The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-03-27
POULTNEY BIGEEOW'S TALK
TO YiLE MEN ON COLONI1L AD-
 MINISTRITION.

Philippines Look Like Il Gang of Dis
 ensed Tramps-Likens EInniia to th
 Augean Stables.
 Poultney Bigelow, the famous autho1
 and war correspondent and a graduat' | of Yale of the class of '79, last nigh addressed a large body of Yale men 1T l College street hall on Colonial Admin | istraticn.' Although MT. BigeloW has | had an extended career in journalism | has acted during the Spanish war as
 the special correspondent for the Lon | don Times. has done newspaper WorF | in the Philippines and is now London
 correspondent for Harper's Weekly yet all this experience does not seen tc 1 have taught him that probably his talk i last night on the United States colonla question would be reported by the
 newspapers. During the progress ot
 his talk he incidentally betrayed some | of the conditions prevalent in the l Philippines, and concerning American | consuls abroad, which he said are never 1 known at home, and which he disclosed | to Yale men because there were no re- | porters present"
 The speaker was introduced by Pro- lessor Sumner in a short address in which he scored the United States gov
 ernment for having assumed the burden
 of the colonies, but said that now we
 are in for t we might as well fight 1t through. "In the last two or three years," he said, "our literary and ora
 torical leaders tell us we have become a
 great nation: that before this we were
 provincial, countrified set of people,
 but we have now taken our place
 among the great nations of the earth.
 We'll, we have got to accept the situa-
 ton, with all the frills that belong to
 it. We have got to have great army
 and navy-and colonies. In this way
 rich men in order to follow the fashion
 load themselves down with a great bur
 den of care, and find that their wealth
 has caused them to lose their liberty
 Tt makes me think of a rural indi- vidual whom I once saw at dinner in the New Haven house. who did not know the use of a finger bowl. He had ordered pie. In his country home he had probably had very good pie, and en- joyed it. but here he considered that he ought to keep up with the style, and therefore he poured the contents of his flngerbowl into the pie, and ate the wretched mess, while the waiter near ly died with laughter.
 But there is Q moral to be drawn from this For one thing, the rustic went through 1t like man, and for another he got into his ridiculous situ- ation through ignorance. Our govern lnent before 1t gets through with this business may also not only make itself ridiculous, but it may make serious mis- takes involving the veal or woe of ten or twelve millions of people now on our hands"
 Professor Sumner then spoke of Poultney Bigelow as a man whom he has known for the last twenty-five years. and that he could vouch for his honesty of opinion and his moral cour- age to speak wholesome though unpop- ular truths.
 The first part of MT. Bigelow's ad dress consisted in review Of the Flu ropean nations who have held colonial possessions unsuccessfully. He touched upon Spain's four hundred years of autocratic control of the West Indies; how, though the natives had been Latinized in language and Ro- in religion Spain had ultimate ly failed, and Portugal's greatest port in Africa to-day Is Delagoa bay where a few ginger colored manikins in it's wretched custom house represent Euro pean civilization among the staAly ebo- ny six-footers that constitute the Zulu population. This place Portugal holds only because of the jealousy of strang- CT nations.
 The disastrous experience of the French in Canada and their more cred itable failure in the West Indies were next dWelt, on, while the speaker said that the admirable control of her pos sessions in north Africa was maintain ed at an enormous loss consequent up- on the naval and military outlay re- quired.
 In the case of Holland, the Dutch West India company ia worth noting in that from it sprung the Boers, ''the | backwoodsmen of South Africa" Here | the speaker noted the great resemblance | of these pioneers of South Africa to our own westerners, of whom Daniel Boone was a type, saying that the Boers to- l day resemble our western population | more than they do the Holland Dutch. | He said that the struggle now taking l place would end as the civil war did in | lhis country, and the common bond, | that of self-preservation, would draw he Afrikanders-al the Europeans, in- ,luding the BGers-again into unity.
 "One thing about the Boers of inter- est to US is that they for the first time l proved that the white man can flourish n the tropics, and raise larre and vir-I oroua families There settlement, there ore, was an important date in the worlds history"
 Germany had no colonies until the l lays of Bismarck, and as a result of | lis efforts she has now million sGuare niles of fever-stlicken and depopulat- d country in Africa, and a miserable station in China.
 ''These countries, continued MT. 5igelow, have so far not justified the | xpense entailed by their colonies. It S significant that they were formed, tot on account of over-population at lome, but from an adventurous disposi- ion and the idea of profit This is es- ,ecially the case with England and l