Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 66, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1909 — PRESIDENT’S LAST SPEECH [ARTICLE]

PRESIDENT’S LAST SPEECH

Delivered at Celebration of African Diamond Jubilee of Methodists. Washington, Jan. 19.—The president made an address at the celebration of the African Diamond Jubilee of the Methodists. He referred to the fact that this was the last public speech which he would make in this city as president of th* United States. He talked of the Philippines in this language: "Take our own experience in the Philippines. Spain finally lost power to be of benefit to the islands; but do not forget that Spain accomplished very, very much for them during more than two centuries; and that the is lands owe their present possibilities to the fact that the Spaniards took possession of them. Then we came in. Exactly as in the Carribean sea we have endeavored to give genuine and disinterested help to the independent people of Cuba and San Domingo, so, in the same spirit—though the task is of quite different character —we are endeavoring to educate and train th* native races under our sovereignty in the Phlippines. “In our treatment of the FMlipinos we have acted up to the highest standard that has yet been set as marking the proper way in which a powerful and advanced nation should treat a weaker people. In the Philippines we are constantly giving, an increasing measure of self-government. "If we hod abandoned them at the outset to their own devices, If we bad shirked our duty and sailed out of the islands, leaving them in a bloody welter of confusion, the chief sufferers* would have been the Philippine people themselves."