its efforts to bring about by peaceful agencies a peace which shall
be honorable and enduring. If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty
imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilization and humanity
to intervene with force, it shall be without fault on our part and only
because the necessity for such action will be so clear as to command the
support and approval of the civilized world.

By a special message dated the 16th day of June last, I laid before
the Senate a treaty signed that day by the plenipotentiaries of the
United States and of the Republic of Hawaii, having for its purpose
the incorporation of the Hawaiian Islands as an integral part of the
United States and under its sovereignty. The Senate having removed the
injunction of secrecy, although the treaty is still pending before that
body, the subject may be properly referred to in this Message because
the necessary action of the Congress is required to determine by
legislation many details of the eventual union should the fact of
annexation be accomplished, as I believe it should be.

While consistently disavowing from a very early period any aggressive
policy of absorption in regard to the Hawaiian group, a long series of
declarations through three-quarters of a century has proclaimed the
vital interest of the United States in the independent life of the
Islands and their intimate commercial dependence upon this country. At
the same time it has been repeatedly asserted that in no event could the
entity of Hawaiian statehood cease by the passage of the Islands under
the domination or influence of another power than the United States.
Under these circumstances, the logic of events required that annexation,
heretofore offered but declined, should in the ripeness of time come
about as the natural result of the strengthening ties that bind us to
those Islands, and be realized by the free will of the Hawaiian State.