Under the principles that for generations had governed the Old World there would have been no particular difficulty in meeting this problem.

The United States would have candidly annexed the islands, and exploited their resources and their peoples; we should have concerned ourselves little about any duties that might be owed to the several millions of human beings who inhabited them.

Indeed, what other alternatives were there?
One was to hand the possessions back to Spain, who in a four hundred years' experiment had demonstrated her unfitness to govern them; another was to give the islands their independence, which would have meant merely an indefinite continuance of anarchy.

It is one of the greatest triumphs of American statesmanship that it discovered a more satisfactory solution.

Essentially, the new plan was to establish in these undeveloped and politically undisciplined regions the fundamental conditions that may make possible the ultimate creation of democratic, self-governing states.