ARTICLE II
His Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands grants to the Government of the United States the exclusive right to enter the harbor of the Pearl River in the Island of Oahu, and to establish and maintain there a coaling and repair station for the use of vessels of the United States, and to that end the United States may improve the entrance to said harbor and do all other things needful to the purpose aforesaid.

On May 10, 1898, hearings were held in the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs concerning Democratic Representative Francis Griffith Newlands' resolution to provide for annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States of America. In testimony given before this committee, United States Naval Captain Alfred T. Mahan and U.S. Army General John Schofield explained the military importance as to why the resolution should be submitted to a vote by the U.S. Congress.

Captain Alfred T. Mahan stated:

"It is obvious that if we do not hold the islands ourselves we can not expect the neutrals in the war to prevent the other belligerent from occupying them; nor can the inhabitants themselves prevent such occupation. The commercial value is not great enough to provoke neutral interposition. In short, in war we should need a larger Navy to defend the Pacific coast, because we should have not only to defend our coast, but also to prevent, by naval force, an enemy from occupying the islands; whereas, if we pre-occupied them, fortifications could preserve them to us. In my opinion it is not practicable for any trans-Pacific country to invade our Pacific coast without occupying Hawaii as a base." (emphasis added)

General John Schofield added:

"We got a preemption title to those islands through the volunteer action of our American missionaries who went there and civilized and Christianized those people and established a Government that has no parallel in the history of the world, considering its age, and we made a preemption which nobody in the world thinks of disputing, provided we perfect our title. If we do not perfect it in due time, we have lost those islands. Anybody else can come in and undertake to take them. So it seems to me the time is now ripe when this Government should do that which has been in contemplation from the beginning." (emphasis added)