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—and even those nations like ourselves in mind and sentiment—German and Scandinavian—we regard as not so excellent as ourselves."And a scholar like Ruskin, who spent so much time weepingover the poor, could say that England "must found colonies as fastand as far as she is able; seizing every rod of waste ground she canset her foot upon and then teaching these her colonies that theirchief virtue is fidelity to their country and that their first aim is toadvance the power of England by land and sea."But we need not go to England. Professor Washburn Hopkins ofYale said in 1900, when America was considering her first feeblesteps in imperialism, "What seems criminal aggression in a largenation against a weak one is justifiable if it conduces to the advantageof the race," and with characteristic American piety he called thisthe "higher morality." We need not suppose that the seeds of thisdangerous and malignant philosophy do not lurk deeply in our ownnational nature. America broke very definitely with her great democratictradition in 1900 when she decided to hold the PhilippineIslands. This was an assertion of power, the power of conquest, theright based wholly on might. At the time some of America's mostdistinguished men, statesmen like Senator George Hoar, for instance,warned America that she was introducing a poisonous organism intoher system, that she was throwing away principles of human justicewhich she had asserted with complete confidence and belief in thepast, and that, furthermore, she was pushing her western frontierlike a long, thin salient into the Orient where every cat-and-dogfight in the future between aggressor nations of Europe and Asiamight involve her in a war.The Philippines turned out to be a very bad bargain from thepoint of view of imperialist profit, which is the basis on which weremained there, though the bargain was wrapped up in moral goldpaper. It was more than thirty years later that we decided to leavethe Islands, fixing five years as a period of our departure. But wewere too late. We are at war, and we are at war in Asia becausewe possessed the Philippine Islands. That was the break with ourgreat tradition, and that break had the approval of the Americanpeople in 1900 when the presidential campaign was fought almostexclusively on that issue.216