Imperialism is defined as a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force. Franklin Henry Giddings had a very strong view regarding this policy. So strong, he wrote an article regarding this idea. In Political Science Quarterly, Giddings establishes and explains his opposition on this issue as he defines it as waste and misdirection of time.
Professor Giddings begins his article with an expression of regret that the intellectual energies of the wisest men in the United States are putting their energy in places it shouldn’t be. He explains at times they are blind to what probably will be that they gave us no real aid in adapting ourselves to inevitable conditions. Professor Giddings illustrates of this
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Still we did not go to war on those occasions. The war with Spain, however, in Professor Giddings’ opinion, “was neither accidental nor merely a product of the machinations of self loving politicians. The Cuban situation gave the American people the first apparently decent excuse for fighting that had been vouchsafed them since the Civil War. The sufferings of the Cuban population were real beyond reasonable doubt. The government of the island was thoroughly corrupt no one denied. That justice had long been little more than a name was currently believed; and that years of bad government had culminated in a deliberate attempt to starve the reconcetrados was believed by practically all those newspaper reading Americans who had no exact knowledge of political conditions beyond the borders of their commonwealth. All those feelings of mingled sympathy and anger which precipitated the Civil war were again awakened by the sufferings of Cuba. With hardly an exception the religious press insisted that it was the duty of America to intervene. Thus there existed that peculiar combination of the moral forces of sympathy and conviction with the inherited love of dangerous enterprise which, as I have attempted to show, must exist before the American people will go to war, but which is practically certain, when it does exist, the beget