Whitelaw Reid

“ If we make them freemen, and their defense is the defense of the Nation, whose right and duty is it to bear arms, if not theirs? In this great struggle, now for universal freedom not less than for perpetual Union, who ought to take part, if not they? And how can we expect to succeed, if we fail to avail ourselves of the natural helps created for us by the very conditions of the war? When, therefore, the President, after much consideration, resolved to summon black soldiers to battle for the flag, I felt that it was a wise act, only too long delayed. ”

“ A child that breaks a pane of glass or sets fire to a house may indeed escape. Are we to plead the baby act, and claim that we can flounce around the world, breaking international china and burning property, and yet repudiate the bill because we have not come of age? Who dare say that a self-respecting Power could have sailed away from Manila and repudiated the responsibilities of its victorious belligerency? After going into a war for humanity, were we so craven that we should seek freedom from further trouble at the expense of civilization? ”

“ Your attempt to base a great enduring party on the heat and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody civil war is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. ”

“ We want no Porto Ricans or Cubans to be sending Senators and Representatives to Washington to help govern the American Continent, any more than we want Kanakas or Tagals or Visayans or Mohammedan Malays. We will do them good and not harm, if we may, all the days of our life; but, please God, we will not divide this Republic, the heritage of our fathers, among them.
Resist the crazy extension of the doctrine that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed to an extreme never imagined by the men who framed it, and never for one moment acted upon in their own practice. ”

“ It is my firm conviction, that suffrage is not only the best security for freedom, but the most potent agent of amelioration and civilization. He who has that right will usually respect himself more, be more respected, perform more, and more productive work, and do more to increase the wealth and welfare of the community, than he who has it not. Suffrage makes nations great. Hence I am in favor of suffrage for all ”

“ For, lo! yet another century is upon you, before which even the marvels of the Nineteenth are to grow pale. As of old, light breaks from the east, but now also, for you, from the farther East. It circles the world in both directions, like the flag it is newly gilding now with its tropic beams. The dawn of the Twentieth Century bursts upon you without needing to cross the Sierras, and bathes at once in its golden splendors, with simultaneous effulgence, the Narrows of Sandy Hook and the peerless portals of the Golden Gate. ”

“ To see a fort is naturally supposed to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort. ”

“ Never again will any nation imagine that it can trespass indefinitely against the United States with impunity. Never again will an American war-ship run greater risks in a peaceful harbor than in battle. The world will never again be in doubt whether, when driven to war, we will end it in a gush of sentimentality or a shiver of unmanly apprehension over untried responsibilities, by fleeing from our plain duty, and hastening to give up what we are entitled to, before we have even taken an opportunity to look at it. ”

“ Memphis—Out from the Reconstructed. Of the trip between Jackson, Mississippi, and Grand Junction, Tennessee, I only remember a dismal night of thumpings over broken rails, and lurches and contortions of the cars, as if we were really trying in our motion to imitate the course of the rails the Yankee raiders had twisted. At one point all were waked up, hurried out into the mud of a forlorn little village, and informed that, some way or another, they must get over the burnt bridge to the train half a mile on the other side. ”

“ New York will then become what London now is—the great central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America.... The responsibility rests upon us whether this first American State of the Pacific shall in youth and ripe manhood realize the promise of infancy. We may cramp her energies and distort her form, or we may make her a rival even of the Empire State of the Atlantic. The best wishes of Americans are with us. ”

“ An idea that the place was unhealthy possessed the owners, and, with a curious taste, what was too dangerous for men to live in was straightway selected for dead men to be buried in. We would hardly choose a malarious bottom, or a Northern tamarack swamp for a burying ground, beautiful as either might be, but what matters it? After life’s fitful fever, the few interred here sleep, doubtless, as sweetly beneath the gigantic oaks in the solemn avenues, as if on breeziest upland of mountain heather. ”

“ America asks only a fair field, even as against her oldest and most formidable rivals. Nature, and our position as the nearest neighbors to eastern Asia, separated from her only by the great highways of the ocean, have placed in our hands all the advantages that we need.... Favored by vicinity, by soil and climate on our own territory, with a people inferior to none in enterprise and vigor, without any serious rivals anywhere, all this Pacific coast is ours or is our tributary.... We hold as ours the great ocean that so lately rolled in solitary grandeur from the equator to the pole. ”

“ Judge, we always knows who’s our friends and who isn’t. We knows the difference between the Union ticket and the Rebel ticket. We may not know all about all the men that’s on it; but we knows the difference between the Union and the Rebel parties. Yes, sir; we knows that much better than you do! Because, sir, some of our people stand behind these men at the table, and hear ’em talk; we see ’em in the house and by the wayside; and we know ’em from skin to core, better than you do or can do, till you live among ’em as long, and see as much of ’em as we have. ”

“ When a business stops growing it is in danger of decline. When a nation stops growing it has passed the meridian of its course, and its shadows fall eastward.
Is China to be our model, or Great Britain? Or, better still, are we to follow the instincts of our own people? The policy of isolating ourselves is a policy for the refusal of both duties and opportunities—duties to foreign nations and to civilization, which cannot be respectably evaded; opportunities for the development of our power on the Pacific in the Twentieth Century, which it would be craven to abandon. ”

“ One, embracing, I think, a majority of the people, is thoroughly cowed by the crushing defeat, has the profoundest respect for the power that has whipped them so badly, and, under the belief of its necessity, will submit to anything the Government may require—negro suffrage, territorial pupilage—anything. A smaller class are Union men, if they can have the Union their way—if the negroes can be kept under, and themselves put foremost. And another class are violent and malignant Rebels, enraged at their defeat, and hardly yet willing to submit to the inevitable. ”

“ No nation stands higher in those new contributions to International Law which form the high-water mark of civilization from one generation to another. At the same time, in fields less under the public eye, our foreign service has been haphazard at the best, and often bad beyond belief—ludicrous and humiliating. The harm thus wrought to our national good name and the positive injury to our trade have been more than we realized. We cannot escape realizing them now, and when the American people wake up to a wrong they are apt to right it. ”

“ Fifty women and children, with only a few weakly men among them, were scattered along the old cotton rows, chopping up weeds, gathering together the trash that covered the land, firing little heaps of it, singing an occasional snatch of some camp-meeting hymn, and keeping up an incessant chatter. ”

“ We are all citizens of the Republic, grateful for our high privilege and solicitous that the Republic shall take no harm—all Americans, proud of the name and eager that it shall never be stained by base or unworthy acts. There is no one here, of whatever political faith or lack of faith, who is not a patriot, anxious for our country on these new and untried paths it must walk—most desirous that all its ways may prove ways of pleasantness and all its paths lead to honorable peace. ”

“ Ask them what should be done with the negroes, now that they’re free, and the bolder ones answer, “Put them under the care of the State Legislature;” while all seem to insist upon some sort of apprenticeship, or other legal restriction that will practically keep them as much slaves as ever. I have found no Georgian who, now that his slaves can no longer be made to work for him, expects to work for himself. In fact, working for themselves does not seem to be, in any event, of success or of failure, of loyalty or of rebellion, a part of their philosophy of life. ”

“ It is not Imperialism to take up honestly the responsibility for order we incurred before the world, and continue under it, even if that should lead us to extend the civil rights of the American Constitution over new regions and strange peoples. It is not Imperialism when duty keeps us among these chaotic, warring, distracted tribes, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous, to help them, as far as their several capacities will permit, toward self-government, on the basis of those civil rights. ”

“ We drove through miles of cotton and corn, rank with the luxuriant growth of a soil marvelous for its fertility. Then came a bad road along a broken levee, through a cypress swamp, where amid the gloom of trailing moss, hanging down almost to the edge of the stagnant, scum-covered water, one could dimly make out the great cypress-knees, and fancy them fit resting-places for the snakes and alligators which are said to constitute the only inhabitants. ”