From Four Nodes of History: The Human Rights Challenge in the Philippine Security Sector “Count the dead niggers”: American soldiers watch as Filipino civilians bury their compatriots. (c) Public domain to take Cuba and the Philippines as colonies. These liberals organized themselves into a group called the American Anti-Imperialist League. It had powerful allies in the US congress. This organization believed that the US could not annex the Philippines and Cuba because that would violate the US Constitutional principle of “consent of the governed” and the foreign policy laid down by President Abraham Lincoln: 54 No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism (Abraham Lincoln’s Speech of October 16, 1854).