system of autonomy "such that no motive or pretext is left for claiming any fuller measure thereof."4 These are of course isolated snatches out of a long and involved correspondence between the two governments. I cite them only to indicate that on paper, at least, the Spanish government was coming around very rapidly in those early days of April, 1898, to the sort of attitude and action we had been demanding of them. Yet, despite all that, one finds no evidence that the United States government was in any way influenced by these last-minute concessions. It made no move to prevent feeling and action in Congress from proceeding along a line that was plainly directed toward an early outbreak of hostilities. Now, it is true that, as people then saw it, many of these Spanish concessions came too late and were not fully dependable. It is also true that the insurgents were by this time in no frame of mind, and in no state of discipline, to collaborate in any way with the Spanish authorities. But one does not get the impression that these were the things which dictated the decision of our government to go to war. This decision seems rather attributable to the state of American opinion, to the fact that it was a year of congressional elections, to the unabashed and really fantastic warmongering of a section of the American press, and to the political pressures which were freely and bluntly exerted on the President from various political quarters. (It is an interesting fact, incidentally, that financial and business circles, allegedly the instigator of wars, had no part in this and generally frowned on the idea of our involvement in the hostilities.) The upshot of all this, as you know, was that on April 20 Congress resolved that "it is the duty of the United States to demand, and the Government of the United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the island of Cuba and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters." And it directed and empowered the President "to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States . . . to such extent as may be necessary" to enforce that requirement. We gave the Spaniards a flat three-day ultimatum for compliance with this resolution. We knew they would not, and could not, accept it. Early the following morning the Spaniards, without waiting for the delivery of the ultimatum, declared the resolution GI equivalent to a declaration of war and broke relations. On the same day, hostilities were inaugurated by the United States government. Thus our government, to the accompaniment of great congressional and popular acclaim, inaugurated hostilities against another country in a situation of which it can only be said that the possibilities of settlement by measures short of war had by no means been exhausted. So much for the origin of the war. Now a few words about the way we fought it and particularly about the taking of the Philippines. You will recall that the wording of the congressional resolution which I just quoted mentioned only the island of Cuba. There was nothing in the resolution to indicate that Congress had any interest in any territory other than Cuba or that the President was authorized to use the armed forces for any purpose not directly related to the Spanish withdrawal from Cuba. Now, this resolution was passed on April 20, 1898. Yet it was only eleven days later that Admiral Dewey, sailing into Manila Bay in the early hours of morning, attacked and destroyed the Spanish fleet there. And only a few days later President McKinley authorized preparations for the dispatch of an army of occupation. The mission of this ground force was to follow up Dewey's victory, to complete "the reduction of Spanish power in that quarter," and to give "order and security to the islands while in the possession of the United States."5 This force proceeded to the Philippines and went into action there. By August it stormed and took the city of Manila. The effect of this action was later to constitute the most important and probably decisive consideration in our final decision to take the islands away from Spain and put them under the United States flag entirely; for this military operation shattered Spanish rule in the islands, made it impossible for us to leave them to Spain, and left us, as we shall see shortly, no agreeable alternative but to take them ourselves. Now, why did all this happen? If there was no justification for the action against the Philippines in the origin of the war with Spain, what were the motives that lay behind it? Why, in other words, did we do things in May, 1898, that made it almost impossible for its later not to annex a great archipelago in the South Seas in which, prior to this time, our interest had been virtually nil? I ask this question not as one of moral judgment of American statesmen of the time but as one which may illumine the ways by which decisions are taken, and business done, by the United States government. The fact of the matter is that down to the present day we do not know the full answer to this question. We know a number of things about it. We know that Theodore Roosevelt, who was then the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had long felt that we ought to take the Philippines; that he wangled Dewey's appointment to the command of the Asiatic fleet; that both he and Dewey wanted war; and that he had some sort of a prior understanding with Dewey to the effect that Dewey would attack Manila, regardless of the circumstances of the origin or the purpose of the war. We know that President McKinley, in defending Dewey's action at a later date, showed a very poor understanding of what was really involved and professed to believe a number of strategic premises that simply were not true. McKinley indicated that he hid no thought of taking the Philippines at the time of the Battle of Manila and that Dewey's action was designed only to destroy the Spanish fleet and eliminate it as a factor in the war. But, if this is true, we are still mystified as to why McKinley authorized the sending of any army of occupation to the islands within a few days of Dewey's victory. We are not sure that we really know what passed between government in Washington and Dewey prior to the battle. And we can only say that it looks very much as though, in this case, the action of the United States government had been determined primarily on the basis of a very able and quiet intrigue by a few strategically placed persons in Washington, an intrigue which received absolution, forgiveness, and a sort of a public blessing by virtue of war hysteria - of the fact that Dewey's victory was so thrilling and pleasing to the American public - but which, had its results been otherwise, might well have found its ending in the rigors of a severe and extremely unpleasant congressional investigation. So much, then, for the decisions underlying our conduct of hostilities. What about the broader political decisions connected with the war - the decisions which led to the final annexation not only of the Philippines but of Puerto Rico and Guam and the Hawaiian Islands? These were very important decisions from our own standpoint. They represented a turning point, it seems to me, in the whole concept of the American political system. These territorial acquisitions of the year 1898 represented the first extensions of United States sovereignty to important territories beyond the continental limits of North America, unless our share in the ruling of Samoa warranted such description. They represented the first instances of sizable populations being taken under our flag with no wide anticipation that they would ever be accepted into statehood. Prior to this time our territorial acquisitions had been relatively empty lands, too sparsely populated to be eligible at once for statehood. For them the territorial status was viewed as a temporary expedient, intended to tide them over - until they were filled with our own sort of people and were prepared to come into the Union. But here, in 1898, for the first time, territories were acquired which were not expected to gain statehood at all at any time but rather to remain indefinitely in a status of colonial subordination. The leading advocates of expansion were quite definite on this point. One of the most thoughtful and articulate of them, Whitelaw Reid, often expressed his anxiety lest people might think of the new territories as candidates for statehood, because he knew that, if they did, they would be less inclined to take them in. Andrew Carnegie, who was an opponent of expansionism, attacked Reid on precisely this point: "You will be driven off from your opposition to letting all these islands in as states," he said; "you'll have to swallow every last one of them."6 The question was thus squarely raised and faced as one of the admission of territories not intended for statehood. The debate over this was long and voluminous. Much of it was concerned with legalities. But these were not the real issue. The real issue was one of expediency and wisdom. The proponents of expansion advanced a variety of arguments. Some said that it was our manifest destiny to acquire these territories. Others said that for one reason or another we had a paramount interest in them. Still others maintained that we, as an enlightened and a Christian nation, had a duty to regenerate their ignorant and misguided inhabitants. Another argument was that they were necessary to the defense of our continental territory. Finally, it was alleged by the commercially minded that we had to take them, Hawaii and the Philippines in particular, to assure ourselves of a fitting part in what was regarded as the great future trade with the Orient. The opponents of expansionism argued partly in legal terms, challenging the constitutionality of such arrangements. But their most powerful arguments were those which asked by what right we Americans, who had brought our country into existence on the thesis that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, could assume the rights of empire over other peoples and accept them into our system, regardless of their own feelings, as subjects rather than as citizens. To annex foreign territory and govern it without the consent of its population, said Senator Hoar of Massachusetts in the course of the debate over the ratification of the peace treaty with Spain, would be utterly contrary to the sacred principles of the Declaration of Independence and unconstitutional because it promoted no purpose of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers, said the Senator, had never thought that their descendants "would be beguiled from these sacred and awful verities that they might strut about in the cast-off clothing of pinchbeck emperors and pewter kings; that their descendants would be excited by the smell of gun powder and the sound of the guns of a single victory as a small boy by a firecracker on some Fourth of July morning."7 The strongest argument of the imperialists was actually none of those that I mentioned but the argument of what has sometimes been called contingent necessity - the argument that, unless we took these territories, somebody else would and that this would be still worse. In the case of Puerto Rico and Hawaii, this argument seems to me to have been unsubstantial. There was no real likelihood of anybody else intervening. Puerto Rico could quite safely have been left with Spain, or given independence like Cuba, so far as our security was concerned. In the case of the Philippines the question was a more serious one. Once we had completed our defeat of the ,Spanish forces on the island and the conquest of Manila, once we had shattered Spanish rule, there was no question of giving the islands back to Spain. It was also fairly clear that the inhabitants were hardly fit for self-rule, even if there had been a chance of their being let alone by other powers, which there was not. The alternative to our taking them probably have been a tussle between England and Germany over their possession but with a reasonable likelihood that some sort of a modus vivendi and division of the territory would eventually have resulted. Sooner or later, the Japanese would also have become competitors for their possession. Whether this would have been unfortunate from the standpoint of later developments in the Southwest Pacific, I cannot say. The historian's power fails before such speculative questions. But if we today cannot see a likelihood that this would have been particularly unfavorable to America's interests, I doubt halt the people of that time could ' have seen it very clearly themselves. And if they did not, one asks one's self, why did they need to destroy Spanish reign in the islands at all? The Russian writer, Anton Chekhov, who was also a doctor, once observed that when a large variety of remedies were recommended for the same disease, it was a pretty sure sign that none of them was any good and that the disease was incurable. Similarly, when one notes the variety of arguments put up by the expansionists for the territorial acquisitions of 1898, one has the impression that none of them was the real one - that at the bottom of it all lay something deeper, something less easy to express, probably the fact that the American people of that day, or at least many of their more influential spokesmen, simply liked the smell of empire and felt in urge to range themselves among the colonial powers of the time, to see our flag flying on distant tropical isles, to feel the thrill of foreign adventure and authority, to bask in the sunshine of recognition as one of the great imperial powers of the world. But by the same right of retrospect one is impressed with the force and sincerity of the warnings of the anti-expansionists and the logic, as yet never really refuted, of their contention that a country which traces its political philosophy to the concept of the social compact has no business taking responsibility for people who have no place in that concept and who arc supposed to appear on the scene in the role of subjects and not of citizens. Kings can have subjects; it is a question whether a republic can. One remembers, in particular, the words of one of the anti-imperialists, Frederick Gookin: "The serious question for the people of this country to consider is what effect the imperial policy will have upon ourselves if we permit it to be established."8 It is primarily in the light of this question that one thinks about our subsequent experience with these colonial possessions. About Puerto Rico, I shall not speak. Recent events have surely been eloquent enough to cause us all to ask ourselves whether we have really thought through all the implications of a relationship so immensely important, so pregnant with possibilities for both good and evil, as the colonial tic between our country and the people of Puerto Rico. In the case of Hawaii, we see the outcome of the decision as a relatively successful one, but only, I fear, because American blood and American ways were able to dominate the scene entirely: because the native way of life was engulfed and reduced, as was the case with our American Indians, to the helpless ignominy of tourist entertainment. In the case of the Philippines, we recall that only a few years after their annexation the first and most eager protagonist of their acquisition, Theodore Roosevelt, was already disillusioned, was already repenting his initiative and wishing we could be rid of them. Finally, let us remember, in the thirties we decided to set them free, and we recently did so, but not really primarily for their sake - not primarily because we were sorry for them or thought them prepared for freedom and felt that we had an obligation to concede it to them - but rather because we found them a minor inconvenience to ourselves; because the economic intimacy that their existence under our flag implied proved uncomfortable to powerful private interests in this country; because, in other words, we were not ourselves prepared to endure for long even those rudimentary sacrifices implied in the term "the white man's burden." Remember Gookin's words which I just cited: "The . . . question . . . is what effect the imperial policy will have upon ourselves." When one thinks of these things, one is moved to wonder whether our most signal political failures as a nation have not lain in our attempts to establish a political bond of obligation between the main body of our people and other peoples or groups to whom, whether because we wished it so or because there was no other practical solution, we were not in a position to concede the full status of citizenship. There is a deep significance in the answer to this question. If it is true that our society is really capable of knowing only the quantity which we call "citizen," that it debauches its own innermost nature when it tries to deal with the quantity called "subject," then the potential scope of our system is limited; then it can extend only to people of our own kind - people who have grown up in the same peculiar spirit of independence and self-reliance, people who can accept, and enjoy, and content themselves with our institutions. In this case, the ruling of distant peoples is not our dish. In this case, there are many things we Americans should beware of, and among them is the acceptance of any sort of a paternalistic responsibility to anyone, be it even in the form of military occupation, if we can possibly avoid it, or for any period longer than is absolutely necessary. These, then, are some of the things that strike us when we think about the remote and picturesque conflict with Spain at the end of the last century. Let us recapitulate them. We see that, in the reasons governing our resort to war and the determination of the character of our military operations, there was not much of solemn and careful deliberation, not much prudent and orderly measuring of the national interest. When it came to the employment of our armed forces, popular moods, political pressures, and inner-governmental intrigue were decisive. McKinley did not want war. But, when the bitter realities were upon him, there is no indication that either he or his Secretary of State felt in duty bound to oppose the resort to war if this was advantageous to them from the standpoint of domestic politics. Having resorted to war for subjective and emotional reasons, we conducted it in part on the basis of plans which, as far as we know, had never been seriously examined and approved by any competent official body; which were known to, and understood by, only a tiny handful of individuals in the government service; and which obviously reflected motives ulterior to the announced purposes of the war as defined by Congress. When the success of the naval and military operations that flowed from these plans inflamed public imagination and led to important questions of the acquisition of foreign territory, the Executive branch of the government took little part in the debate. It made no serious effort to control the effects of popular reaction to the exploits of a popular commander far afield. It was only the obligation of the Senate to ratify treaties which caught the tremendous issues involved and brought them to the attention of the public in a senatorial debate as measured and enlightened as any we have ever had. To my mind it seems unlikely, in the light of retrospect, that the conclusions which triumphed in that debate were the right ones. But we should not let that constitute a reproach to our forefathers, for we are poor judges of their trials and predicaments. Let us content ourselves with recording that in the course of their deliberations they stumbled upon issues and problems basic to the health of our American civilization; that these issues and problems are ones which are still before us and still require answer; and that, whereas the men of 1898 could afford to be mistaken in their answers to them, our generation no longer has this luxury. FOOTNOTES 1. "The Spanish War and the Equilibrium of the World," in America’s Economic Supremacy, by Brooks Adams. New edition with evaluation by Marquis W. Childs (New York, 1947). 2. Message of the President, December 7, 1875. 3. Letter from Dupuy de Lome quoted by Charles S. Olcott in William McKinley (Boston and New York, 1916), II, 9. 4. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1898 (Washington, 1901), p. 747 5. Olcott, op. cit., II, 166-67. 6. R. Cortissoz, Life of Whitelaw Reid (New York, 1921), II, 266. From a letter of January 22, 1900, to Senator William E. Chandler. 7. Cited by Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (Baltimore, 1936), p. 347. 8. Frederick W. Gookin, A Literary Catechysm (Chicago, 1899), p. 17, as cited by A. K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (Baltimore, 1935), p. 306.