Few delegations had as differing a duo of senators as Massachusetts, which paired the expansionist Henry Cabot Lodge with Senator George Hoar. The speech below deals with the annexation of the Philippines (an outgrowth of the war in Cuba). But the principles outlined by Hoar were broader.GEORGE HOAR : The Lust for Empire[Hoar begins with a lengthy discussion of whether imperialism was constitutional. Move on to his consideration of the ideological rationale behind the policy.] It is not my purpose . . . to discuss the general considerations which affect any acquisition of sovereignty by the American people over the Philippine Islands, which has been or may be proposed. I am speaking today only of the theory of constitutional interpretation propounded by the senator from Connecticut. If at any time hereafter the senator shall seek to put his theories into practice by reducing to subjection a distant people, dwelling in the tropics, aliens in blood, most of them Moslem in faith, incapable to speak or comprehend our language, or to read or to write any language, to whom the traditions and the doctrines of civil liberty are unknown, it will be time to point out what terrible results and penalties this departure from our constitutional principles will bring upon us. . . .The question is this: Have we the right, as doubtless we have the physical power, to enter upon the government of ten or twelve million subject people without constitutional restraint? Of that question the senator from Connecticut takes the affirmative. And upon that question I desire to join issue.Mr. President, I am no strict constructionist. I am no alarmist. I believe this country to be a nation, a sovereign nation. I believe Congress to possess all the powers which are necessary to accomplish under the most generous and liberal construction the great objects which the men who framed the Constitution and the people who adopted it desired to accomplish by its instrumentality. I was bred, I might almost say I was born, in the faith which I inherited from the men whose blood is in my veins, of the party of Hamilton and Washington and Webster and Sumner, and not in that of Madison or Calhoun or the strict constructionists. . . .I affirm that every constitutional power, whether it be called a power of sovereignty or of nationality - neither of which phrases is found in terms in the Constitution - or whether it be a power expressly declared and named therein, is limited to the one supreme and controlling purpose declared as that for which the Constitution itself was framed: "In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
