The Triumphant Life of Theodore Roosevelt edited by J. Martin Miller

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 15
order. We have provided the Philippines with a complete
civil service government and as large a measure of local self-
government as they are capable of exercising.
President Roosevelt well summed up the Philippine situa-
tion in his message at the beginning of the second session of
the Fifty-Seventh Congress, wherein he said:
"Civil government has now been introduced. Not only
does each Filipino enjoy such rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness as he has never before known during the
recorded history of the islands, but the people taken as a
whole now enjoy a measure of self-government greater than
that granted to any other orientals by any foreign power, and
greater than that enjoyed by any other orientals under their
own government, save the Japanese alone.
"No policy ever entered into by the American people has
vindicated itself in a more signal manner than the policy of
holding the Philippines."
The termination of the war with Spain freed Cuba and
gave to the United States Porto Rico and the Philippines.
But there were more important results. That short, though
momentous, conflict, small though it was in comparison with
our own Civil War, had almost as important an effect upon
the subsequent history and policy of the United States.
Our war with Spain brought the nation to a self-conscious-
ness as no other event in our history has done. That conflict
aroused us to a realization of the fact that more than a cen-
tury of remarkable internal industrial development had ren-
dered us an important factor in the world's system.
Under the administrations of McKinley and Roosevelt the
United States obtained a position among the nations of the
world which it never occupied in any former period of our