editorialHarper’s WeeklyJuly 2, 1898Volume 42p. 634It is probable that the issue of the coming elections for Congress is to be imperialism — that is, that all domestic questions are at least to be obscured by the overshadowing and engrossing subject of territorial expansion. Such a campaign will be interesting, and it will certainly excite the imaginations of the voters. That it is probable that the country is at the parting of the ways is evident from the enormous majority by which the House of Representatives passed the NEWLANDS resolution "for annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States," the vote being 209 to 91, the affirmative vote being mainly Republican and the negative mainly Democratic, although the statement that the cleavage on this issue goes through the parties may possibly be sustained by the fact that three Republicans voted against the resolution. Speaker Reed, who was ill at home, sending word that he also would have voted no if he had been present, while 27 Democrats, Populists, and Silverites voted for it.It is reasonably certain, therefore, that there is great danger that the country is to enter upon a colonial policy — that is, in our judgment, it is to abandon the independent attitude which it has generally maintained towards the rest of the world, and is to adopt what may be briefly characterized as a simian policy, or a policy imitative of that which has created quarreling European frontiers in Africa and Asia, and which has loaded the workers and producers of Europe with the burdens of militarism.As to what we may be about to do in Hawaii, nothing so monstrous has been proposed to this country since Buchanan, Soule and Mason issued the famous Ostend manifesto concerning Cuba. Every American who believes in the fundamental principle of his government, that government exists by the consent of the governed, will agree that, if we are to have colonial possessions, and to rival the European military powers in this respect, the new policy could not be inaugurated in a worse way than by the adoption of the Newlands resolution.What is the character of this effort to increase the territorial possessions of the United States? As formulated in this resolution it is brigandage pure and simple, and thus far in its history the United States Supreme Court has not found that Congress has the power to seize the territory of distant peoples. We propose to take these islands, simply because we want them, by means of a joint resolution. Chief Justice Marshall held that the power of Congress to acquire territory resulted from the power to make war and the power to make treaties. These powers being conferred by the Constitution, there are implied the power to take security for the future from the country with which we may be at war, and the power to receive possessions from the country with which we bargain. But it will be difficult to find in the Constitution a grant of power to Congress to seize with its legislative grasp a foreign people's domain. We are not at war with Hawaii, and therefore we cannot take the territory as security from a hostile power. It is true that we might take the islands by treaty, and this would be the proper Constitutional method, but the annexationists cannot secure the necessary number of votes in the Senate for the ratification of the treaty which is pending.In other words, if Congress should strictly obey the Constitution, annexation could not take place. Therefore the annexationists resort to a short-cut, and they propose to turn their backs upon the Constitution, as they disregard the facts that this question of acquiring Hawaii has never yet been presented to the people of the United States for their votes, and that not a party platform in the last Presidential campaign suggested the annexation of the islands. At that time, only two years ago, it was admitted by the political managers of both parties that annexation would not be a winning issue. So keenly was this realized that the treaty, still before the Senate, lost so much of the support which it at first commanded that Senator Davis has practically abandoned it. In a word, this effort is, as we have said, to take a snap judgment against the people, and it is probably resorted to because the politicians are now, as they were two years ago, afraid to put the question to the test of a popular vote.The Newlands resolution is, moreover, a legislative assault upon Hawaii, and is contrary to the essential character of our own government. If our republic means anything, it is that the people of every country have the right to govern themselves. They have the right to determine the form of government under which they will live. We have insisted upon this right for ourselves; we have fought for it, and we have won it. Under what system of logic, then, can we reach the conclusion that we may deny to the Hawaiians what we have asserted for ourselves, under the general principle that every people in the world have the right "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them?" We have set up our own government for our own affairs, and we have neither had the intention to govern others, nor have we the machinery to carry such an intention into effect.Our government has been self-government in good faith; but in the Newlands resolution it is proposed that we shall annex another people's country, and that, until congress shall provide another government, the President, whose powers over his own countrymen are limited by the constitution and by statutes, shall exercise absolute and despotic powers over the inhabitants of Hawaii. Strange as this may seem to those who believe that we have a republican form of government, and that it stands for the right of the people to govern themselves, this despotism is really proposed by Congress in the Newlands resolution in the following words: "Until Congress shall provide for the government of such islands, all the civil, judicial, and military powers exercised by the officers of the existing government in said islands shall be vested in such person or persons, and shall be exercised in such manner, as the President of the United States shall direct; and the President shall have power to remove said officers, and fill the vacancies to occasions."Congress, in other words, enacts that the lands of the Hawaiians shall belong to this country, and that the President shall have the power to remove the officers of the Hawaiian government, and, for a time at least, to exercise despotic powers over the people. Was there ever such a perversion of the principle on which the republic was founded?The excuse for this proposed democratic excursion into absolutism is that the government of Hawaii has consented to it. But neither have the people of Hawaii consented to the pretended cessions, which has really never been made, nor have the people of this country consented to accept it. In the first place, the government of Hawaii is a self-constituted power. It does not represent the freely expressed will of the people of the islands. So fearful were the men who seized upon the powers that in the Constitution, which is wholly the work of themselves and their friends, they inserted the strange provision that Sandford [SIC] B. Dole should be the first President of the republic, and they provided that his successor should not be chosen until 1900.We have no criticism to make on this oligarchy. We are willing to admit that its government of the islands has been and will be better for the people than that of the monarchy was; that, in brief, it is the best possible form of government for the islands, and very much better than could be that of a distant and despotic American President or Congress. But when it comes to the question of annexation, this republic is bound, we think, to refuse a country offered to us by an oligarchy which not only does not represent the people, but which is acting, or attempting to act, against the expressed will of the people. There are in Hawaii 31,019 natives, 24,407 Japanese, and 21,616 Chinese, and most of these are opposed to the rule of the 3086 Americans and to their effort to transfer them to this country. Believe and say what we will against black and brown and yellow men, it has never before been contended that it is in accordance with the spirit of our institutions to seize their lands and to put them under the rule of our President or our Congress.
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