Manifest Destiny Quotes
This quotation illustrates the racist view of Native Americans that prevailed at the time. The Mexican government invited settlers and would give then the Indian lands. In addition to Mexicans who came to Texas, many Americans also went to Texas, changing their citizenship to Mexico. Later, they banded together and broke from Mexico and Joined the United States. The Indians lost most of their lands.
Most of her modern admirers tend to repress this quotation which is very embarrassing for most modern conservatives. However, there is a minority of thinkers who maintain that land, unused, is open to anyone who will make use of it to improve civilization. Many conservationists, in contrast, extol unused land for preservation.
Under the Mexican law which governed Texas at the time, slavery had been much curtailed. Austin and many others wished to expand it “to permit families to bring the necessary and indispensable house servants and laborers”
He had concluded that Spain, who then ruled the Philippines, was incompetent, cruel and immoral in its rule, but that the Filipinos were not educated or sophisticated enough to rule themselves. However, he felt that he had to protect our commercial interests in the islands and the region, and was worried that commercial interests of other countries would take over and control the area. Another reason that this is a very important quotation is that it indicates the anti-Catholic bias in America at the time. Note that the President stated that one objective was to “Christianize” them. However, Spain had been in the islands for over 300 years and most Filipinos were already Roman Catholic. However, Roman Catholics were then a much smaller proportion of the American population and many Protestants didn’t think Catholicism was a legitimate Christian Religion. When the majority of Americans thought of Christianizing other people, they thought of Protestant missionaries much like England. At the time there was very little criticism of the President for the “error” of stating that Filipinos should be Christianized when they were so already Spanish Colonial Policy and Practice was generally terrible and particularly so in the Philippines, See {629450}.
