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Pacific Press Publishing Co. · New York · December 1, 1898

Dr. Parkhurst on Imperialism.

New York’s noted reform clergyman, Dr. Parkhurst, in a Thanksgiving day sermon, discussed the policy of imperialism in the light of American history and principles of government, and said some things on the subject that will bear repeating. We quote the following:—

“The proposition is that we turn our backs on traditions of the past and sing out the anthem of our national future in a key distinct from that which has been sounding for a century or more. I am no stickler for tradition, but I am concerned that the rank and file of our population should in all soberness of thought realize what abandonment of such traditions means and what weight of import the adoption of the new suggested lines involves.

“No one can recognize more confidently than myself the mission which it belongs to us as a nation to render to the world at large. The principles, civil and religious, which we nationally embody are given to us for our use in order that they may be extended to the world for its use. It is what our nation is, in the first instance, that is going to determine its power to make the world great along civil and religious lines. Hence the pertinence of the expression recently used by James Bryce when he said: ‘The United States will render a far greater service to humanity by developing a high type of industrial civilization on her own continent than by foreign conquests.’ And the words of Bryce are peculiarly significant from the fact that, as shown in his masterly work, ‘The American Commonwealth,’ he grasps with so firm a hand the strength, the weakness and the opportunities of the great American people.”

“There is not to-day respect enough for the authority of the general Government to secure to the negro the rights that belong to him as a citizen, although such rights were nominally conferred upon him a third of a century ago. Aside from the question of the negro, heterogeneous populations are pouring in upon us from all parts of the globe, and we cannot keep up with them, great, undigested masses of foreign stuff here that are no more American in their appreciations and sympathies than the day they were born in Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia, or out in the great East.

“What are our labor people thinking about that they are not rising up in protest from one end of the land to the other against swinging wide open the flood gates of cheap immigration? These things are not understand yet by the masses of our population, and the masses of our population have a right to understand them. You shut out the Chinese because you don’t want cheap labor and bad morals, but send cards of invitation to the Malays. Are you going to treat them as captives, shoot them down if they undertake to leave the islands on a visit to the home government? Then what becomes of the vaunted spirit of American institutions and of such principles so dear for one hundred years to the American heart as that all men are created free and equal, or that little apothegm of ours that governments shall derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; or did Dewey’s guns that knocked the Spanish flag to pieces blow up also the Declaration of Independence?”

“When a nation takes what is not its own, we call it enlarging the sphere of its influence. When an individual does that we call him a thief. Perhaps the two are essentially different, but there is an unwholesome impression left upon the public mind, as in the instance of the Franco-Prussian war. The world felt that Germany took Alsace and Lorraine because knowing that France was so utterly undone she could not help herself, and having knocked France prostrate, took advantage of her helplessness to seize her jewels and rifle her pocket.”

“It is simply a question whether the Government is going to keep its word to its own people and to the world, or whether it is not. It is simply a question whether we have become so intoxicated by our military success, as to have unlearned the simple principles of transparent honesty that we started out with.”

“I do not wonder that those islanders do not want to be governed from America, and they will probably want it less after they have had it awhile. Our policy

of dealing with semi-civilized folk and with savages is not just what you would call reassuring. I would rather be a Malay, subject to Spain, than be an American Indian, subject to the Indian Bureau.

“So long as it is an understood thing that office is spoils, we may well pray to be delivered from the responsibility of governing dependencies.”