News of the Week
TEElearned and able Americans who are representing the "United States at the Pan-American Congress mar succeed in keeping the discussions off dangerous lines, but that will not prevent the question of" Imperialism" from being iaisedin 'Congress at Washington. Many people here talk as though the United States was facing the implications of an expansive external policy for the first tithe, but to look no further back than 1898 all the impli- cations were recognized in outline when she came to the conclusion that she could not have a misgoverned and bitterly aggrieved Cuba at her door. The cause of the Cuban rebels against Spain was quite good enough for Congress to adopt ; it was in itself regarded as containing a easus beiii. The disaster to the American battleship, Maine,' in Havana Harbour may have been the immediate pretext for war, but it was not more. At the end of the'Spanish War the United States found herself with Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines on her hands.
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