MR. PRESIDENT, I address the Senate at this time because senators and members of the House on both sides have asked that I give to Congress and the country my observations in the Philippines and the Far East, and the conclusions which those observations compel; and because of hurtful resolutions introduced [condemning the American occupation] and utterances made in the Senate, every word of which will cost and is costing the lives of American soldiers.

Mr. President, the times call for candor..  The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitution calls them..  And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets..  We will not retreat from either..  We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient..  We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world..  And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and Thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.. 

This island empire is the last land left in all the oceans..  If it should prove a mistake to abandon it, the blunder once made would be irretrievable..  If it proves a mistake to hold it, the error can be corrected when we will..  Every other progressive nation stands ready to relieve us.. 

But to hold it will be no mistake....The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East..  Lines of navigation from our ports to the Orient and Australia, from the Isthmian Canal to Asia, from all Oriental ports to Australia converge at and separate from the Philippines..  They are a self-supporting, dividend-paying fleet, permanently anchored at a spot selected by the strategy of Providence, commanding the Pacific..  And the Pacific is the ocean of the commerce of the future..  Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.

I have cruised more than 2,000 miles through the archipelago, every moment a surprise at its loveliness and wealth..  I have ridden hundreds of miles on the islands, every foot of the way a revelation of vegetable and mineral riches.

No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon..  Rice and coffee, sugar and coconuts, hemp and tobacco, and many products of the temperate as well as the tropic grow in various sections of the archipelago..  I have seen hundred of bushels of Indian corn lying in the road fringed with banana trees..  The forests of Negroes, Mindanao, Mindora, Paluan and parts of Luzon are invaluable and intact..  The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come..  At Cebu the best informed man in the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal...I have a nugget of gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. [Beveridge holds up a rock.] ...And this wealth is but a small fraction.

...If we are willing to go to war rather than let England have a few feet of frozen Alaska, which affords no market and commands none, what should we not do rather than let England, Germany, Russia, or Japan have all the Philippines? And no man on the spot can fail to see that this would be their fate if we retired.

...It will be hard for Americans who have not studied them to understand the people..  They are a barbarous race, modified by three centuries of contact with a decadent race..  The Filipino is the South Sea Malay, put through a process of three hundred years of superstition in religion, dishonesty in dealing, disorder in habits of industry, and cruelty, caprice, and corruption in government..  It is barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self government in the Anglo-Saxon sense.... 

But, Senators, it would be better to abandon this combined garden and Gibraltar of the Pacific, and count our blood and treasure already spent a profitable loss than to apply any academic arrangement of self-government to these children..  They are not capable of self-government..  How could they be? They are Orientals, Malays, instructed by Spaniards in the latter's worst estate..  They know nothing of practical government except as they have witnessed the weak, corrupt, cruel, and capricious rule of Spain..  What magic will anyone employ to dissolve in their minds and characters those impressions of governors and governed which three centuries of misrule has created? What alchemy will change the oriental quality of their blood and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring through their Malay veins? How shall they, in the twinkling of an eye, be exalted to the heights of self-governing peoples which required a thousand years for us to reach, Anglo-Saxon though we are?

...Self-government is no base and common thing to be bestowed on the merely audacious..  It is the degree which crowns the graduate of liberty, not the name of liberty's infant class, who have not yet mastered the alphabet of freedom.... We must act on the situation as it exists, not as we would wish it.

...Example for decades will be necessary to instruct them in American ideas and methods of administration..  Example, example, always example--this alone will teach them...