members of this Society, owe their greatness; that while it pays a people to pay heed to material matters, it pays infinitely better to treat material as absolutely second to moral considerations.  I am glad for the sake of America that we have seen the American Army and the American Navy driving the Spaniard from the Western world.  I am glad that the descendants of the Puritan and the Hollander should have completed the work begun, when Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher singed the beard of the King of Spain, and William the Silent fought to the death to free Holland.  I am glad we did it for our own sake, but I am infinitely more glad because we did it to free the people of the islands of the sea and tried to do good to them.

I have told you why I am glad, because of what we have done.  Let me add my final word as to why I am anxious about it.  We have driven out the Spaniards.  This did not prove for this nation a very serious task.  Now we are approaching the really serious task.  Now it behooves us to show that we are capable of doing infinitely better the work which we blame the Spaniards for doing so badly; and woe to us unless we do show not merely a slight but a well-nigh immeasurable improvement!  We have assumed heavy burdens, heavy responsibilities.  I have no sympathy with the men who cry out against our assuming them.  If this great nation, if this nation with its wealth, with its continental vastness of domain, with its glorious history, with its memory of Washington and Lincoln, of its statesmen and soldiers and sailors, the builders and the wielders of commonwealths, if this nation is to stand cowering back because it is afraid to undertake tasks lest they prove too formidable, we may well suppose that the decadence of our race has begun.  No; the tasks are difficult, and all the more for that reason let us gird up our loins and go out to do them.  But let us meet them, realizing their difficulty; not in a spirit of levity, but in a spirit of sincere and earnest desire to do our duty as it is given us to see our duty.  Let us not do it in the spirit of sentimentality, not saying we must at once give universal suffrage to the people of the Philippines—­they are unfit for it.  Do not let us mistake the shadow for the substance.  We have got to show the practical common sense which was combined with the fervent religion of the Puritan; the combination which gave him the chance to establish here that little group of commonwealths which more than any others have shaped the spirit and destiny of this nation; we must show both qualities.

Gentlemen, if one of the islands which we have acquired is not fit to govern itself, then we must govern it until it is fit.  If you cannot govern it according to the principles of the New England town meeting—­because the Philippine Islander is not a New Englander—­if you cannot govern it according to these principles, then find out the principles upon which you can govern it, and apply those principles.  Fortunately,