Legislator and author; born in
Boston, May 12, 1850; graduated at Harvard University in 1871, and at the Harvard Law School in 1875; was admitted to the
Suffolk bar in 1876; edited
North American review in 1873-76, and the
International review in 1879-81; was a Republican Representative in Congress in 1886-93, when he was elected
United States Senator; reelected, 1899.
Among his publications are
A short history of the English colonies in America;
Alexander Hamilton;
Daniel Webster;
Studies in history, etc. Since his entrance into political life he has been a stalwart Republican, and on the questions of the war with
Spain and the events growing therefrom he has
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Henry Cabot Lodge. |
given
President McKinley's administration a hearty and effective support.
Besides the following speeches, see
election bill, federal.
Restriction of immigration.
In 1896
Senator Lodge introduced into the Senate a bill to restrict the flood of immigration, the most striking feature of which was the provision of an educational qualifixation, requiring that every alien hereafter landing in the ports of the
United States should be able to read and write the language of his native country.
The test to ascertain the intelligence of candidates for citizenship in this great republic was to be applied as follows:
The inspection officers shall be furnished with copies of the
Constitution of the United States, printed on numbered uniform pasteboard slips, each containing five lines of said Constitution in the various languages of the immigrants, in double small-pica type.
These slips shall be kept in boxes made for that purpose, and so constructed as to conceal the slips
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from view, each box to contain slips of but one language, and the immigrant may designate the language in which he prefers the test shall be made.
Each immigrant shall be required to draw one of said slips from the box, and read, and afterwards write out, in full view of the immigration officers, the five lines printed thereon.
Each slip shall be returned to the box immediately after the test is finished, and the contents of the box shall be shaken up by an inspection officer before another drawing is made.
The immigrant failing to read and write out the slip thus drawn by him shall be returned to the country from which he came at the expense of the steamship or railroad company which brought him, as now provided by law. The inspection officers shall keep in each box, at all times, a full number of said printed pasteboard slips, and, in the case of each excluded immigrant, shall keep a certified memorandum of the number of the slip which the said immigrant failed to read or copy out in writing.
In support of his bill,
Senator Lodge made an argument, of which the subjoined is the substance:
There can be no doubt that there is a very earnest desire on the part of the
American people to restrict further and much more extensively than has yet been done foreign immigration to the
United States. Three methods of obtaining this further restriction have been widely discussed of late years, and in various forms have been brought to the attention of Congress.
The first was the imposition of a capitation tax on all immigrants.
There can be no doubt as to the effectiveness of this method if the tax is made sufficiently heavy.
But although exclusion by a tax would be thorough, it would be undiscriminating, and your committee did not feel that the time had yet come for its application.
The second scheme was to restrict immigration by requiring consular certification of immigrants.
This plan has been much advocated, and if it were possible to carry it out thoroughly, and to add very largely to the number of our consuls in order to do so, it would no doubt be effective and beneficial.
But the committee was satisfied that consular certification was unpractical; that the necessary machinery could not be provided; that it would lead to many serious questions with foreign governments, and that it could not be properly and justly enforced.
The third method was to exclude all immigrants who could neither read nor write, and this is the plan which was adopted by the committee, and which is embodied in this bill.
In their report the committee have shown by statistics, which have been collected and tabulated with great care, the immigrants who would be affected by the illiteracy test.
It is found, in the first place, that the illiteracy test will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking immigrants, or Germans, Scandinavians, and
French.
In other words, the races most affected by the illiteracy test are those whose immigration to this country has begun within the last twenty years and swelled rapidly to enormous proportions, races with which the English-speaking people have never hitherto assimilated, and which are most alien to the great body of the people of the
United States.
On the other hand, immigrants from the United Kingdom and of those races which are most closely related to the Englishspeaking people, and who with the English-speaking people themselves founded the
American colonies and built up the
United States, are affected but little by the proposed test.
The statistics prepared by the committee show further that the immigrants excluded by the illiteracy test are those who remain for the most part in congested masses in our great cities.
They furnish a large proportion of the population of the slums.
It also appears from investigations which have been made that the immigrants who would be shut out by the illiteracy test are those who bring least money to the country and come most quickly upon private or public charity for support.
The classes now excluded by law—the criminals, the diseased, the paupers, and the contract laborers—are furnished chiefly by the same races as those affected by the test of illiteracy.
The same is true as to those immigrants who come to this country for a
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brief season and return to their native land, taking with them the money they have earned in the
United States.
There is no more hurtful and undesirable class of immigrants from every point of view than these “birds of passage,” and the tables show that the races furnishing the largest number of “birds of passage” have also the greatest proportion of illiterates.
There is no one thing which does so much to bring about a reduction of wages and to injure the
American wage-earner as the unlimited introduction of cheap foreign labor through unrestricted immigration.
Statistics show that the change in the race character of our immigration has been accompanied by a corresponding decline in its quality.
The number of skilled mechanics and of persons trained to some occupation or pursuit has fallen off, while the number of those without occupation or training—that is, who are totally unskilled—has risen in our recent immigration to enormous proportions.
This low, unskilled labor is the most deadly enemy of the
American wage-earner, and does more than anything else towards lowering his wages and forcing down his standard of living.
An attempt was made, with the general assent of both political parties, to meet this crying evil some years ago by the passage of what are known as the contract-labor laws.
That legislation was excellent in intention, but has proved of but little value in practice.
It is perfectly clear after the experience of several years that the only relief which can come to the
American wage-earner from the competition of low-class immigrant labor must be by general laws, restricting the total amount of immigration, framed in such a way as to affect most strongly those elements of the immigration which furnish the low, unskilled, and ignorant foreign labor.
The injury of unrestricted immigration to American wages and American standards of living is sufficiently plain, and is bad enough, but the danger which this immigration threatens to the quality of our citizenship is far worse.
While the people who for 250 years have been migrating to
America have continued to furnish large numbers of immigrants to the
United States, other races of totally different origin, with whom the Englishspeaking people have never hitherto been assimilated or brought in contact, have suddenly begun to immigrate to the
United States in large numbers.
Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Greeks, and even Asiatics, whose immigration to
America was almost unknown twenty years ago, have, during the last twenty years, poured in in steadily increasing numbers, until now they nearly equal the immigration of those races kindred in blood or speech, or both, by whom the
United States has hitherto been built up and the
American people formed.
This momentous fact is the one which confronts us to-day, and, if continued, it carries with it future consequences far deeper than any other event of our times.
It involves, in a word, nothing less than the possibility of a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race.
When we speak of a race we do not mean its expressions in art or in language, or its achievements in knowledge.
We mean the moral and intellectual characters which, in their association, make the soul of a race, and which represent the product of all its past, the inheritance of all its ancestors, and the motives of all its conduct.
The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect.
What make a race are their mental, and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulations of centuries of toil and conflict.
It is on the moral qualities of the English-speaking race that our history, our victories, and all our future rest.
There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail.
The lower race will absorb the higher, not the higher the lower, where the two strains approach equality in numbers.
In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race, and when you begin to pour in in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social
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efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that any people can run. The lowering of a great race means not only its own decline, but that of human civilization.
The danger has begun.
It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time, and when it can be done easily and efficiently.
There lies the peril at the portals of our land; there is pressing in the tide of unrestricted immigration.
The time has certainly come, if not to stop, at least to check, to sift, and to restrict those immigrants.
Problem of the Philippines.
On March 7, 1900,
Senator Lodge delivered a speech in the Senate on the new relations of the
United States in the
East, substantially as follows:
The questions involved in the future management of these islands, and in our policy in the
Far East, are of a nature to demand the highest and the most sagacious statesmanship.
I have always thought with
Webster that party politics should cease “at the water's edge.”
He spoke only in reference to our relations with foreign nations, but I think we might well apply his patriotic principle to our dealings with our own insular possessions, both in the
Atlantic and the
Pacific.
The
Philippines should be an American question, not the sport of parties or the subject of party creeds.
The responsibility for them rests upon the
American people, not upon the
Democratic or
American party.
If we fail in dealing with them, we shall all alike suffer from the failure; and if we succeed, the honor and the profit will redound in the end to the glory and the benefit of all. This view, no doubt, seems visionary.
It certainly ought not to be so, and in time I believe it will be accepted.
Unfortunately, it is not the case to-day.
One of the great political parties of the country has seen fit to make what is called “an issue” of the Philippines.
They have no alternative policy to propose which does not fall to pieces as soon as it is stated.
A large and important part of their membership, North and South, is heartily in favor of expansion, because they are
Americans, and have not only patriotism but an intelligent perception of their own interests.
They are the traditional party of expansion—the party which first went beyond seas and tried to annex
Hawaii, which plotted for years to annex
Cuba, which have in our past acquisitions of territory their one great and enduring monument.
In their new wanderings they have developed a highly commendable, if somewhat hysterical, tenderness for the rights of men with dark skins dwelling in the islands of the
Pacific, in pleasing contrast to the harsh indifference which they have always manifested towards those American citizens who “wear the shadowed livery of the burnished sun” within the boundaries of the
United States.
The Democratic party has for years been the advocate of freetrade and increased exports, but now they shudder at our gaining control of the
Pacific and developing our commerce with the
East.
Ready in their opposition to protection to open our markets to the free competition of all the tropical, all the cheapest labor of the world, they are now filled with horror at the thought of admitting to our markets that small fragment of the world's cheap labor contained in the
Philippine Islands—something which neither Republicans nor any one else think for one moment of doing.
Heedless of their past and of their best traditions, careless of their inconsistencies, utterly regardless of the obvious commercial interests of the
South, which they control; totally indifferent to the wishes and beliefs of a large portion of their membership and to the advice and example of some of their most patriotic, most loyal, and most courageous leaders, to whom all honor is due, the managers of the
Democratic organization have decided to oppose the retention of the Philippines and our policy of trade expansion in the
East, for which those islands supply the cornerstone.
Their reason appears to be the highly sagacious one that it is always wise to oppose whatever the Republicans advocate, without regard to the merits of the policy or to the circumstances which gave it birth.
I will make no comment upon this theory of political action, except to say that it has seemed for a long time exceedingly congenial to the intelligence of the Democratic party, and that it may
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perhaps account for the fact that since 1860 they have only held for eight years a brief and ineffective power.
As an American I regret that our opponents should insist on making a party question of this new and far-reaching problem, so fraught with great promise of good, both to ourselves and to others.
As a party man and as a Republican I can only rejoice.
Once more our opponents insist we shall be the only political party devoted to American policies.
As the standard of expansion once so strongly held by their great predecessors drops from their nerveless hands we take it up, and invite the
American people to march with it. We offer our policy to the
American people, to Democrats and to Republicans, as an American policy, alike in duty and honor, in morals and in interest, as one not of scepticism and doubt, but of hope and faith in ourselves and in the future, as becomes a great young nation, which has not yet learned to use the art of retreat or to speak with the accents of despair.
In 1804 the party which opposed expansion went down in utter wreck before the man who, interpreting aright the instincts, the hopes and the spirit of the
American people, made the
Louisiana purchase.
We make the same appeal in behalf of our American policies.
We have made the appeal before, and won, as we deserved to win. We shall not fail now.
Before explaining our policy I should be glad, as a preliminary, to state the policy proposed by our opponents, so that I could contrast our own with it, but I have thus far been unable to discover what their policy is. No doubt it exists, no doubt it is beautiful, but, like many beautiful things, it seems to the average searcher after truth both diaphanous and elusive.
We have had presented to us, it is true, the policy desired by
Aguinaldo and his followers, that we should acknowledge him as a government, enforce his rule upon the other eighty-three tribes, and upon all the other islands, and then protect him from foreign interference.
This plan, which would involve us in endless wars with the natives and keep us embroiled with other nations, loads us with responsibility without power, and falls into ruin and absurdity the moment it is stated.
Another proposition is that we should treat the Philippines as we treat
Cuba.
That is precisely what we are doing.
But what is really meant by this demand is not that we should treat the Philippines as we treat
Cuba, but that we should make them a promise as to the future.
And that is what every proposition made by those opposed to the Republican party comes down to, a promise as to the future.
We are to put down insurrection and disorder, and hold the islands temporarily without the consent of the governed, but simultaneously we are to make large promises as to the future which will look well in print, and keep insurrection and disorder alive.
The resolutions offered by
Senators on the other side, and the tenor of their speeches, are all of this description.
They present no policy, but invite us to make promises.
Promises are neither action nor policy, and, in the form of legislation, are a grave mistake.
Those which involve us in pledges of independence have the additional disadvantage of being the one sure means of keeping alive war and disorder in the islands.
Those who offer them or urge them proceed on the assumption that you can deal with an Asiatic in the same manner and expect from him the same results as from a European or an American.
This shows, it seems to me, a fatal misconception.
The Asiatic mind and habit of thought are utterly different from ours.
Words or acts which to us would show generosity and kindness, and would bring peace and order, to an Asiatic mean simply weakness and timidity and are to him an incentive to riot, resistance, and bloodshed.
Promises of this kind, therefore, are neither effective action nor intelligent policy, but the sure breeders of war. If we must abandon the Philippines, let us abandon them frankly.
If we mean to turn them over to domestic anarchy or foreign control, let us do it squarely.
If we are to retain them, let us deal manfully with the problems as they arise.
But do not indulge in the unspeakable cruelty of making promises, which our successors may be unable or unwilling to fulfil, and which will serve merely to light the flames of war once more, and bring death to hundreds of natives and to scores of American soldiers.
Let us not attempt in such a
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situation, and with such responsibilities, to mortgage an unknown future and give bonds to fate which will be redeemed in blood.
The policy we offer, on the other hand, is simple and straightforward.
We believe in the frank acceptance of existing facts, and in dealing with them as they are and not on a theory of what they might or ought to be. We accept the fact that the
Philippine Islands are ours today, and that we are responsible for them before the world.
The next fact is that there is a war in those islands which, with its chief in hiding, and no semblance of a government, has now degenerated into mere guerilla fighting and brigandage.
Our immediate duty, therefore, is to suppress this disorder, put an end to fighting, and restore peace and order.
That is what we are doing.
That is all we are called upon to do in order to meet the demands of the living present.
Beyond this we ought not to go by a legislative act, except to make such provision that there may be no delay in re-establishing civil government when the war ends.
The question of our constitutional right and power to govern those islands in any way we please I shall not discuss.
Not only is it still in the future, but if authority is lacking, the
Constitution gives full right and authority to hold and govern the Philippines without making them either economically or politically part of our system, neither of which they should ever be. When our great chief-justice,
John Marshall—
magnum et venerabile nomen —declared in the
Cherokee case that the
United States could have under its control, exercised by treaty or the laws of Congress, a “domestic and dependent nation,” I think he solved the question of our constitutional relations to the Philippines.
Further than the acts and the policy, which I have just stated, I can only give my own opinion and belief as to the future, and as to the course to be pursued in the Philippines.
I hope and believe that we shall retain the islands, and that peace and order once restored we shall and should re-establish civil government, beginning with the towns and villages, where the inhabitants are able to manage their own affairs.
We should give them honest administration, and prompt and efficient courts.
We should see to it there is entire protection to persons and property, in order to encourage the development of the islands by the assurance of safety to investors of capital.
All men should be protected in the free exercise of their religion, and the doors thrown open to missionaries of all Christian sects.
The land which belongs to the people, and of which they have been robbed in the past, should be returned to them and their titles made secure.
We should inaugurate and carry forward, in the most earnest and liberal way, a comprehensive system of popular education.
Finally, while we bring prosperity to the islands by developing their resources, we should, as rapidly as conditions will permit, bestow upon them self-government and home rule.
Such, in outline, is the policy which I believe can be and will be pursued towards the Philippines.
It will require time, patience, honesty, and ability for its completion, but it is thoroughly practicable and reasonable.
The foundation of it all is the retention of the islands by the
United States, and it is to that question that I desire to address myself.
I shall not argue our title to the islands by the law of nations, for it is perfect.
No other nation has ever questioned it. It is too plain a proposition to warrant the waste of time and words upon it. Equally plain is our right under the
Constitution, by a treaty which is the supreme law of the land, to hold those islands.
I will not argue this point nor the entire legality of all that the
President has done in accordance with his constitutional power and with the law passed by Congress at the last session, which recognized the necessity of an increased army in order to cope with the existing insurrection.
The opposition rests its weight on grounds widely different from these.
They assert that on moral grounds we have no right to take or retain the Philippines, and that as a matter of expediency our whole Eastern policy was a costly mistake.
I traverse both assertions.
I deny both propositions.
I believe we are in the Philippines as righteously as we are there rightfully and legally.
I believe that to abandon the islands, or to leave them now, would be a wrong to humanity, a dereliction of duty,
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a base betrayal of the Filipinos who have supported us, led by the best men of
Luzon, and in the highest degree contrary to sound morals.
As to expediency, the arguments in favor of the retention of the Philippines seem to me so overwhelming that I should regard their loss as a calamity to our trade and commerce, and to all our business interests, so great that no man can measure it.
