These are the opening words of the amendment:--
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
We have no subject classes in America excepting only such as have been created, temporarily, as I trust, in Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, by the policy of President McKinley, and all in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads thus:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
President McKinley claimed jurisdiction over the Philippine Islands and consequently the inhabitants are entitled to the benign protection of this provision of the Constitution. There cannot be any form of involuntary servitude imposed upon any American citizen without a violation of this fundamental law. Hence it is that the administration is forced to deny citizenship to the inhabitants of the Island and to assert the claim that the President and Congress may govern the inhabitants of territories acquired by purchase, as in the case of the Philippine Islands, or by conquest, as in the case of Porto Rico, as they might be governed if the Constitution did not exist. And this, we are told by the President and his supporters, is not imperialism, but a process of extending the blessings of liberty and civilization to the inferior races of the earth.
The claim of the President is the assertion of a right in Congress to establish a system of peonage or even of slavery in Alaska, Hawaii, and the rest. Your representative finds himself called to the defence of this doctrine. Thus is the amendment to the Constitution made of no effect in the Territories.
The character of President McKinley's policy is set forth in his own words and they justify the charge of imperialism.
In his speech of acceptance he said:--"The Philippines are ours, and American authority must be supreme throughout the Archipelago. There will be amnesty, broad and liberal, but no abatement of our rights, no abandonment of our duty; there must be no scuttle policy." What is the meaning of this language? Is it not an assertion of absolute, unconditional, permanent supremacy over the millions of the islands?