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               THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES

                               1898-1912


                                   By
                            JAMES H. BLOUNT

   Officer of United States Volunteers in the Philippines, 1899-1901
       United States District Judge in the Philippines, 1901-1905



                               With a Map

                          G. P. Putnam's Sons
                          New York and London
                        The Knickerbocker Press
                                  1912






                            Copyright, 1912
                                   By
                            James H. Blount

                   The Knickerbocker Press, New York






                                   To
                           JOHN DOWNEY WORKS
                             OF CALIFORNIA
                 AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN
                                AS EVER
            GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
                                  WHO
        BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT
             INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION
                                   IS
                          INDEFINITE DRIFTING
                  HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK
                            AS IT PROGRESSED
           LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF
                        AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN
                                  AND
                       THE CONTAGIOUS SERENITY OF
                   CONFIDENCE THAT RIGHT WILL PREVAIL
                  THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED BY
                               The Author






PREFACE

                                          Pardon, gentles all,
                        The flat unraised spirit that hath dared
                        On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
                        So great an object.

                                                       Henry V.


To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of
invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a
strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as
an official of that government, watch it work out through a number
of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to
a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the
course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen,
in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American
occupation of the Philippines to date.

This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two
remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret
each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course
altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.

The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the
voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to
be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for
the last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously,
and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is
benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary
to the end.

At a time when all our military and fiscal experts agree that having
the Philippines on our hands is a grave strategic and economic mistake,
fraught with peril to the nation's prestige in the early stages of our
next great war, we are keeping the Filipinos in industrial bondage
through unrighteous Congressional legislation for which special
interests in America are responsible, in bald repudiation of the
Open Door policy, and against their helpless but universal protest,
a wholly unprotected and easy prey to the first first-class Power with
which we become involved in war. Yet all the while the very highest
considerations of national honor require us to choose between making
the Filipino people free and independent without unnecessary delay,
as they of right ought to be, or else imperilling the perpetuity
of our own institutions by the creation and maintenance of a great
standing army, sufficient properly to guard overseas possessions.

A cheerful blindness to the inevitable worthy of Mark Tapley himself,
the stale Micawberism that "something is bound to turn up," and
a Mrs. Jellyby philanthropy hopelessly callous to domestic duties,
expenses, and distresses, have hitherto successfully united to prevent
the one simple and supreme need of the situation--a frank, formal,
and definite declaration, by the law-making power of the government,
of the nation's purpose in the premises. What is needed is a formal
legislative announcement that the governing of a remote and alien
people is to have no permanent place in the purposes of our national
life, and that we do bona fide intend, just as soon as a stable
government, republican in form, can be established by the people
of the Philippine Islands, to turn over, upon terms which shall be
reasonable and just, the government and control of the islands to
the people thereof.

The essentials of the problem, being at least as immutable as human
nature and geography, will not change much with time. And whenever
the American people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose
guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty consistent with
taxation without representation and unanimous protest by the governed,
they will at once set about to secure to a people who have proven
themselves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, generous,
and tractable in peace, the right to pursue happiness in their own way,
in lieu of somebody else's way, as the spirit of our Constitution,
and the teachings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand.

After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so-called "Expansion,"
the first of the seven as a volunteer officer in Cuba during and after
the Spanish War, the next two in a like capacity in the Philippines,
and the remainder as a United States judge in the last-named country,
the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, sustained in spirit,
at parting, by cordial farewells, oral and written, personal and
official, but convinced that foreign kindness will not cure the
desire of a people, once awakened, for what used to be known as
Freedom before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philippines; and
that to permanently eradicate sedition from the Philippine Islands,
the American courts there must be given jurisdiction over thought
as well as over overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an
indictment against a whole people.

Seven other years of interested observation from the Western Hemisphere
end of the line have confirmed and fortified the convictions above
set forth.

If we give the Filipinos this independence they so ardently desire
and ever clamor for until made to shut up, "the holy cause,"
as their brilliant young representative in the American House
of Representatives, Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at
once spoiled, as the American hemp and other special interests so
contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and his compatriot,
Señor Osmeña, the Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and the rest of
the leaders of the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting
incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of contention is
merely the hiss of the same old serpent of tyranny which has always
beset the pathway of man's struggle for free institutions.

When first the talk in America, after the battle of Manila Bay,
about keeping the Philippines, reached the islands, one of the
Filipino leaders wrote to another during the negotiations between
their commanding general and our own looking to preservation of
the peace until the results of the Paris Peace Conference which
settled the fate of the islands should be known, in effect, thus:
"The Filipinos will not be fit for independence in ten, twenty, or a
hundred years if it be left to American colonial office-holders drawing
good salaries to determine the question." Is there not some human
nature in that remark? Suppose, reader, you were in the enjoyment
of a salary of five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars a year as a
government official in the Philippines, how precipitately would you
hasten to recommend yourself out of office, and evict yourself into
this cold Western world with which you had meantime lost all touch?

The Filipinos can run a far better government than the Cubans. In 1898,
when Admiral Dewey read in the papers that we were going to give Cuba
independence, he wired home from Manila:


    These people are far superior in their intelligence, and more
    capable of self-government than the people of Cuba, and I am
    familiar with both races.


After a year in Cuba and nearly six in the Philippines, two as an
officer of the army that subjugated the Filipinos, and the remainder
as a judge over them, I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral
Dewey, but with this addition, viz., that the people of those islands,
whatever of conscious political unity they may have lacked in 1898,
were welded into absolute oneness as a people by their original
struggle for independence against us, and will remain forever so
welded by their incurable aspirations for a national life of their
own under a republic framed in imitation of ours. Furthermore, the one
great difference between Cuba and the Philippines is that the latter
country has no race cancer forever menacing its peace, and sapping
its self-reliance. The Philippine people are absolutely one people,
as to race, color, and previous condition. Again, American sugar and
tobacco interests will never permit the competitive Philippine sugar
and tobacco industries to grow as Nature and Nature's God intended;
and the American importers of Manila hemp--which is to the Philippines
what cotton is to the South--have, through special Congressional
legislation still standing on our statute books--to the shame of the
nation--so depressed the hemp industry of the islands that the market
price it brings to-day is just one half what it brought ten years ago.

If three strong and able Americans, familiar with insular conditions
and still young enough to undertake the task, were told by a President
of the United States, by authority of Congress, "Go out there and
set up a stable native government by July 4, 1921, [1] and then come
away," they could and would do it; and that government would be a
success; and one of the greatest moral victories in the annals of
free government would have been written by the gentlemen concerned
upon the pages of their country's history.

We ought to give the Filipinos their independence, even if we have
to guarantee it to them. But, by neutralization treaties with the
other great Powers similar to those which safeguard the integrity and
independence of Switzerland to-day, whereby the other Powers would
agree not to seize the islands after we give them their independence,
the Philippines can be made as permanently neutral territory in
Asiatic politics as Switzerland is to-day in European politics.


James H. Blount.

1406 G Street, N. W.,
Washington, D. C.,
July 4, 1912.


P.S.--The preparation of this book has entailed examination of a
vast mass of official documents, as will appear from the foot-note
citations to the page and volume from which quotations have been
made. The object has been to place all material statements of fact
beyond question. For the purpose of this research work, Mr. Herbert
Putnam, Librarian of Congress, was kind enough to extend me the
privileges of the national library, and it would be most ungracious
to fail to acknowledge the obligation I am under, in this regard,
to one whom the country is indeed fortunate in having at the head
of that great institution. I should also make acknowledgment of the
obligation I am under to Mr. W. W. Bishop, the able superintendent
of the reading-room, for aid rendered whenever asked, and to my
life-long friends, John and Hugh Morrison, the most valuable men,
to the general public, except the two gentlemen above named, on the
whole great roll of employees of the Library of Congress.


J. H. B.






CONTENTS


                                                                 Pages
Chapter I

Mr. Pratt's Serenade                                              1-15

    Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at Singapore,
    in the British Straits Settlements, finding Aguinaldo a political
    refugee at that place at the outbreak of our war with Spain,
    April 21, 1898, arranges by cable with Admiral Dewey, then at
    Hong Kong with his squadron, for Aguinaldo to come to Hong Kong
    and thence to Manila, to co-operate by land with Admiral Dewey
    against the Spaniards, Pratt promising Aguinaldo independence,
    without authority. Mr. Pratt is later quietly separated from the
    consular service.

Chapter II

Dewey and Aguinaldo                                              16-45

    After the battle of Manila Bay, May 1, 1898, Admiral Dewey brings
    Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong, whither he had proceeded from
    Singapore, lands him at Cavite, and chaperones his insurrection
    against the Spaniards until the American troops arrive, June 30th.

Chapter III

Anderson and Aguinaldo                                           46-66

    General Anderson's official dealings with Aguinaldo from June 30,
    1898, until General Merritt's arrival, July 25th,

Chapter IV

Merritt and Aguinaldo                                            67-87

    General Merritt's five weeks' sojourn in the Islands, from July 25,
    1898, to the end of August, including fall of Manila, August 13th,
    and our relations with Aguinaldo during period indicated.

Chapter V

Otis and Aguinaldo                                              88-106

    Dealings and relations between, September-December,
1898.

Chapter VI

The Wilcox-Sargent Trip                                        107-120

    Two American naval officers make an extended tour through
    the interior of Luzon by permission of Admiral Dewey and with
    Aguinaldo's consent, in October-November, 1898, while the Paris
    peace negotiations were in progress. What they saw and learned.

Chapter VII

The Treaty of Paris                                            121-138

    An account of the negotiations, October-December, 1898. How we came
    to pay Spain $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection. Treaty
    signed December 10, 1898.

Chapter VIII

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation                       139-151

    President McKinley's celebrated proclamation of December 21,
    1898, cabled out to the Islands, December 27, 1898, after the
    signing of the Treaty of Paris on the 10th, and intended as
    a fire-extinguisher, in fact acted merely as a firebrand, the
    Filipinos perceiving that Benevolent Assimilation meant such
    measure of slaughter as might be necessary to "spare them from
    the dangers of" the independence on which they were bent.

Chapter IX

The Iloilo Fiasco                                              152-163

    By order of President McKinley, General Otis abstains from
    hostilities to await Senate action on Treaty of Paris.

Chapter X

Otis and Aguinaldo (Continued)                          164-185

    Still waiting for the Senate to act.

Chapter XI

Otis and the War                                               186-223

    Covering the period from the outbreak of February 4, 1899, until
    the fall of that year.

Chapter XII

Otis and the War (Continued)                            224-269

    From the fall of 1899 to the spring of 1900.

Chapter XIII

Macarthur and the War                                          270-281

    Carries the story up to the date of the arrival of the Taft
    Commission, sent out in the spring of 1900, to help General
    MacArthur run the war.

Chapter XIV

The Taft Commission                                            282-344

    Shows how the Taft Commission, born of the McKinley Benevolent
    Assimilation theory that there was no real fundamental opposition
    to American rule, lived up to that theory, in their telegrams
    sent home during the presidential campaign of 1900, and in 1901
    set up a civil government predicated upon their obstinate but
    opportune delusions of the previous year.


            "The papers 'id it 'andsome
            But you bet the army knows."


Chapter XV

Governor Taft--1901-2                                          345-402

    Shows the prematurity of a civil government set up under pressure
    of political expediency, and the disorders which followed.

Chapter XVI

Governor Taft--1903                                            403-436

    Shows divers serious insurrections in various provinces amounting
    to what the Commission itself termed, in one instance, "a reign of
    terror"--situations so endangering the public safety that to fail
    to order out the army to quell the disturbances was neglect of
    plain duty, such neglect being due to a set policy of preserving
    the official fiction that peace prevailed, and that Benevolent
    Assimilation was a success.

Chapter XVII

Governor Taft--1903 (Continued)                         437-445

    Shows the essentially despotic, though theoretically benevolent,
    character of the Taft civil government of the Philippines, and
    its attitude toward the American business community in the Islands.

Chapter XVIII

Governor Wright--1904                                          446-498

    Shows the change of the tone of the government under Governor
    Taft's successor, his consequent popularity with his fellow-country
    men in the Islands, and his corresponding unpopularity with the
    Filipinos. Shows also a long series of massacres of pacificos by
    enemies of the American government between July and November,
    1904, permitted out of super-solicitude lest ordering out the
    army and summarily putting a stop to said massacres might affect
    the presidential election in the United States unfavorably to
    Mr. Roosevelt, by reviving the notion that neither the Roosevelt
    Administration nor its predecessor had ever been frank with the
    country concerning the state of public order in the Islands.

Chapter XIX

Governor Wright--1905                                          499-514

    Shows the prompt ordering of the army to the scene of the
    disturbances after the presidential election of 1904 was safely
    over, and the nature and extent of the insurrections of 1905.

Chapter XX

Governor Ide--1906                                             515-523

    Describes the last outbreak prior to the final establishment of
    a state of general and complete peace.

Chapter XXI

Governor Smith--1907-9                                         524-557

    Describes divers matters, including a certificate made March 28,
    1907, declaring that a state of general and complete peace had
    prevailed for the two years immediately the preceding. Describes
    also the formal opening of First Philippine Assembly by Secretary
    of War Taft in October, 1907, and his final announcement to them
    that he had no authority to end the uncertainty concerning their
    future which is the corner-stone of the Taft policy of Indefinite
    Tutelage, and that Congress only could end that uncertainty.

Chapter XXII

Governor Forbes--1909-12                                       558-570

    Suggests the hypocrisy of boasting about "the good we are doing"
    the Filipinos when predatory special interests are all the while
    preying upon the Philippine people even more shamelessly than
    they do upon the American people, and by the same methods, viz.:
    legislation placed or kept on the statute-books of the United
    States for their special benefit, the difference being that
    the American people can help themselves if they will, but the
    Philippine people cannot.

Chapter XXIII

"Non-Christian" Worcester                                      571-586

    Professor Worcester, the P. T. Barnum of the "non-Christian tribe"
    industry, and his menagerie of certain rare and interesting wild
    tribes still extant in the Islands, specimens of which you saw at
    the St. Louis Exposition of 1903-4; by which device the American
    people have been led to believe the Igorrotes, Negritos, etc.,
    to be samples of the Filipino people.

Chapter XXIV

The Philippine Civil Service                                   587-594

    Showing how imperatively simple justice demands that Americans,
    who go out to enter the Philippine Civil Service should, after
    a tour of duty out there, be entitled, as matter of right, to
    be transferred back to the Civil Service in the United States,
    instead of being left wholly dependent on political influence to
    "place" them after their final return home.

Chapter XXV

Cost of the Philippines                                        595-603

    In life, and money, together with certain consolatory reflections
    thereon.

Chapter XXVI

Congressional Legislation                                      604-622

    Showing how a small group of American importers of Manila
    hemp--hemp being to the Philippines what cotton is to the
    South--have so manipulated the Philippine hemp industry as to
    depress the market price of the main source of wealth of the
    Islands below the cost of production; also other evils of taxation
    without representation.

Chapter XXVII

The Rights of Man                                              623-632

    Industrial slavery to predatory interests and physical slavery
    compared.

Chapter XXVIII

The Road to Autonomy                                           633-646

    Shows how entirely easy would be the task of evolving the American
    Ireland we have laid up for ourselves in the Philippines into
    complete Home Rule by 1921, the date proposed for Philippine
    independence in the pending Jones bill, introduced in the House
    of Representatives in March, 1912.

Chapter XXIX

The Way Out                                                    647-655

    Shows how, by neutralization treaties with the other powers, as
    proposed in many different resolutions, of both Republican and
    Democratic origin, now pending in Congress, whereby the other
    powers should agree not to annex the Islands after we give them
    their independence, the Philippines can be made permanently neutral
    territory in Asiatic politics exactly as both Switzerland and
    Belgium have been for nearly a hundred years in European politics.

Index                                                              657






ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    Page
The Capture of Aguinaldo, March 23, 1901--The Central
Fact of the American Military Occupation                    Frontispiece
    From the Drawing by F. C. Yohn
    Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons

Bird's-eye View of the Philippine Archipelago, Showing
Preponderating Importance of Luzon                                   228

Outline Sketch of the Theatre of Operations in Luzon, 1899           232

Sketch Map of the Philippines                                     At End






THE AMERICAN OCCUPATIONS OF THE PHILIPPINES


CHAPTER I

MR. PRATT'S SERENADE

                        Had I but served my God with half the zeal
                        I served my king, he would not in mine age
                        Have left me naked to mine enemies.

                                      King Henry VIII., Act III., Sc. 2.


Any narrative covering our acquisition of the Philippine Islands
must, of course, centre in the outset about Admiral Dewey, and the
destruction by him of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on Sunday
morning, May 1, 1898. But as the Admiral had brought Aguinaldo down
from Hong Kong to Manila after the battle, and landed him on May
19th to start an auxiliary insurrection, which insurrection kept the
Spaniards bottled up in Manila on the land side for three and a half
months while Dewey did the same by sea, until ten thousand American
troops arrived, and easily completed the reduction and capture of the
beleaguered and famished city on August 13th, it is necessary to a
clear understanding of the de facto alliance between the Americans and
Aguinaldo thus created, to know who brought the Admiral and Aguinaldo
together and how, and why.

The United States declared war against Spain, April 21, 1898,
to free Cuba, and at once arranged an understanding with the Cuban
revolutionists looking to co-operation between their forces and ours
to that end. For some years prior to this, political conditions in the
Philippines had been quite similar to those in Cuba, so that when, two
days after war broke out, the Honorable Spencer Pratt, Consul-General
of the United States at Singapore, in the British Straits Settlements,
found Aguinaldo, who had headed the last organized outbreak against
Spain in the Philippines, temporarily sojourning as a political
refugee at Singapore, in the Filipino colony there, he naturally
sought to arrange for his co-operating with us against Spain, as
Gomez and Garcia were doing in Cuba. Thereby hangs the story of
"Mr. Pratt's Serenade." However, before we listen to the band whose
strains spoke the gratitude of the Filipinos to Mr. Pratt for having
introduced Aguinaldo to Dewey, let us learn somewhat of Aguinaldo's
antecedents, as related to the purposes of the introduction.

The first low rumbling of official thunder premonitory to the war
with Spain was heard in Mr. McKinley's annual message to Congress of
December, 1897, [2] wherein he said, among other things:


    The most important problem with which this government is now
    called upon to deal pertaining to its foreign relations concerns
    its duty toward Spain and the Cuban insurrection.


In that very month of December, 1897, Aguinaldo was heading a
formidable insurrection against Spanish tyranny in the Philippines,
and the Filipinos and their revolutionary committees everywhere were
watching with eager interest the course of "The Great North American
Republic," as they were wont to term our government.

The Report of the First Philippine Commission sent out to the Islands
by President McKinley in February, 1899, of which President Schurman
of Cornell University was Chairman, contains a succinct memorandum
concerning the Filipino revolutionary movement of 1896-7, which had
been begun by Aguinaldo in 1896, and had culminated in what is known as
the Treaty of Biac-na-Bato, [3] signed December 14, 1897. This treaty
had promised certain reforms, such as representation in the Spanish
Cortez, sending the Friars away, etc., and had also promised the
leaders $400,000 if Aguinaldo and his Cabinet would leave the country
and go to Hong Kong. "No definite time was fixed," says President
Schurman (vol. I., p. 171), "during which these men were to remain
away from the Philippines; and if the promises made by Spain were not
fulfilled, they had the right to return." Of course, "the promises made
by Spain" were not fulfilled. Spain thought she had bought Aguinaldo
and his crowd off. "Two hundred thousand dollars," says Prof. Schurman,
"was paid to Aguinaldo when he arrived in Hong Kong." But instead of
using this money in riotous living, the little group of exiles began
to take notice of the struggles of their brothers in wretchedness
in Cuba, and the ever-increasing probability of intervention by the
United States in that unhappy Spanish colony, which, of course, would
be their opportunity to strike for Independence. They had only been
in Hong Kong about two months when the Maine blew up February 15,
1898, Then they knew there would be "something doing." Hong Kong
being the cross-roads of the Far East and the gateway to Asia, and
being only sixty hours across the choppy China Sea from Manila, was
the best place in that part of the world to brew another insurrection
against Spain. But Singapore is also a good place for a branch office
for such an enterprise, being on the main-travelled route between the
Philippines and Spain by way of the Suez Canal, about four or five days
out of Hong Kong by a good liner, and but little farther from Manila,
as the crow flies, than Hong Kong itself. Owing to political unrest
in the Philippines in 1896-7-8, there was quite a colony of Filipino
political refugees living at Singapore during that period. Aguinaldo
had gone over from Hong Kong to Singapore in the latter half of April,
1898, arriving there, it so chanced, the day we declared war against
Spain, April 21st. He was immediately sought out by Mr. Pratt, who
had learned of his presence in the community through an Englishman
of Singapore, a former resident of Manila, a Mr. Bray, who seems to
have been a kind of striker for the Filipino general. Aguinaldo had
come incognito. Out of Mr. Pratt's interview with the insurgent chief
thus obtained, and its results, grew the episode which is the subject
of this chapter.

A word just here, preliminary to this interview, concerning the
personal equation of Aguinaldo, would seem to be advisable.

While I personally chased him and his outfit a good deal in the latter
part of 1899, in the northern advance of a column of General Lawton's
Division from San Isidro across the Rio Grande de Pampanga, over the
boggy passes of the Caraballa Mountains to the China Sea, and up the
Luzon West Coast road, we never did catch him, and I never personally
met him but once, and that was after he was captured in 1901. He
was as insignificant looking physically as a Japanese diplomat. But
his presence suggested, equally with that of his wonderful racial
cousins who represent the great empire of the Mikado abroad, both a
high order of intelligence and baffling reserve. And Major-General
J. Franklin Bell, recently Chief of Staff, United States Army, who
was a Major on General Merritt's staff in 1898, having charge of the
"Office of Military Information," in a confidential report prepared
for his chief dated August 29, 1898, "sizing up" the various insurgent
leaders, in view of the then apparent probability of trouble with them,
gives these notes on Aguinaldo, the head and front of the revolution:
"Aguinaldo: Honest, sincere, and * * * a natural leader of men." [4]

Any one acquainted with General Bell knows that he knows what he is
talking about when he speaks of "a natural leader of men," for he is
one himself. Our ablest men in the early days were the first to cease
considering the little brown soldiers a joke, and their government an
opera-bouffe affair. General Bell also says in the same report that he,
Aguinaldo, is undoubtedly endowed in a wonderful degree with "the power
of creating among the people confidence in himself." He was, indeed,
the very incarnation of "the legitimate aspirations of" his people,
to use one of the favorite phrases of his early state papers, and
the faithful interpreter thereof. That was the secret of his power,
that and a most remarkable talent for surrounding himself with an
atmosphere of impenetrable reserve. This last used to make our young
army officers suspect him of being what they called a "four-flusher,"
which being interpreted means a man who is partially successful in
making people think him far more important than he really is. But
we have seen General Bell's estimate. And the day Aguinaldo took the
oath of allegiance to the United States, in 1901, General MacArthur,
then commanding the American forces in the Philippines, signalized the
event by liberating 1000 Filipino prisoners of war. General Funston,
the man who captured him in 1901, says in Scribner's Magazine for
November, 1911, "He is a man of many excellent qualities and * * *
far and away the best Filipino I was ever brought in contact with."

Aguinaldo was born in 1869. To-day, 1912, he is farming about twenty
miles out of Manila in his native province of Cavite; has always
scrupulously observed his oath of allegiance aforesaid; occasionally
comes to town and plays chess with Governor-General Forbes; and
in all respects has played for the last ten years with really fine
dignity the rôle of Chieftain of a Lost Cause on which his all had
been staked. He was a school-teacher at Cavite at one time, but is not
a college graduate, and so far as mere book education is concerned, he
is not a highly educated man. Whether or not he can give the principal
parts of the principal irregular Greek verbs I do not know, but his
place in the history of his country, and in the annals of wars for
independence, cannot, and for the honor of human nature should not,
be a small one. Dr. Rizal, the Filipino patriot whose picture we print
on the Philippine postage stamps, and who was shot for sedition by the
Spaniards before our time out there, was what Colonel Roosevelt would
jocularly call "one of these darned literary fellows." He was a sort of
"Sweetness and Light" proposition, who only wrote about "The Rights of
Man," and finally let the Spaniards shoot him--stuck his head in the
lion's mouth, so to speak. Aguinaldo was a born leader of men, who knew
how to put the fear of God into the hearts of the ancient oppressors
of his people. Mr. Pratt's own story of how he earned his serenade
is preserved to future ages in the published records of the State
Department. [5] We will now attempt to summarize, not so eloquently as
Mr. Pratt, but more briefly, the manner of its earning, the serenade
itself, and its resultant effects both upon the personal fortunes of
Mr. Pratt and upon Filipino confidence in American official assurances.

It was on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1898, that Mr. Pratt
was confidentially informed of Aguinaldo's arrival at Singapore,
incognito. "Being aware," says Mr. Pratt, "of the great prestige of
General Aguinaldo with the insurgents, and that no one, either at
home or abroad, could exert over them the same influence and control
that he could, I determined at once to see him." Accordingly, he did
see him the following Sunday morning, the 24th.

At this interview, it was arranged that if Admiral Dewey, then
at Hong Kong with his squadron awaiting orders, should so desire,
Aguinaldo should proceed to Hong Kong to arrange for co-operation
of the insurgents at Manila with our naval forces in the prospective
operations against the Spaniards.

Accordingly, that Sunday, Mr. Pratt telegraphed Dewey through our
consul at Hong Kong:


    Aguinaldo, insurgent leader, here. Will come Hong Kong arrange
    with Commodore for general co-operation insurgents Manila if
    desired. Telegraph.


Admiral Dewey (then Commodore) replied:


    Tell Aguinaldo come soon as possible.


This message was received late Sunday night, April 24th, and was
at once communicated to Aguinaldo. Mr. Pratt then did considerable
bustling around for the benefit of his new-found ally, whom, with
his aide-de-camp and private secretary, all under assumed names
he "succeeded in getting off," to use his phrase, by the British
steamer Malacca, which left Singapore for Hong Kong, April 26th. In
the letter reporting all this to the State Department, Mr. Pratt
adds that he trusts this action "in arranging for his [Aguinaldo's]
direct co-operation with the commander of our forces" will meet
with the Government's approval. A little later Mr. Pratt sends the
State Department a copy of the Singapore Free Press of May 4, 1898,
containing an impressive account of the above transaction and the
negotiations leading up to it. This account describes the political
conditions among the population of the Philippine archipelago, "which,"
it goes on to say, "merely awaits the signal from General Aguinaldo to
rise en masse." Speaking of Pratt's interview with Aguinaldo, it says:


    General Aguinaldo's policy embraces the independence of the
    Philippines. * * * American protection would be desirable
    temporarily, on the same lines as that which might be instituted
    hereafter in Cuba.


Mr. Pratt also forwards a proclamation gotten up by the Filipino
insurgent leaders at Hong Kong and sent over to the Philippines in
advance of Admiral Dewey's coming, calling upon the Filipinos not
to heed any appeals of the Spaniards to oppose the Americans, but to
rally to the support of the latter. This manifesto of the Filipinos
is headed, prominently--for all we know it may have had a heading
as big as a Hearst newspaper box-car type announcement of the latest
violation of the Seventh Commandment--: "America's Allies."

It begins thus:


    Compatriots: Divine Providence is about to place independence
    within our reach. * * * The Americans, not from mercenary motives,
    but for the sake of humanity and the lamentations of so many
    persecuted people, have considered it opportune * * * etc. [Here
    follows a reference to Cuba.] At the present moment an American
    squadron is preparing to sail for the Philippines. * * * The
    Americans will attack by sea and prevent any reinforcements coming
    from Spain; * * * we insurgents must attack by land. Probably
    you will have more than sufficient arms, because the Americans
    have arms and will find means to assist us. There where you
    see the American flag flying, assemble in numbers; they are our
    redeemers! [6]


For twelve days after his letter to the State Department enclosing
the above proclamation, Mr. Pratt, so far as the record discloses,
contemplated his coup d'état in silent satisfaction. Since its
successful pulling off, Admiral Dewey had smashed the Spanish fleet,
and Aguinaldo had started his auxiliary insurrection. The former was
patting the latter on the back, as it were, and saying, "Go it little
man." But nobody was patting Pratt on the back, yet. Therefore, on June
2d, Mr. Pratt writes the State Department, purring for patting thus:


    Considering the enthusiastic manner General Aguinaldo has been
    received by the natives and the confidence with which he already
    appears to have inspired Admiral Dewey, it will be admitted,
    I think, that I did not over-rate his importance and that I
    have materially assisted the cause of the United States in the
    Philippines in securing his co-operation. [7]


A glow of conscious superiority, in value to the Government, over
his consular colleague and neighbor, Mr. Wildman, at Hong Kong,
next suffuses Mr. Pratt's diction, being manifested thus:


    Why this co-operation should not have been secured to us during
    the months General Aguinaldo remained awaiting events in Hong
    Kong, and that he was allowed to leave there without having been
    approached in the interest of our Government, I cannot understand.


Considering that in his letter accepting the nomination for the
Vice-Presidency two years after this Mr. Roosevelt compared Aguinaldo
and his people to that squalid old Apache medicine man, Sitting Bull,
and his band of dirty paint-streaked cut-throats, Mr. Pratt's next
Pickwickian sigh of complacent, if neglected, worth is particularly
interesting:


    No close observer of what had transpired in the Philippines during
    the past four years could have failed to recognize that General
    Aguinaldo enjoyed above all others the confidence of the Filipino
    insurgents and the respect alike of Spaniards and foreigners in
    the islands, all of whom vouched for his high sense of justice
    and honor.


In other words, knowing the proverbial ingratitude of republics,
Mr. Pratt is determined to impress upon his Government and on the
discerning historian of the future that he was "the original Aguinaldo
man." A week later (June 9th) Mr. Pratt writes the Department enclosing
copies of the Singapore papers of that date, giving an account of
a generous outburst of Filipino enthusiasm at Singapore in honor
of America, Admiral Dewey, and, last, if not least, Mr. Pratt. He
encloses duplicate copies of these newspaper notices "for the press,
should you consider their publication desirable." His letter begins:


    I have the honor to report that this afternoon, on the occasion of
    the receipt of the news of General Aguinaldo's recent successes
    near Manila, I was waited upon by the Philippine residents in
    Singapore and presented an address. * * *


He then proceeds with further details of the event, without
self-laudation. The Singapore papers which he encloses, however, not
handicapped by the inexorable modesty of official correspondence,
give a glowing account of the presentation of the "address," and
of the serenade and toasts which followed. Says one of them, the
Straits Times:


    The United States consulate at Singapore was yesterday afternoon
    in an unusual state of bustle. That bustle extended itself to
    Raffles Hotel, of which the consulate forms an outlying part. From
    a period shortly prior to 5 o'clock, afternoon, the natives of
    the Philippines resident in Singapore began to assemble at the
    consulate. Their object was to present an address to Hon. Spencer
    Pratt, United States Consul-General, and, partly, to serenade him,
    for which purpose some twenty-five or thirty of the Filipinos
    came equipped with musical instruments.


First there was music by the band. Then followed the formal reading and
presentation of the address by a Dr. Santos, representing the Filipino
community of Singapore. The address pledged the "eternal gratitude"
of the Filipino people to Admiral Dewey and the honored addressee,
alluded to the glories of independence, and to how Aguinaldo had been
enabled by the arrangement so happily effected with Admiral Dewey
by Consul Pratt to arouse 8,000,000 of Filipinos to take up arms
"in defence of those principles of justice and liberty of which your
country is the foremost champion" and trusted "that the United States
* * * will efficaciously second the programme arranged between you,
sir, and General Aguinaldo in this port of Singapore, and secure to
us our independence under the protection of the United States."

Mr. Pratt arose and "proceeded speaking in French," says the
newspaper--it does not say Alabama French, but that is doubtless what
it was--"to state his belief that the Filipinos would prove and were
now proving themselves fit for self-government." The gentleman from
Alabama then went on to review the mighty events and developments of
the preceding six weeks, Dewey's victory of May 1st,


    the brilliant achievements of your own distinguished leader,
    General Emilio Aguinaldo, co-operating on land with the Americans
    at sea, etc. You have just reason to be proud of what has
    been and is being accomplished by General Aguinaldo and your
    fellow-countrymen under his command. When, six weeks ago, I
    learned that General Aguinaldo had arrived incognito in Singapore,
    I immediately sought him out. An hour's interview convinced me
    that he was the man for the occasion; and, having communicated
    with Admiral Dewey, I accordingly arranged for him to join the
    latter, which he did at Cavite. The rest you know.


Says the newspaper clipping which has preserved the Pratt oration:
"At the conclusion of Mr. Pratt's speech refreshments were served,
and as the Filipinos, being Christians, drink alcohol, [8] there was
no difficulty in arranging as to refreshments."

Then followed a general drinking of toasts to America, Dewey, Pratt,
and Aguinaldo. Then the band played. Then the meeting broke up. Then
the Honorable Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States,
retired to the seclusion of his apartments in Raffles Hotel, and,
under the soothing swish of his plunkah, forgot the accursed heat of
that stepping-off place, Singapore, and dreamed of future greatness.

A few days later the even tenor of Mr. Pratt's meditations was
disturbed by a letter from the State Department saying, in effect,
that it was all right to get Aguinaldo's assistance "if in so doing
he was not induced to form hopes which it might not be practicable to
gratify." [9] But it did not tell him to tell the Filipinos so. For
Aguinaldo was keeping the Spaniards bottled up in the old walled city
of Manila on short and ever shortening rations, and American troops
were on the way to join him, and the shorter the food supply grew
in Manila the readier the garrison would be to surrender when they
did arrive, and the fewer American soldiers' lives would have to be
sacrificed in the final capture of the town. Every day of Aguinaldo's
service under the Dewey-Pratt arrangement was worth an American life,
perhaps many. It was too valuable to repudiate, just yet. July 20th,
the State Department wrote Mr. Pratt a letter acknowledging receipt of
his of June 9th "enclosing printed copies of a report from the Straits
Times of the same day, entitled 'Mr. Spencer Pratt's Serenade,'
with a view to its communication to the press," and not only not
felicitating him on his serenade, but making him sorry he had ever
had a serenade. It said, among other things:

"The extract now communicated by you from the Straits Times of the
9th of June has occasioned a feeling of disquietude and a doubt as
to whether some of your acts may not have borne a significance and
produced an impression which this government would feel compelled
to regret." [10] Hapless Pratt! "Feel compelled to regret" is State
Department for "You are liable to be fired."

The letter of reprimand proceeds:

"The address * * * discloses an understanding on their part that * * *
the ultimate object of our action is * * * the independence of the
Philippines * * *. Your address does not repel this implication * * *".

The letter then scores Pratt for having called Aguinaldo "the man
for the occasion," and for having said that the "arrangement" between
Aguinaldo and Dewey had "resulted so happily," and after a few further
animadversions, concludes with this great blow to the reading public
of Alabama:

"For these reasons the Department has not caused the article to be
given to the press lest it might seem thereby to lend a sanction to
views the expression of which it had not authorized."

"The Department" was very scrupulous about even the appearance, at
the American end of the line, of "lending a sanction" to Pratt's
arrangement with Aguinaldo, while all the time it was knowingly
permitting the latter to daily risk his own life and the lives of
his countrymen on the faith of that very "arrangement," and it was
so permitting this to be done because the "arrangement" was daily
operating to reduce the number of American lives which it would be
necessary to sacrifice in the final taking of Manila. The day the
letter of reprimand was written our troop-ships were on the ocean,
speeding toward the Philippines. And Aguinaldo and his people were
fighting the Spaniards with the pent-up feeling of centuries impelling
their little steel-jacketed messengers of death, thinking of "Cuba
Libre," and dreaming of a Star of Philippine Independence risen in
the Far East.

Such are the circumstances from which the Filipino people derived
their first impressions concerning the faith and honor of a strange
people they had never theretofore seen, who succeeded the Spaniards
as their overlords. Mr. Pratt was subsequently quietly separated from
the consular service, and doubtless lived to regret that he had ever
unloosed the fountains of his Alabama French on the Filipino colony
of Singapore.






CHAPTER II

DEWEY AND AGUINALDO

                    Armaments that thunderstrike the walls
                    Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake
                    And monarchs tremble in their capitals.

                                                          Childe Harold.


The battle of Manila Bay was fought May 1, 1898. Until the thunder of
Dewey's guns reverberated around the world, there was perhaps no part
of it the American people knew less about than the Philippine Islands.

We have all heard much of what happened after the battle, but
comparatively few, probably, have ever had a glimpse at our great
sailor while he was there in Hong Kong harbor, getting ready to go
to sea to destroy the Spanish armada. Such a glimpse is modestly
afforded by the Admiral in his testimony before the Senate Committee
in 1902. [11]

Asked by the Committee when he first heard from Aguinaldo and his
people in 1898, Admiral Dewey said [12]:


    I should think about a month before leaving Hong Kong, that is,
    about the first of April, when it became pretty certain that there
    was to be war with Spain, I heard that there were a number of
    Filipinos in the city of Hong Kong who were anxious to accompany
    the squadron to Manila in case we went over. I saw these men two
    or three times myself. They seemed to be all very young earnest
    boys. I did not attach much importance to what they said or to
    themselves. Finally, before we left Hong Kong for Mirs Bay [13]
    I received a telegram from Consul-General Pratt at Singapore
    saying that Aguinaldo was there and anxious to see me. I said to
    him "All right; tell him to come on," but I attached so little
    importance to Aguinaldo that I did not wait for him. He did not
    arrive, and we sailed from Mirs Bay without any Filipinos.


From his testimony before the Committee it is clear that Admiral
Dewey's first impressions of the Filipinos, like those of most
Americans after him, were not very favorable, that is to say, he did
not in the outset take them very seriously. It will be interesting
to consider these impressions, and then to compare them with those he
gathered on better acquaintance from observing their early struggles
for independence. The more intimate acquaintance, as has been the case
with all his fellow countrymen since, caused him to revise his first
verdict. Answering a question put by Senator Carmack concerning what
transpired between him and the Philippine Revolutionists at Hong Kong
before he sailed in search of the Spanish fleet, the Admiral said [14]:


    They were bothering me. I was getting my squadron ready for battle,
    and these little men were coming on board my ship at Hong Kong and
    taking a good deal of my time, and I did not attach the slightest
    importance to anything they could do, and they did nothing; that
    is, none of them went with me when I went to Mirs Bay. There had
    been a good deal of talk, but when the time came they did not
    go. One of them didn't go because he didn't have any tooth-brush.

    Senator Burrows: "Did he give that as his reason?"

    Admiral Dewey: "Yes, he said 'I have no tooth-brush.'"

    They used to come aboard my ship and take my time, and finally
    I would not see them at all, but turned them over to my staff.


Now the lack of a tooth-brush is hardly a valid excuse for not going
into battle, however great a convenience it may be in campaign. But
the absence of orders from your commanding officer stands on a very
different footing. Aguinaldo had not yet arrived. Three hundred years
of Spanish misgovernment and cruelty is not conducive to aversion
to fictitious excuses by the lowly in the presence of supreme
authority. The answer was amusingly uncandid, but disproved neither
patriotism nor intelligence.

Aguinaldo arrived at Hong Kong from Singapore a day or so after
Admiral Dewey had sailed for Manila. Of the battle of May 1st,
no detailed mention is essential here. Every schoolboy is familiar
with it. It will remain, as long as the republic lasts, a part of
the heritage of the nation. But the true glory of that battle, to my
mind, rests, not upon the circumstance that we have the Philippines,
but upon the tremendous fact that before it occurred the attitude of
our State Department toward an American citizen sojourning in distant
lands and becoming involved in difficulties there had long been,
"Why didn't he stay at home? Let him stew in his own juice"; whereas,
since then, to be an American has been more like it was in the days
of St. Paul to be a Roman citizen.

May 16th, our consul at Hong Kong, Mr. Wildman, succeeded in
getting the insurgent leader and his staff off for Manila on board
the U. S. S. McCulloch by authority of Admiral Dewey. Like his
colleague over at Singapore, Consul Wildman was bent on the rôle of
Warwick. Admiral Dewey was quite busy there in Manila Bay the first
two or three weeks after the battle, but yielding to the letters
of Wildman, who meantime had constituted himself a kind of fiscal
agent at Hong Kong for the prospective revolution in the matter of
the purchase of guns and otherwise, the Admiral told the commanding
officer of the McCulloch that on his next trip to Hong Kong he might
bring down a dozen or so of the Filipinos there. The frame of mind
they were in on reaching Manila, as a result of the assurances of
Pratt and Wildman, is well illustrated by a letter the latter wrote
Aguinaldo a little later (June 25th) which is undoubtedly in keeping
with what he had been telling him earlier:


    Do not forget that the United States undertook this war for the
    sole purpose of relieving the Cubans from the cruelties under
    which they were suffering, and not for the love of conquest or
    the hope of gain. They are actuated by precisely the same feelings
    for the Filipinos. [15]


And at the time, they were.

"Every American citizen who came in contact with the Filipinos at
the inception of the Spanish War, or at any time within a few months
after hostilities began," said General Anderson in an interview
published in the Chicago Record of February 24, 1900, "probably
told those he talked with * * * that we intended to free them from
Spanish oppression. The general expression, was 'We intend to whip
the Spaniards and set you free.'"

The McCulloch arrived in Manila Bay with Aguinaldo and his outfit,
May 19th. Let Admiral Dewey tell what happened then [16]:


    Aguinaldo came to see me. I said, "Well now, go ashore there; we
    have got our forces at the arsenal at Cavite, go ashore and start
    your army." He came back in the course of a few hours and said,
    "I want to leave here; I want to go to Japan." I said, "Don't give
    it up, Don Emilio." I wanted his help, you know. He did not sleep
    ashore that night; he slept on board the ship. The next morning
    he went on shore, still inside my lines, and began recruiting men.


Enterprises of great pith and moment have often turned awry and lost
the name of action for lack of a word spoken in season by a stout
heart. Admiral Dewey spoke the word, and Aguinaldo, his protégé,
did the rest. "Then he began operations toward Manila, and he did
wonderfully well. He whipped the Spaniards battle after battle * * *."
[17] In fact, the desperate bravery of those little brown men
after they got warmed up reminds one of the Japs at the walls of
Peking, in the advance of the Allied Armies to the relief of the
foreign legations during the Boxer troubles of 1900. Admiral Dewey
told the Senate Committee in 1902 that Aguinaldo actually wanted to
put one of the old smooth-bore Spanish guns he found at Cavite on a
barge and have him (Dewey) tow it up in front of Manila so he could
attack the city with it. "I said, 'Oh no, no; we can do nothing until
our troops come.'"

Otherwise he was constantly advising and encouraging him. Why? Let the
Admiral answer: "I knew that what he was doing--driving the Spaniards
in--was saving our troops." [17] In other words they were daily dying
that American soldiers might live, on the faith of the reasons for
which we had declared war, and trusting, because of the words of our
consuls and the acts of our admiral, in the sentiment subsequently
so nobly expressed by Mr. McKinley in his instructions to the Paris
peace Commissioners:


    The United States in making peace should follow the same high
    rule of conduct which guided it in facing war. [18]


"I did not know what the action of our Government would be," said
the Admiral to the Committee, [19] adding that he simply used his
best judgment on the spot at the time; presumably supposing that his
Government would do the decent thing by these people who considered
us their liberators. "They looked on us as their liberators," said
he. [20] "Up to the time the army came he (Aguinaldo) did everything I
requested. He was most obedient; whatever I told him to do he did. I
saw him almost daily. [21] I had not much to do with him after the
army came." [22]

That was no ordinary occasion, that midsummer session of the
Senate Committee in 1902. It was a case of the powerful of the earth
discussing a question of ethics, even as they do in Boston. The nation
had been intoxicated in 1898 with the pride of power--power revealed
to it by the Spanish War; and in a spirit thus mellowed had taken
the Philippines as a sort of political foreign mission, forgetting
the injunction of the Fathers to keep Church and State separate,
but not forgetting the possible profits of trade with the saved. A
long war with the prospective saved had followed, developing many
barbarities avenged in kind, and the breezes from the South Seas were
suggesting the aroma of shambles. "How did we get into all this mess,
anyhow?" said the people. "Let us pause, and consider." Hear the
still small voice of a nation's conscience mingling with demagogic
nonsense perpetrated by potent, grave, and reverend Senators:


    Admiral Dewey: "I do not think it makes any difference what my
    opinion is on these things."

    Senator Patterson: "There is no man whose opinion goes farther
    with the country than yours does, Admiral, and therefore I think
    you ought to be very prudent in expressing your views."

    Senator Beveridge (Acting Chairman): "The Chairman will not permit
    any member to lecture Admiral Dewey on his prudence or imprudence."


This of course would read well to "Mary of the Vine-clad Cottage"
out in Indiana, whose four-year-old boy was named George Dewey--,
or to her counterpart up in Vermont who might name her next boy
after the brilliant and distinguished Acting Chairman, in token of
her choice for the Presidency.


    Senator Patterson: "I was not lecturing him."

    Senator Beveridge: "Yes; you said he ought to be prudent."

    Senator Patterson: "And I think it was well enough to suggest
    those things." [23]


Thawed into theorizing by these indubitably genuine evidences of
a nation's high regard, the man of action tried to help the nation
out. He said he had used the Filipinos as the Federal troops used the
negroes in the Civil War. Senator Patterson struck this suggestion
amidships and sunk it with the remark that the negroes were expecting
freedom. Admiral Dewey had said "The Filipinos were slaves too"
and considered him their liberator. [24] But he never did elaborate
on the new definition of freedom which had followed in the wake of
his ships to Manila, viz., that Freedom does not necessarily mean
freedom from alien domination, but only a change of masters deemed
by the new master beneficial to the "slave."

Apropos of why he accepted Aguinaldo's help, the Admiral also said:


    I was waiting for troops to arrive, and I felt sure the Filipinos
    could not take Manila, and I thought that the closer they invested
    the city the easier it would be when our troops arrived to march
    in. The Filipinos were our friends, assisting us; they were doing
    our work. [25]


Asked as to how big a force Aguinaldo had under arms then and
afterwards, the Admiral said maybe 25,000, adding, by way of
illustration of the pluck, vim, and patriotism of his valuable new-made
friends, "They could have had any number of men; it was just a question
of arming them. They could have had the whole population." [26]
Eleven months after that, when we captured the first insurgent capital,
Malolos, General MacArthur, the ablest and one of the bravest generals
we ever set to slaughtering Filipinos, said to a newspaper man just
after a bloody and of course victorious fight: "When I first started in
against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented
only a faction." "I did not like," said this veteran of three
wars, who was always "on the job" in action out there as elsewhere,
"I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * *
was opposed to us * * * but after having come thus far, and having
been brought much in contact with both insurrectos and amigos, I have
been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses are
loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads". [27]

Is it at all unlikely that Admiral Dewey did in fact say of his
protégés, the Filipinos, to an American visiting Manila in January,
1899, three or four weeks before the war broke out, "Rather than
make a war of conquest upon the Filipino people, I would up anchor
and sail out of the harbor." [28]

If Dewey and MacArthur were right, then, about the situation around
Manila in 1898, it was a case of an entire people united in an
aspiration, and looking to us for its fulfilment.

When the American troops reached the Philippines and perfected
their battle formations about Manila, and the order to advance
was given, they did "march in," to use Admiral Dewey's expression
above quoted. But they did not let the Filipinos have a finger in the
pie. The conquest and retention of the islands had then been determined
upon. The Admiral's reasons for saddling his protégé with a series of
bloody battles and a long and arduous campaign are certainly stated
with the proverbial frankness of the sailorman: "I wanted his help,
you know." But what was Aguinaldo to get out of the transaction,
from the Dewey point of view?

"They wanted to get rid of the Spaniards. I do not think they looked
much beyond that," [29] said the Admiral to the Senate Committee. Let
us see whether they did or not. Aguinaldo had been shipped by the
Honorable E. Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at
Singapore, from that point to Hong Kong on April 26th, consigned to
his fellow Warwick, the Honorable Rounseville Wildman, Consul-General
of the United States at the last-named place, and had been received
in due course by the consignee. May 5th, at Hong Kong, the Filipino
Revolutionary Committee had a meeting, the minutes of which we
subsequently came into possession of, along with other captured
insurgent papers. The following is an extract from those minutes:


    Once the President [Aguinaldo] is in the Philippines with his
    prestige, he will be able to arouse the masses to combat the
    demands of the United States, if they should colonize that country,
    and will drive them, the Filipinos, if circumstances render it
    necessary, to a Titanic struggle for their independence, even
    if later they should succumb to the weight of the yoke of a new
    oppressor. If Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental
    principles of its Constitution, it is most improbable that an
    attempt will be made to colonize the Philippines or annex them. It
    is probable then that independence will be guaranteed. [30]


The truth is that instead of leaving everything to the chance of
our continuing in the same unselfish frame of mind we were really in
when the Spanish-American War started, Aguinaldo and his people, not
sure but what in the wind-up they might even be thrown back upon the
tender mercies of Spain, played their cards boldly and consistently
from the beginning with a view of organizing a de facto government
and getting it recognized by the Powers as such at the very earliest
practicable moment. They believed that the Lord helps those who help
themselves. They had anticipated our change of heart and already had
it discounted before we were aware of it ourselves. They were already
acting on the idea that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty
while public opinion in the United States concerning them was in a
chrysalis state, and trying to develop a new definition of Liberty
which should comport with the subjugation of distant island subjects
by a continental commonwealth on the other side of the world based on
representative government. The prospective subjects did not believe
that a legislature ten thousand miles away in which they had no vote
would ever give them a square deal about tariff and other laws dictated
by special interests. They had had three hundred years of just that
very sort of thing under Spain and instinctively dreaded continuance
of it. That their instincts did not deceive them, our later study of
Congressional legislation will show. The Filipinos had greatly pondered
their future in their hearts during the last twelve months of Spain's
colonial empire, watching her Cuban embarrassments with eager eye.

Having seen the frame of mind in which they approached the contract
implied in Admiral Dewey's cheery words, "Well now, go ashore there
and start your army," what were the facts of recent history within
the knowledge of both parties at the time? What had been the screams
of the American eagle, if any, concerning his moral leadership of
the family of unfeathered bipeds?

President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1897,
[31] calling attention to conditions in Cuba as intolerable,
had declared that if we should intervene to put a stop to them,
we certainly would not make it the occasion of a land-grab. The
other nations said: "We are from Missouri." But Mr. McKinley said,
"forcible annexation" was not to be thought of by us. "That by
our code of morality would be criminal," etc. So the world said,
"We shall see what we shall see." Then had come the war message
of April 11, 1898, [32] reiterating the declaration of the Cuban
message of December previous, that "forcible annexation by our code of
morality would be criminal aggression." In other words we announced
to the overcrowded monarchies of the old world, whose land-lust is
ever tempted by the broad acres of South America, and ever cooled
by the virile menace of the Monroe doctrine, that we not only were
against the principle of land-grabbing, but would not indulge in the
practice. Immediately upon the conclusion of the reading of the war
message, Senator Stewart was recognized, and said, among other things:
"Under the law of nations, intervention for conquest is condemned,
and is opposed to the universal sentiment of mankind. It is unjust,
it is robbery, to intervene for conquest." Then Mr. Lodge stood up,
"in the Senate House a Senator," and said:


    We are there [meaning in this present Cuban situation] because we
    represent the spirit of liberty and the spirit of the new time, and
    Spain is over against us because she is mediæval, cruel, dying. We
    have grasped no man's territory, we have taken no man's property,
    we have invaded no man's rights. We do not ask their lands. [33]


These speeches went forth to the world almost like a part of the
message itself. And Admiral Dewey, like every other American, in
his early dealings with Aguinaldo, after war broke out, must have
assumed a mental attitude in harmony with these announcements. But
the world said, "All this is merely what you Americans yourselves
call 'hot air.' We repeat, 'We are from Missouri.'" Then we said:
"Oh very well, we will show you." So in the declaration of war against
Spain we inserted the following:


    Fourth: That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or
    intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over
    said island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its
    determination when that is accomplished, to leave the government
    and control of the island to its people.


This meant, "It is true we do love the Almighty Dollar very dearly,
oh, Sisters of the Family of Nations, but there are some axiomatic
principles of human liberty that we love better, and one of them is the
'unalienable right' of every people to pursue happiness in their own
way, free from alien domination." All these things were well known to
both the contracting parties when Admiral Dewey set Aguinaldo ashore
at Cavite, May 20, 1898, and got him to start his insurrection "under
the protection of our guns," as he expressed it. [34] Accordingly,
when the insurgent leader went ashore, the declaration of war was
his major premise, the assurances of our consuls and the acts of our
Admiral pursuant thereto were his minor premise, and Independence was
his conclusion. Trusting to the faith and honor of the American people,
he took his life in his hands, left the panoplied safety of our mighty
squadron, and plunged, single-handed, into the struggle for Freedom.

What was the state of the public mind on shore, and how was it
prepared to receive his assurances of American aid? Consider the
following picture in the light of its sombre sequel.

Just as the war broke out, Consul Williams had left Manila and gone
over to Hong Kong, where he joined Admiral Dewey, and accompanied him
back to Manila, and was thus privileged to be present at the battle
of Manila Bay, May 1st. Under date of May 12th, from his consular
headquarters aboard the U. S. S. Baltimore, he reports [35] going
ashore at Cavite and being received with enthusiastic greetings by
vast crowds of Filipinos. "They crowded around me," says Brother
Williams, "hats off, shouting 'Viva los Americanos,' thronged about
me by hundreds to shake either hand, even several at a time, men,
women, and children, striving to get even a finger to shake. So I
moved half a mile, shaking continuously with both hands."

Tut! tut! says the casual reader. What did the Government at
Washington know of all these goings on, that it should be charged
later with having violated as binding a moral obligation as ever a
nation assumed? It is true that the news of the Williams ovation,
as in the case of the Pratt serenade, reached Washington only by the
slow channels of the mail. But Washington did in fact receive the
said news by due course of mail. When it came, however, Washington
was nursing visions of savages in blankets smoking the pipe of peace
with the agents of the Great White Father in the White House--i.e.,
thought, or hoped, the Filipinos were savages--and remained as deaf
to the sounds of the Williams ovation as it had been to the strains
of the Pratt serenade.

However, hardly had Admiral Dewey taken his binoculars from the gig
that carried Aguinaldo ashore to raise his auxiliary insurrection,
when he called his Flag Secretary, or the equivalent, and dictated
the following cablegram to the Secretary of the Navy:


    Aguinaldo, the rebel commander-in-chief, was brought down by
    the McCulloch. Organizing forces near Cavite, and may render
    assistance that will be valuable. [36]


This sounds a little more serious than "earnest boys" alleging the
lack of a toothbrush as an excuse for declining mortal combat, does
it not? How valuable did this assistance prove? Admiral Dewey had to
wait three and one half months for the army to arrive, and this is
how the commanding general of the American forces describes conditions
as he found them in the latter part of August:


    For three and one half months Admiral Dewey with his squadron
    and the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly bottled. All
    commerce had been interdicted, internal trade paralyzed, and food
    supplies were nearly exhausted. [37]


And, he might have added, the taking of the city was thus made
perfectly easy. Otherwise, as Aguinaldo put it in one of his letters
to General Otis, we would not have taken a city, but only the ruins
of a city. Admiral Dewey said to the Senate Committee in 1902: "They
[the Spaniards] surrendered on August 13th, and they had not gotten
a thing in after the 1st of May." [38]

In the early part of the next year, 1899, President McKinley sent
out a kind of olive-branch commission, of which President Schurman
of Cornell University was Chairman. The olive branch got withered
in the sulphur of exploding gun-powder, so the Commission contented
itself with making a report. And this is what they said concerning
what followed the Dewey-Aguinaldo entente:


    Shortly afterwards, the Filipinos began to attack the
    Spanish. Their number was rapidly augmented by the militia who
    had been given arms by Spain, all of whom revolted and joined
    the insurgents. Great Filipino successes followed, many Spaniards
    were taken prisoners, and while the Spanish troops now remained
    quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves masters
    of the entire island [of Luzon] except that city. [39]


Of conditions in July, sixty days after Admiral Dewey had on May 20th
said to Aguinaldo in effect, "Go it, little man, we need you in our
business," Mr. Wildman, our Consul at Hong Kong, writing to the State
Department, said, in defending himself for his share in the business
of getting Aguinaldo's help under promises, both express and implied,
which were subsequently repudiated, that after he, Wildman, put the
insurgent chief aboard the McCulloch, May 16th, bound for Manila to
co-operate by land with our navy: "He * * * organized a government
* * * and from that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful
in the field and dignified and just as the head of his government,"
[40] a statement which Admiral Dewey subsequently endorsed. [41]

We have seen the preliminaries of this "government" started under
the auspices of our Admiral and under what he himself called "the
protection of our guns" (ante). Let us note its progress. If you
turn the leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see
quite a moving picture show, and the action is rapid. On May 24th,
still "under the protection of our guns," Aguinaldo proclaimed his
revolutionary government and summoned the people to his standard for
the purpose of driving the Spaniards out forever. The situation was an
exact counterpart of the cotemporary Cuban one as regards identity of
purpose between "liberator" and "oppressed." His proclamation promised
a constitutional convention to be called later (and which was duly
called later) to elect a President and Cabinet, in whose favor he
would resign the emergency authority now assumed; referred to the
United States as "undoubtedly disinterested" and as considering the
Filipinos "capable of governing for ourselves our unfortunate country";
and formally announced the temporary assumption of supreme authority
as dictator. Copies of these proclamations were duly furnished Admiral
Dewey. The latter was too busy looking after the men behind his guns
and watching the progress of his plucky little ally to study Spanish,
so he forwarded them to the Navy Department without comment--"without
reading them," said he to the Senate Committee in 1902. [42] When his
attention was called to them before the Committee by one of the members
reading them, his comment was, "Nothing about independence there, is
there?" [43] It seems to me it did not take an international lawyer
to see a good deal "there," about independence. In a proclamation
published at Tarlac in the latter part of 1899, which appears to have
been a sort of swan-song of the Philippine Republic, Aguinaldo had
said, in effect, "Certainly Admiral Dewey did not bring me from Hong
Kong to Manila to fight the Spaniards for the benefit of American
Trade Expansion," and in this proclamation he claimed that Admiral
Dewey promised him independence. It is true, that in a letter to
Senator Lodge, which that distinguished gentleman read on the floor
of the Senate on January 31, 1900, Admiral Dewey denounced this last
statement as false. It is also true that those Americans are few and
far between who will take Aguinaldo's word in preference to Admiral
Dewey's. Certainly the writer is not one of them. But Aguinaldo
is no Spanish scholar, being more of a leader of men than a master
of language, and what sort of an interpreter acted between him and
the Admiral does not appear. Certainly he never did get anything in
writing from Admiral Dewey. But after the latter brought him to Manila,
set him to fighting the common enemy, and helped him with guns and
otherwise in quickly organizing an army for the purpose, the Admiral
was at least put on inquiry as to just what Aguinaldo supposed he was
fighting for. What did the Admiral probably suppose? He told the Senate
Committee that the idea that they wanted independence "never entered
his head." The roar of mighty guns seems to have made it difficult for
him to hear the prattlings of what Aguinaldo's proclamations of the
time called "the legitimate aspirations of a people." The milk in the
cocoanut is this: How could it ever occur to a great naval commander,
such as Admiral Dewey, familiar with the four quarters of the globe,
that a coterie of politicians at home would be so foolish as to buy
a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered islands in the South
Seas which had been a nuisance to every government that ever owned
them? But let us turn from the Senate Committee's studies of 1902 to
the progress of the infant republic of 1898 at Cavite.

The same day the above proclamations of May 24th were issued, we
find Consul Williams, now become a sort of amphibious civilian
aide to Dewey, having his consular headquarters afloat, on the
U. S. S. Baltimore, of the squadron, writing the State Department,
describing the great successes of the insurgents, his various
conferences with Aguinaldo and the other leaders, and his own
activities in arranging the execution of a power of attorney whereby
Aguinaldo released to certain parties in Hong Kong $400,000 then
on deposit to his credit in a Hong Kong bank, for the purpose of
enabling them to pay for 3000 stand of arms bought there and expected
to arrive at Cavite on the morrow, and for other needed expenses of the
revolutionary movement. He says, in part: "Officers have visited me
during the darkness of the night to inform the fleet and me of their
operations, and to report increase of strength. When General Merritt
arrives he will find large auxiliary land forces adapted to his service
and used to the climate." [44] Throughout this period Admiral Dewey
reports various cordial conferences with Aguinaldo, though he is not so
literary as to vivify his accounts with allusions to the weather. In
one despatch he states that he has "refrained from assisting him * * *
with the forces under my command" [45]--explaining to him that "the
squadron could not act until the arrival of the United States troops."

Six days after the issuance of the Dictatorship proclamations above
mentioned, viz., on May 30th, Admiral Dewey cables the Navy Department
[46]:


    Aguinaldo, revolutionary leader, visited Olympia yesterday. He
    expects to make general attack May 31st.


He did not succeed entirely, but there was hard fighting, and the
cordon around the doomed Spaniards in Manila and its suburbs was
drawn ever closer and closer.

The remarkable feat of Aguinaldo's raising a right formidable fighting
force in twelve days after his little "Return from Elba," which force
kept growing like a snowball, is difficult, for one who does not know
the Filipinos, and the conditions then, to credit. It is explained
by the fact that Admiral Dewey let him have the captured guns in the
Cavite arsenal, that Cavite was a populous hotbed of insurrection,
and that many native regiments, or parts of regiments, quite suited
to be the nucleus of an army, having lots of veteran non-commissioned
officers, deserted the Spaniards and went over to the insurgents,
their countrymen, as soon as Aguinaldo arrived.

On June 6th, we have another bulletin sent to the Navy Department
by Admiral Dewey, transmitting with perceptible satisfaction further
information as to the progress of his indefatigable protégé:


    Insurgents have been engaged actively within the province of Cavite
    during the last week; they have had several small victories,
    taking prisoners about 1800 men, 50 officers; Spanish troops,
    not native. [47]


Along about this period Aguinaldo happens to get hold of a belated
copy of the London Times of May 5, 1898. It contains considerable
speculation on the future of the Philippines which casts a shadow
over the soul of the president of the incipient republic. Having read
President McKinley's immortal State papers about the moral obliquity
of "forcible annexation," he is moved to write direct to the source
of those noble sentiments. The letter is dated June 10, 1898. It is
addressed, with a quaintness now pathetic, "To the President of the
Republic of the Great North American Nation." It greets the addressee
with "the most tender effusion of" the writer's soul, expresses his
"deep and sincere gratitude," in the name of his people, "for the
efficient and disinterested protection which you have decided to give
it to shake off the yoke of the cruel and corrupt Spanish domination,
as you are doing to the equally unfortunate Cuba" and then proceeds to
tell of "the great sorrow which all of us Filipinos felt on reading
in the Times the astounding statement that you, sir, will retain
these islands," etc. He proceeds:


    The Philippine people * * * have seen in your nation, ever since
    your fleet destroyed in a moment the Spanish fleet which was here
    * * * the angel who is the harbinger of their liberty; and they
    rose like a single wave * * * as soon as I trod these shores; and
    captured in ten days nearly the whole garrison of this Province
    of Cavite in whose port I have my government--by the consent of
    the Admiral of your triumphant fleet. [48]


The writer closes his letter with an impassioned protest against
the occurrence of what is suggested in the Times, and speaks of
his fellow-countrymen as "a people which trusts blindly in you not
to abandon it to the tyranny of Spain, but to leave it free and
independent," and adds his "fervent prayers for the ever-increasing
prosperity of your powerful nation." [49]

But the signer of the foregoing letter did not spend all his time
praying for us, as may be observed in this bulletin from Admiral Dewey
concerning the way he was lambasting the common enemy, sent the Navy
Department, June 12th:


    Insurgents continue hostilities and have practically surrounded
    Manila. They have taken 2500 Spanish prisoners, whom they treat
    most humanely. They do not intend to attack city proper until
    the arrival of United States troops thither; I have advised. [50]


Four days later Washington chided the hapless Pratt at Singapore about
having talked to Aguinaldo of "direct co-operation" with Admiral Dewey,
saying: "To obtain the unconditional personal assistance of General
Aguinaldo in the expedition to Manila was proper, if in so doing he
was not induced to form hopes which it might not be practicable to
gratify." [51] This communication goes on to advise Mr. Pratt that the
Department cannot approve anything he may have said to Aguinaldo on
behalf of the United States which would concede that in accepting his
co-operation we would owe him anything. Yet it did not tell Admiral
Dewey to quit coaching him, because the service he was rendering
was too valuable. There is no communication to Admiral Dewey about
"hopes which it might not be practicable to gratify" in the official
archives of those times. There was Admiral Dewey coaching Aguinaldo
and telling him to wait for the main attack until General Merritt
should arrive with our troops. Why? Because he expected Merritt to
co-operate with Aguinaldo, and of course Aguinaldo expected exactly
what Dewey expected.

In reviewing the history of those times the writer has not been
so careless as to have overlooked Senator Lodge's elaborate speech
in the Senate on March 7, 1900, wherein attention is called to the
circumstance that a few days after Aguinaldo landed at Cavite, the
Navy Department cabled cautioning Dewey to have no alliance with him
that might complicate us, and that the Admiral answered he had made no
alliance and would make none. But if actions speak louder than words,
the Senator's point does not rise above the dignity of a technicality.

The same day the State Department reprimanded Pratt, as above
indicated, viz., June 16th, Consul Williams at Manila wrote them
a glowing communication [52] about how "active and almost uniformly
successful" Aguinaldo was continuing to be. But no resultant enthusiasm
is of record. Two days later, on June 18th, Aguinaldo issued his
first formal Declaration of Independence. The infant republic was now
less than a month old, but it already had a fine set of teeth. The
Spaniards had seen them. The proclamation was of course addressed to
the Filipino people, and called on them to rally to the cause, but
he was also driving at recognition by the Powers. It read in part:
"In the face of the whole world I have proclaimed that the aspiration
of my whole life, the final object of all my wishes and efforts,
is your independence, because I have the inner conviction that it is
also your constant longing." [53] Many Americans insist that this is
mere "hot air" and that the average Filipino peasant does not think
much more than his plough animal, the scoffer himself being stupidly
unaware that this has been precisely the argument of tyranny in all
ages. But the pride a people will have in seeing the best educated
and most able men of their own race in charge of their affairs seems
to me too obvious to need elaboration. It was always accepted by us
as axiomatic until we took the Philippines. It is a cruel species of
wickedness for an American to tell his countrymen that the Filipino
people do not want independence, for some of them may believe it.

The Declaration of Independence of June 18th is known to students
of Philippine political archæology as the Proclamation establishing
the "dictatorial" government. The principal thing it did was to
supplement the absolute dictatorship proclaimed May 24th by provisions
for organizing in detail. It also declared independence. A more
elaborate Declaration followed on June 23d, known as the proclamation
establishing the "revolutionary" government. This made provision
for a Congress, a Cabinet, and courts. Of course it was only a paper
government the day the ink dried on it. But we will follow it through
its teething, and adolescence, to the attainment of its majority at
an inauguration where the president was driven to the place of the
taking of the oath of office in a coach and four, through a short
and very self-respecting heyday, and a longer peripatetic existence,
to final dissolution. The document of June 23d reminds us of a fact
which in reading it at this late date we are apt to forget, viz.,
that the Filipinos did not know at what moment their powerful ally,
the American squadron, might up anchor and sail away to the high
seas, to meet another Spanish fleet; thus leaving them to the tender
mercies of the Spaniards, possibly forever. So they were losing no
time. In fact, they had set to work from the very beginning with a
determination to try and secure recognition from the Powers at the
earliest moment. In appealing to the public opinion of the world with a
view of paving the way to recognition by the Powers--which recognition
would mean getting arms for war with Spain or any other power without
the inconveniences of filibustering--Aguinaldo says on behalf of his
people in the proclamation of June 23d, above mentioned, that they
"now no longer limit themselves to asking for assimilation with the
political constitution of Spain, but ask for a complete separation
(and) strive for independence, completely assured that the time has
come when they can and ought to govern themselves."

Mr. Frank D. Millet, who reached Manila soon enough (in July) to
see the ripples of this proclamation, describes the effect on the
people. While Mr. Millet is one of the best men that anybody ever knew,
a proposition as to which I am quite sure the President of the United
States and many people great and small in many lands would affirm my
judgment, [54] still, he writes from a frankly White Man's Burden or
land-grabbing standpoint--is in harmony with his environment. At
page 50 of his book, [55] he reproduces the proclamation last
above quoted from, and adds the following satirical comment: "This
flowery production was widely circulated and had a great effect on
the imagination of the people, who, in the elation of their present
success in investing the town and in their belief that the United
States was beginning a campaign in the Philippines to free them from
Spanish oppression (italics mine) shortly came to think that they
were already a nation."

Copies of these June proclamations also, as in the case of those
of May 24th, were duly forwarded by Aguinaldo to Admiral Dewey
[56] and by him forwarded to Washington without comment. In his
letter transmitting them to Dewey, Aguinaldo announces that his
government has "taken possession of the various provinces of the
archipelago." Just exactly how many provinces he had control of on
June 23d will be examined later. The very same day the proclamation
of June 23d declaring independence was issued, Admiral Dewey cabled
the Navy Department [57]: "Aguinaldo has acted independently of the
squadron, but has kept me advised of his progress which has been
wonderful. I have allowed him to take from the arsenal such Spanish
arms and ammunition as he needed." After adding that "Aguinaldo
expects to capture Manila without any assistance," the Admiral,
evidently divining the temptation that was then luring the political
St. Anthonies at Washington, volunteers this timely suggestion:


    In my opinion these people are superior in intelligence and more
    capable of self-government than the natives of Cuba, and I am
    familiar with both races. [57]


That there may be no doubt about the motive behind that suggestion,
it may be noted here that the Admiral told the Senate Committee in
1902: "I wrote that because I saw in the newspapers that Congress
contemplated giving the Cubans independence." [58]

But this is not all. On August 13th, the day after the Peace
Protocol was signed, Mr. McKinley wired Admiral Dewey asking about
"the desirability of the several islands," the "coal and mineral
deposits," and in reply on August 29th, the Admiral wrote:


    In a telegram sent the Department on June 23d, I expressed the
    opinion that "these people are far superior in their intelligence
    and more capable of self-government than the natives of Cuba,
    and I am familiar with both races." Further intercourse with them
    has confirmed me in this opinion. [59]


As a result of one year's stay in Cuba, and six in the Philippines--two
in the army that subjugated the Filipinos and four as a judge over
them--I heartily concur in the above opinion of Admiral Dewey,
but with this addition: Whatever of solidarity for governmental
purposes the Filipinos may have lacked at the date of the Admiral's
communications, they were certainly welded into conscious political
unity, as one people, in their war for independence against us.

In the 1609 or Douay (pronounce Dewey) version of the Bible, the
Latin Vulgate, Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer only says "Lead
us not into temptation," while Matthew adds "but deliver us from
evil." The Dewey suggestions to the Washington Government in 1898
remind a regretful nation of both the evangelical versions mentioned,
for the first seems to say what Luke says, and the second seems to
add what Matthew adds.

There is not an American who has known the Filipinos since the
beginning of the American occupation who doubts for a moment that
but for our intervention a Republic would have been established out
there under the lead of Aguinaldo, Mabini, and their associates,
which would have compared well with the republican governments
between the United States and Cape Horn. The writer doubts very
much if President Taft is of a contrary opinion. The real issue is,
now that we have them, should we keep them in spite of the tariff
iniquities which the Trusts perpetrate on them through Congress,
until they have received the best possible tuition we can give them,
or be content to give them their independence when they are already at
least as fit for it as the Republics to the South of us, guaranteeing
them independence by international agreement like that which protects
Belgium and Switzerland?

Now why did Admiral Dewey repeat to his home government and emphasize
on August 29th a suggestion so extremely pertinent to the capacity of
the Filipinos for self-government which he had already made in lucid
language on June 23d previous? The answer is not far to seek. General
Anderson had arrived between the two dates, with the first American
troops that reached the islands after the naval battle of May 1st,
and brought the Admiral the first intimation, which came somewhat as
a surprise of course, that there was serious talk in the United States
of retaining the Philippines. "I was the first to tell Admiral Dewey,"
says General Anderson in the North American Review for February, 1900,
"that there was any disposition on the part of the American people to
hold the Philippines if they were captured." He adds: "Whether Admiral
Dewey and Consuls Pratt, Wildman, and Williams did or did not give
Aguinaldo assurances that a Filipino government would be recognized,
the Filipinos certainly thought so, judging from their acts rather
than from their words. Admiral Dewey gave them arms and ammunition,
as I did subsequently at his request."

General Anderson might have added that whenever the Admiral captured
prisoners from the Spaniards he would promptly turn them over to the
Filipinos--1300 at one clip in the month of June at Olongapo. [60]
These 1300 were men a German man-of-war prevented the Filipinos from
taking until Aguinaldo reported the matter to Admiral Dewey, whereupon,
he promptly sent Captain Coghlan with the Raleigh and another of his
ships to the scene of the trouble, and Captain Coghlan said to the
German "Hoch der Kaiser" etc. or words to that effect, and made him
go about his business and let our ally alone. Then Captain Coghlan
took the 1300 prisoners himself and turned them over to Aguinaldo by
direction of Admiral Dewey. The motive for, as well as the test of,
an alliance, is that the other fellow can bring into the partnership
something you lack. The navy had no way to keep prisoners of war. There
can be no doubt that if Admiral Dewey's original notions about meeting
the problems presented by his great victory of May 1, 1898, had been
followed, we never would have had any trouble with the Filipinos;
nor can there be any doubt that he made them his allies and used
them as such. They were very obedient allies at that, until they
saw the Washington Government was going to repudiate the "alliance,"
and withhold from them what they had a right to consider the object
and meaning of the alliance, if it meant anything.

The truth is, as Secretary of War Taft said in 1905, before the
National Geographic Society in Washington, "We blundered into
colonization." [61] As we have seen, Admiral Dewey repeatedly
expressed the opinion, in the summer of 1898, that the Filipinos
were far superior in intelligence to the Cubans and more capable
of self-government. He of course saw quite clearly then, when
he was sending home those commendations of Filipino fitness for
self-government, just as we have all come to realize since, that a
coaling station would be; the main thing we should need in that part
of the world in time of war; that Manila, being quite away from the
mainland of Asia, could never supersede Hong Kong as the gateway to
the markets of Asia, since neither shippers nor the carrying trade of
the world will ever see their way to unload cargo at Manila by way of
rehearsal before unloading on the mainland; and that the taking of the
islands was a dubious step from a financial standpoint, and a still
more dubious one from the strategic standpoint of defending them by
land, in the event of war with Japan, Germany, or any other first-class
power. At this late date, when the passions and controversies of that
period have long since subsided, is it not perfectly clear that after
he destroyed the Spanish fleet, Admiral Dewey not only dealt with the
Filipinos, until the army came out, substantially as Admiral Sampson
and General Shatter did with the Cubans, but also that he did all he
properly could to save President McKinley from the one great blunder
of our history, the taking of the Philippine Islands?






CHAPTER III

ANDERSON AND AGUINALDO

                        Well, honor is the subject of my story.

                                            Julius Cæsar, Act. I, Sc. 2.


The destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898,
ten days after the outbreak of the war with Spain, having necessitated
sending troops to the Philippines to complete the reduction of the
Spanish power in that quarter, Major-General Wesley Merritt was on
May 16th selected to organize and command such an expedition.

"The First Expedition," as it was always distinguished, by the officers
and men of the Eighth Army Corps, there having been many subsequent
expeditions sent out before our war with the Filipinos was over,
was itself subdivided into a number of different expeditions, troops
being hurried to Manila as fast as they could be assembled and properly
equipped in sufficient numbers. The first batch that were whipped into
shape left San Francisco under command of Brigadier-General Thomas
M. Anderson, on May 25th, and arrived off Manila, June 30th. General
Merritt did not arrive until July 25th. It was General Anderson,
therefore, who broke the ice of the American occupation of the
Philippines.

In his annual message to Congress of December, following, [62]
summing up the War with Spain and its results, Mr. McKinley gives
a brief account of the First Expedition. After recounting Admiral
Dewey's victory of May 1st previous, he states that "on the seventh
day of May the Government was advised officially of the victory at
Manila, and at once inquired of the commander of the fleet what troops
would be required." President McKinley does not give the Admiral's
answer, though he does state that it was received on the 15th day of
May. The Admiral's answer appears, however, in the Report of the Navy
Department for 1898, Appendix, page 98. It was: "In my best judgment,
a well-equipped force of 5000 men." But the President's message does
state that he at once sent a "total force consisting of 641 officers
and 15,058 enlisted men."

The difference of view-point of the Admiral and the President is clear
from the language of both. In recommending 5000 troops, the Admiral
had said they would be necessary "to retain possession [of Manila]
and thus control Philippine Islands." This counted, of course, on the
friendship of the people, as in Cuba. "I had in view simply taking
possession of the city." said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee
in 1902. [63]

The purpose of the President in sending three times as many troops as
were needed for the purpose Admiral Dewey had in mind is indicated in
his account of what happened. After describing the taking of Manila
by our troops on August 13th, the presidential message says:


    By this the conquest of the Philippine Islands, virtually
    accomplished when the Spanish capacity for resistance was destroyed
    by Admiral Dewey's victory of May 1st, was formally sealed. [64]


Admiral Dewey contemplated that we should merely remain masters of the
situation out where he was until the end of the war. President McKinley
set about to effect "the conquest of the Philippine Islands." The
naval victory of Manila Bay having made it certain that at the
conclusion of our war against a decadent monarchy we would at last
have an adequate coaling station and naval base in the Far East, the
sending of troops to the Philippines, in appropriate prosecution of
the war, to reduce and capture Manila, the capital and chief port,
raised the question at once "And then what?"

The genesis of the idea of taking over the archipelago is traceable
to within a few days after the destruction of the Spanish fleet.

Within a few days after the official news of the battle of Manila
Bay reached Washington, the Treasury Department set a man to work
making a "Report on Financial and Industrial Conditions of the
Philippine Islands." [65] The Interior Department also awoke, about
the same time to possibilities of an El Dorado in the new overseas
conquest. "In May, 1898," says Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss,
in a letter intended for the Peace Commissioners who met at Paris
that fall, "by arrangement between the Secretary of War with this
Department"--Mr. Bliss's grammar is bad, but his meaning is plain--"a
geologist of the United States Geological Survey accompanied the
military expedition to the Philippines for the purpose of procuring
information touching the geological and mineral resources of said
islands." [66] This report, which accompanies the Bliss letter, reads
like a mining stock prospectus. That summer an Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury, presumably echoing the sentiments of the Administration,
came out in one of the great magazines of the period, the Century,
with an article in which he said: "We see with sudden clearness that
some of the most revered of our political maxims have outlived their
force. * * * A new mainspring * * * has become the directing force
* * * the mainspring of commercialism." [67] Of course, the writer did
not mention that Manila is an out-of-the-way place, so far as regards
the main-travelled routes across the Pacific Ocean, and also forgot
that, as has been suggested once before, the carrying trade of the
world, and the shippers on which it depends, in the contest of the
nations for the markets of Asia, would never take to the practice of
unloading at Manila by way of rehearsal, before finally discharging
cargo on the mainland of Asia, where the name of the Ultimate
Consumer is legion. Nevertheless "Expansion"--of Trade, mainly--was
the slogan of the hour, and any one who did not catch the contagion
of exuberant allusion to "Our New Possessions" was considered crusty
and out of date. People who referred back to the political maxims of
Washington's Farewell Address, and the cognate set represented by the
Monroe Doctrine, were regarded merely as not knowing a good thing
when they saw it. So on rode the country, on the crest of the wave
of war. When President McKinley sent the troops to the Philippines,
their job was to hurry up and effect what his subsequent message to
Congress describing their work called "the conquest of the Philippine
Islands." That is, they were to effect a constructive conquest of
the archipelago before Spain should sue for peace. It never seemed
to occur to anybody at home that the Filipinos would object. If the
country had, through some divine interposition, gotten it into its
head that the Filipinos were quite a decent lot and really did object
very bitterly, it would have risen in its wrath and smitten down any
suggestion of forcing a government on them against their will. But
nobody knew anything about them. They were a wholly new proposition.

General Anderson was of course furnished with a copy of the President's
instructions to his chief, General Merritt. They are quite long,
and go into details about a number of administrative matters that
would necessarily come up after the city should surrender, such as
the raising of revenue, the military commander's duty under the law
of nations with regard to the seizure of transportation lines by
land or sea, the protection of places of worship from desecration or
destruction, and the like. The only portion of them that is essential
to a clear understanding of subsequent events is now submitted:
They are dated Executive Mansion, May 18, 1898, and read in part [68]:


    PRESIDENT McKINLEY'S INSTRUCTIONS TO GENERAL MERRITT

    The destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila, followed by
    the taking of the naval station at Cavite, the paroling of the
    garrisons, and acquisition of control of the bay, have rendered
    it necessary, in the further prosecution of the measures adopted
    by this Government for the purpose of bringing about an honorable
    and durable peace with Spain, to send an army of occupation to the
    Philippines for the twofold purpose of completing the reduction of
    the Spanish power in that quarter, and of giving order and security
    to the islands while in the possession of the United States.

    For the command of this expedition I have designated Major-General
    Wesley Merritt, and it now becomes my duty to give instructions
    as to the manner in which the movements shall be conducted.

    The first effect of the military occupation of the enemy's
    territory is the severance of the former political relations of the
    inhabitants and the establishment of a new political power. Under
    this changed condition of things the inhabitants, so long as they
    perform their duties, are entitled to security in their persons
    and property and in all their private rights and relations. It is
    my desire that the people of the Philippines should be acquainted
    with the purpose of the United States to discharge to the fullest
    extent its obligations in this regard. It will therefore be
    the duty of the commander of the expedition, immediately upon
    his arrival in the islands, to publish a proclamation declaring
    that we come not to make war upon the people of the Philippines
    nor upon any party or faction among them, but to protect them
    in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal
    and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or
    by honest submission, co-operate with the United States in its
    efforts to give effect to this beneficent purpose will receive
    the reward of its support and protection. Our occupation should
    be as free from severity as possible. Though the powers of the
    military occupant are absolute and supreme and operate immediately
    upon the political condition of the inhabitants, the municipal
    laws of the conquered territory, such as affect private rights
    of persons and property and provide for the punishment of crime,
    are to be considered as continuing in force, so far as they are
    compatible with the new order of things, until they are suspended
    or superseded by the occupying belligerents; and in practice they
    are not usually abrogated, but are allowed to remain in force
    and to be administered by the ordinary tribunals substantially as
    they were before the occupation. This enlightened practice is, so
    far as possible, to be adhered to on the present occasion. * * *
    The freedom of the people to pursue their accustomed occupations
    will be abridged only when it may be necessary to do so.

    While the rule of conduct of the American commander-in-chief will
    be such as has just been defined, it will be his duty to adopt
    measures of a different kind if, unfortunately, the course of the
    people should render such measures indispensable to the maintenance
    of law and order. He will then possess the power to replace or
    expel the native officials in part or altogether, to substitute
    new courts of his own constitution for those that now exist, or
    to create such supplementary tribunals as may be necessary. In
    the exercise of these high powers the commander must be guided
    by his judgment and experience and a high sense of justice.


While this document declares the purpose of our government to be a "two
fold purpose," viz., first, to make an appropriate move in the game
of war, and, second, to police the Islands "while in the possession
of the United States," it is wholly free from inherent evidence of any
intention out of harmony with the policy as to Cuba. In fact when the
city of Santiago de Cuba surrendered to our forces in July thereafter,
and it became necessary to issue instructions for the guidance of the
military commander there, exactly the same instructions were given him,
[69] verbatim et literatim. But in respect of the Cuban instructions
there was never any concealment practised or necessary because the
Cubans had been assured by the Teller amendment to the resolutions
declaring war against Spain that we had no ulterior designs on their
country, and that, as soon as peace and public order were restored,
we intended "to leave the government and control of the island to its
people." The Cuban instructions were therefore frankly and promptly
published in General Orders No. 101 by the War Department, July 18,
1898, five days after they were received from the President, and
were then translated into Spanish and spread broadcast over Santiago
province without unnecessary delay. I remember poring over a Spanish
copy of General Orders 101, at Santiago de Cuba, shortly after the
fall of that city, which copy was one of many already posted about
that city by direction of General Wood. The words "the powers of the
military occupant are absolute and supreme and operate immediately
upon the political condition of the inhabitants" never disturbed the
Cuban leaders in the least, because they were read in the light of the
disclaimer contained in the declaration of war. On the other hand,
the proclamation which the military commander in the Philippines
was enjoined by his instructions to publish "immediately upon his
arrival in the islands," which arrival occurred July 25th, was not so
published until after we had taken Manila, August 13th, and then it
copied only the glittering generalities of the instructions themselves,
such as the part assuring the people that we had not come to make war
on them and that vested rights would be respected, but it carefully
omitted the words about the powers of the military occupant being
absolute and supreme, because when the army arrived it found a native
government that had already issued its declaration of independence,
was making wonderful progress against the common enemy, and was able
to put up a right good fight against us also, in case we should deny
them independence. [70]

General Anderson arrived in Manila Bay, June 30, 1898, with about
2500 men, and when General Merritt arrived, July 25th, we had about
10,000 all told, while the Filipinos had half again that many, and
there were 12,000 Spanish soldiers in Manila. General Anderson had not
been long camped on the bayshore, under cover of the Navy's guns and
in the neighborhood of Aguinaldo's headquarters, before he understood
the whole situation clearly and wrote the War Department as follows:


    Since reading the President's instructions to General Merritt,
    I think I should state to you that the establishment of a
    provisional government on our part will probably bring us in
    conflict with insurgents.


This letter is dated July 18, 1898. [71]

When General Anderson arrived in the islands on June 30th,
the Washington Government was still wrestling with the angel of
its announced creed about "Forcible Annexation" being "criminal
aggression," and Mr. McKinley had to get both that angel's shoulders on
the mat and put him out of business before he could get his own consent
to giving any instructions to his generals which might sanction their
killing people for objecting to forcible annexation. Hence his early
anxiety to avoid a rupture with the Filipino leaders. The first stage
of this wrestling coincides in point of time with General Anderson's
tenure as the ranking military officer commanding our forces in
the Philippines, which was from June 30th until the date of General
Merritt's arrival, July 25th. As already made plain, the President's
instructions for the guidance of the military commander were entirely
free from any land-grabbing suggestion. On the other hand, when General
Anderson left San Francisco for Manila, May 25th, there was already
talk in the United States about retaining the Islands, if they were
captured, for he so informed Admiral Dewey in the first interview
they had after the transports which brought his command cast anchor
near our squadron in Manila Bay on the last day of June. "I was the
first to tell Admiral Dewey," says he, in the North American Review
for February, 1900, "that there was any disposition on the part of the
American people to hold the Philippines, if they were captured. The
current opinion was setting that way when the expeditionary force
left San Francisco, but this the Admiral had no reason to surmise."

Relegated by the circumstances to his own discretion as to how he
should act until Washington knew its mind, General Anderson's attitude
in the outset represented a "peace-at-any-price" policy, suffused
with benevolent pride at championing the cause of the oppressed, but
secretly knowing from the beginning that it might become necessary
later to slaughter said "oppressed," should they seriously object to
a change of masters.

"On July 1st," says General Anderson, in the North American Review
article above quoted, "I called on Aguinaldo with Admiral Dewey." Of
the Admiral's dealings with the insurgent chief prior to this time,
the General says in this same article:

"Whether Admiral Dewey and Consuls Pratt, Wildman, and Williams did
or did not give Aguinaldo assurances that a Filipino government would
be recognized, the Filipinos certainly thought so, probably inferring
this from their acts rather than from their statements." This last
quoted passage was read to Admiral Dewey by a member of the Senate
Committee in 1902, along with other parts of the magazine article
cited, and he was asked to comment on the same. He said:

"These are General Anderson's statements. They are very interesting,
indeed; I am here to make my own statements."

He had stated that he never did specifically promise Aguinaldo
independence, and the questioner was trying to show that his acts had
amounted to assurances and therefore had committed the Government to
giving the Filipinos their independence. Then Senator Patterson began
another question, and had gotten as far as "I want to know whether
your views--" when out came this, as of a sailor-man clearing decks
for action:

"I do not like your questions a bit. I did not like them yesterday and
I do not like them to-day." So the Admiral's feelings were respected
and the question was not pressed. There is no doubt at all that in
the Philippines in the summer of 1898 the army turned the back of its
hand to Aguinaldo as soon as it got there and baldly repudiated what
the navy had done in the way of befriending the Filipinos. But both
had acted under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army
and Navy--the President. The Admiral's sensitiveness on the subject
ought to have been respected. And it was.

By the time Admiral Dewey and General Anderson decided to call on
"Don Emilio," the day after the General's arrival, the unexpected
intimations which the latter brought, as to the Washington programme
for the Philippine revolutionists being different from that as to Cuba,
had begun to get in its work on the former. Not being a politician,
the gallant Admiral was there ready and able to carry out any orders
his government might send him, whenever the politicians should decide
what they wanted to do. But in the absence of orders, he began to
trim his sails a bit, so as to be prepared for whatever might be the
policy. Accordingly, before he and the General started out to pay their
call on "Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, President of the Revolutionary
Government of the Philippines and General in Chief of its Army"--as he
had styled himself in his proclamation of June 23d,--the Admiral said,
"Do not take your sword or put on your uniform, but just put on your
blouse. Do not go with any ceremony." And says he, in telling this, "We
went in that way." [72] The reason of thus avoiding too much ceremony
toward our "ally" claiming to represent an existing government which
had lately declared its independence, is explained by an expression
of the Admiral's concerning said Declaration of Independence itself:
"That was my idea, not taking it seriously." At that same hearing the
Admiral explained with much genuine feeling that from the day of the
naval battle of May 1st until the arrival of the army "these great
questions" were coming up constantly and he simply met them as they
arose by acting on his best judgment on the spot at the time. But what
a terrible mistake it was not to take that Declaration of Independence
of June 23d, seriously, backed as it was by an army of 15,000 men
flushed with victory, and under the absolute control of the author of
the Declaration! Of course the Declaration had been published to the
army. Could its author have checked them by repudiating it even if
he had wanted to? As Aguinaldo himself expressed what would happen in
such a contingency, "They would fail to recognize me as the interpreter
of their aspirations and would punish me as a traitor, replacing me
by another more careful of his own honor and dignity." [73]

This Dewey-Anderson call on Aguinaldo was on July 1st. Admiral Dewey
now began to foresee that the Washington programme was going to
put him in an awkward position. So he began to take Aguinaldo more
seriously. On July 4th, he wired Washington: "Aguinaldo proclaimed
himself President of the Revolutionary Republic on July 1st." [74]
It was on July 7th that Admiral Dewey captured 1300 armed Spanish
prisoners, the garrison of Isla la Grande, off Olongapo, and turned
them over to the forces of the Aguinaldo government because he had
no way to keep them. [75] Was not that taking that government a
bit seriously? How wholly unauthorized by the facts was this of "not
taking it seriously," on the part of "The Liberator of the Filipinos,"
[76] the immortal victor of Manila Bay, who two months before had
taught the nation the magnitude of its power for good, in a cause as
righteous as the crusades of old, and more sensible!

But to return to General Anderson's account in the North American
Review of his call, with Admiral Dewey, on the insurgent chief: "He
asked me at once whether the 'United States of the North' either had,
or would recognize his government. I am not quite sure as to the form
of the question, whether it was 'had' or 'would'? In either form it was
embarrassing." General Anderson then tells of Aguinaldo's returning
his call: "A few days thereafter he made an official call, coming
with cabinet, staff, and band. He asked if we, the North Americans,
as he called us, intended to hold the Philippines as dependencies. I
said I could not answer that, but that in 122 years we had established
no colonies. He then made this remarkable statement: 'I have studied
attentively the Constitution of the United States, and I find in it no
authority for colonies, and I have no fear.'" General Anderson adds:
"It may seem that my answer was evasive, but I was at the time trying
to contract with the Filipinos for horses, fuel, and forage."

While this history must not lapse into an almanac, it may not be
amiss to follow these early stages of this matter through a few more
successive dates, because the history of that period was all indelibly
branded into Filipino memory shortly afterward with the red-hot iron
of war.

July 4th, General Anderson writes the Filipino candidate for
Independence inviting him to "co-operate with us in military operations
against the Spanish forces." [77] This was written not to arrange
any plan of co-operation but in order to get room about Cavite as a
military base without a row. In his North American Review article
General Anderson says that on that same day, the Fourth of July,
Aguinaldo was invited to witness a parade and review "in honor of
our national holiday." "He did not come," says the article, "because
he was not invited as President but as General Aguinaldo." An odd
situation, was it not? Here was a man claiming to be President of a
newly established republic based on the principles set forth in our
Declaration of Independence, which republic had just issued a like
Declaration, and he was invited to come and hear our declaration read,
and declined because we would not recognize his right to assert the
same truths. On subsequent anniversaries of the day in the Philippines
it was deemed wise simply to prohibit the reading of our Declaration
before gatherings of the Filipino people. It saved discussion.

July 6th, General Anderson writes telling Aguinaldo that he is
expecting more troops soon and therefore "I would like to have your
excellency's advice and co-operation." [78]

July 9th, General Anderson writes the War Department that Aguinaldo
tells him he has about 15,000 fighting men, 11,000 armed with guns,
and some 4000 prisoners, [79] and adds: "When we first landed he
seemed very suspicious, and not at all friendly but I have now come
to a better understanding with him and he is much more friendly and
seems willing to co-operate."

July 13th, we find Admiral Dewey also still in a co-operative mood. On
that day he cables the Navy Department of the capture of the 1,300
prisoners on July 7th, mentioned above, which capture was made, it
appears, because Aguinaldo complained to him that a German war-ship
was interfering with his operations, [80] the prisoners being at once
turned over to Aguinaldo, as stated above.

July 18th, is the date of the letter to the War Department
in which General Anderson states that the establishment of a
provisional government by us will probably mean a conflict with the
insurgents. This was equivalent to saying that they will probably be
ready to fight whenever we assert the "absolute and supreme" authority
that the President's instructions had directed to be asserted by the
army as soon as it should arrive in the Philippines. Yet in the fall
of 1899, President McKinley said he "never dreamed" that Aguinaldo's
"little band" would oppose our rule to the extent of war against it. It
would have been more accurate if the martyred Christian gentleman
who used those words had said he "always hoped" they would not,
instead of "never dreamed" they would. This letter of July 18th,
informs the Department:


    Aguinaldo has declared himself dictator and self-appointed
    president. He has declared martial law and promulgated a minute
    method of procedure under it.


July 19th, General Anderson sends Major (now Major-General) J. F. Bell,
to Aguinaldo, and asks of him a number of favors, such as any
soldier may properly ask of an ally, for example, permission to see
his military maps, etc., and that Aguinaldo "place at his [Bell's]
disposal any information you may have on the above subjects, and also
give him [Bell] a letter or pass addressed to your subordinates which
will authorize them to furnish him any information they can * * *
and to facilitate his passage along the lines, upon a reconnaissance
around Manila, on which I propose to send him." [81] All of which
Aguinaldo did.

Military training is very keen on honor. Talk about what the French
call foi d'officier,--the "word of an officer"! Did ever a letter from
one soldier to another more completely commit the faith and honor of
his government, to recognition of the existence of an alliance? "In
122 years we have established no colonies," he had told Aguinaldo. "It
looks like we are about to go into the colonizing business," he had,
in effect, said to Admiral Dewey, about the same time.

July 21st, General Anderson writes the Adjutant-General of the army
as follows:


    Since I last wrote, Aguinaldo has put in operation an elaborate
    system of military government. * * * It may seem strange that I
    have made no formal protest against his proclamation as dictator,
    his declaration of martial law, etc. I wrote such a protest but
    did not publish it at Admiral Dewey's request. [82]


When he wrote this letter, General Anderson was evidently beginning
to have some compunctions about the trouble he now saw ahead. He was
a veteran of the Civil War, whose gallantry had then been proven on
many a field against an enemy compared with whom these people would
be a picnic. But things did not look to the grim old hero like there
was going to be a square deal. So he put this in the letter:


    I submit, with all deference, that we have heretofore underrated
    the natives. They are not ignorant savage tribes, but have
    a civilization of their own, and although insignificant in
    appearance are fierce fighters and for a tropical people they are
    industrious. A small detail of natives will do more work than a
    regiment of volunteers.


Of course, this slam at "volunteers" was a bit rough. But the
battle-scarred veteran's sense of fair play was getting on his
nerves. He foresaw the coming conflict, and though he did not shirk it,
he did not relish it. He understood the "game," and it seemed to him
the cards were stacked, to meet the necessity of demonstrating that
forcible annexation, instead of being criminal aggression, was merely
Trade Expansion, and that his government was right then irrevocably
committing itself, without any knowledge of, or acquaintance with,
the Filipinos, to the assumption that they were incapable of running
a government of their own.

The next day, July 22d, General Anderson wrote Aguinaldo a letter
advising him that he was without orders as yet concerning the question
of recognizing his government. But that this letter was neither a
protest nor in the nature of a protest, is evident from its text:


    I observe that Your Excellency has announced yourself dictator
    and proclaimed martial law. As I am here simply in a military
    capacity, I have no authority to recognize such an assumption. I
    have no orders from my government on the subject. [83]


Yet General Anderson's letter to the Adjutant-General of the army
of July 18th [84] uses the words "since reading the President's
instructions to General Merritt," etc., showing that he had a copy
of them; and those instructions order and direct (see ante) that
as soon as the commanding general of the American troops arrives
he is to let the Filipinos know that "the powers of the military
occupant are absolute and supreme and immediately operate upon the
political condition of the inhabitants." A charitable view of the
matter would be that, technically, those were Merritt's orders,
not Anderson's. But the whole scheme was to conceal the intention
to assume supreme authority and keep Aguinaldo quiet "until," as
General Merritt afterwards expressed it in his report, "I should be
in possession of the city of Manila, * * * as I would not until then
be in a position to * * * enforce my authority, in the event that his
[Aguinaldo's] pretensions should clash with my designs." [85]

The same day that General Anderson wrote Aguinaldo his billet doux
about the dictatorship, viz., July 22d, he cabled Washington a much
franker and more serious message; which read: "Aguinaldo declares
dictatorship and martial law over all islands. The people expect
independence." The very next day, July 23d, he wrote Aguinaldo asking
his assistance in getting five hundred horses, and fifty oxen and
ox-carts, and manifesting considerable impatience that he had not
already complied with a similar request previously made "as it was
to fight in the cause of your people." [86] The following day, July
24th, replying to General Anderson's letter of the 22d wherein General
Anderson had advised him that he was as yet without orders concerning
the question of recognizing his government, Aguinaldo wrote:


    It is true that my government has not been acknowledged by any
    of the foreign powers, but we expected that the great North
    American nation, which had struggled first for its independence,
    and afterwards for the abolition of slavery, and is now actually
    struggling for the independence of Cuba, would look upon it with
    greater benevolence than any other nation. [87]


That cablegram of July 22d, above quoted, in which the commanding
general of our forces in the Philippines advises the Washington
government, "The people expect independence," is the hardest thing in
the published archives of our government covering that momentous period
for those who love the memory of Mr. McKinley to get around. [88] After
the war with the Filipinos broke out Mr. McKinley said repeatedly in
public speeches, "I never dreamed they would turn against us." You do
not find the Anderson cablegram of July 22d in the published report of
the War Department covering the period under consideration. General
Anderson addressed it to the Secretary of War and signed it, and,
probably for lack of army cable facilities, got Admiral Dewey to send
it to the Secretary of the Navy for transmission to the Secretary of
War. [89] Certain it must be that at some Cabinet meeting on or after
July 22, 1898, either the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of War
read in the hearing of the President and the rest of his advisers that
message from General Anderson, "The people expect independence." The
object here is not to inveigh against Mr. McKinley. It is to show
that, as Gibbon told us long ago, in speaking of the discontent of
far distant possessions and the lack of hold of the possessor on the
affections of the inhabitants thereof, "the cry of remote distress
is ever faintly heard." The average American to-day, if told the
Filipinos want independence, will give the statement about the same
consideration Mr. McKinley did then, and if told that the desire
among them for a government of their people by their people for their
people has not been diminished since the late war by tariff taxation
without representation, and the steady development of race prejudice
between the dominant alien race and the subject one, he will begin
to realize by personal experience how faintly the uttered longings
of a whole people may fall on distant ears.

We saw above that in a letter written July 21st, the day before the
telegram about the "people expect independence," which letter must
have reached Washington within thirty days, General Anderson not
only notified Washington all about Aguinaldo's government and its
pretensions, but stated that at the request of Admiral Dewey he had
made no protest against it. [90] Yet straight on through the period
of General Merritt's sojourn in the Islands, which began July 25th,
and terminated August 29th, we find no protest ordered by Washington,
and we further find the purpose of the President as announced in
the instructions to Merritt, "The powers of the military occupant
are absolute and supreme" throughout the Islands, not only not
communicated to the Filipino people, but deliberately suppressed
from the proclamation published by General Merritt pursuant to those
instructions. [91]

Comments and conclusions are usually impertinent and unwelcome save as
mere addenda to facts, but in the light of the facts derivable from
our own official records, is it any wonder that General Anderson,
a gallant veteran of the Civil War, and perhaps the most conspicuous
figure of the early fighting in the Philippines, delivered an address
some time after he came back home before the Oregon Commandery of
the Loyal Legion of the United States [92] on the subject, "Should
republics have colonies?" and answered the question emphatically "No!"






CHAPTER IV

MERRITT AND AGUINALDO

                    There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

                                           Julius Cæsar, Act IV., Sc. 2.


Major-General Wesley Merritt's account of the operations of the troops
under his command in the First Expedition to the Philippines may be
found in volume i., part 2, War Department Report for 1898. He left
San Francisco accompanied by his staff, June 29, 1898, arrived at
Cavite, Manila Bay, July 25th, received the surrender of the city of
Manila August 13th, and sailed thence August 30th, in obedience to
orders from Washington to proceed without unnecessary delay to Paris,
France, for conference with the Peace Commissioners. According to
General Merritt's report, about the time he arrived Aguinaldo had
some 12,000 men under arms, with plenty of ammunition, and a number
of field-pieces. The late lamented Frank D. Millet has preserved for
us, in his Expedition to the Philippines, some valuable and intimate
studies of this army of Filipino besiegers whom our troops found
busily at work when they arrived in the Islands:


    It was an interesting sight at Camp Dewey to see the insurgents
    strolling to and from the front. Pretty much all day long they
    were coming and going, never in military formation, but singly,
    and in small groups, perfectly clean and tidy in dress, often
    accompanied by their wives and children, and all chatting as
    merrily as if they were going off on a pigeon shoot. The men who
    sold fish and vegetables in camp in the morning would be seen
    every day or two dressed in holiday garments, with rifle and
    cartridge boxes, strolling off to take their turn at the Spaniards.


The reader will readily understand that there were many times as many
volunteers as guns. Mr. Millet continues:


    When they had been at the front twenty-four hours they were
    relieved and returned home for a rest. They generally passed
    their rifles and equipments on to another man and thus a limited
    number of weapons served to arm a great many besiegers. They had
    no distinctive uniform, the only badge of service being a red
    and blue cockade with a white triangle bearing the Malay symbol
    of the sun and three stars, and sometimes a red and blue band
    pinned diagonally across the lower part of the left sleeve. * * *
    Many of them * * * had belonged to the native volunteer force.
    * * * The recruits were soon hammered into shape by the veterans
    of the rank and file. * * * Their men were perfectly obedient
    to orders * * * and they made the most devoted soldiers. There
    was no visible Commissary or Quartermaster's Departments, but
    the insurgent force was always supplied with food and ammunition
    and there was no lack of transportation. The food issued at the
    front was mostly rice brought up in carromatas to within a few
    hundred yards of the trenches, when it was cooked by the women.
    * * * Each man had a double handful of rice, sometimes enriched
    by a small proportion of meat and fish, which was served him in
    a square of plantain leaf. Thus he was unencumbered with a plate
    or knife or fork and threw away his primitive but excellent dish
    when he had "licked the platter clean." It was noticeable that
    the insurgents carried no water bottles nor haversacks, and no
    equipments indeed, but cartridge boxes. They did not seem to be
    worried by thirst like our men.


"Although insignificant in appearance, they are fierce fighters," wrote
General Anderson to the Adjutant-General of the army in July. [93]

General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo had "proclaimed an
independent government, republican in form, with himself as President,
and at the time of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice
of executive and legislative departments had been accomplished, at
least on paper." [94] Of course at that time we were still officially
declining to take Filipino aspirations for independence seriously,
and preferred to treat Aguinaldo's government as purely a matter of
stationery. As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the
official documents of that period, made with a view of ascertaining
just how much of that Aguinaldo government of 1898 was stationery
fiction and how much was stable fact, has absolutely surprised one
man who was out there from 1899 to 1905 (the writer), and I have no
doubt will be interesting, as mere matter of political necrology,
to any American who was there "in the days of the empire" as the
"ninety-niners" called it.

Early in the spring of 1899, Mr. McKinley sent out the Commission of
which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman, to try to
stop the war. They bent themselves to the task in a spirit as kindly
as that in which we know Mr. McKinley himself would have acted. They
failed because the war was already on and the Filipinos were bent on
fighting for independence to the bitter end. But they learned a good
deal about the facts of the earlier situation. Speaking of these in
their report to the President [95] with especial reference to the
period beginning with Aguinaldo's landing at Cavite in May, after
describing how the Filipino successes in battle with the Spaniards
finally resulted in all of them being driven into Manila, where they
remained hemmed in, they say:


    While the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the
    Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire island
    except that city.


"For three and one half months," says General Otis in describing
the facts of this same situation a year later, "the insurgents on
land had kept Manila tightly bottled [meaning while Admiral Dewey
had been blockading the place by water] * * * and food supplies were
exhausted." [96] "We had Manila and Cavite. The rest of the island
was held not by the Spanish but by the Filipinos," said General
Anderson, in the North American Review for February, 1900. "It is a
fact that they were in possession, they had gotten pretty much the
whole thing except Manila," said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee
in 1902. [97]

General Merritt took Manila August 13th, and sailed away for Paris
August 31st, and only a week after that General Otis wired Washington
(under date of September 7th) from Manila: "Insurgents have captured
all Spanish garrisons in island [of Luzon] and control affairs outside
of Cavite and this city." [98]

The recruiting by Aguinaldo of an army of 40,000 men with guns
within one hundred days after his little "Return from Elba"--"15,000
fighting men, 11,000 of them armed with guns," in fifty days, [99]
which number had swelled to nearly 40,000 men with guns in another
fifty days (by August 29th) [100]--is no more remarkable than his
progress in organizing his government and making its grip on the
whole island of Luzon effective in a short space of time.

As all Americans who know the Filipinos know how fond they are of what
government offices call "paper work," and how their escribientes [101]
can work like bees in drafting documents, it might be easy to ignore
Aguinaldo's various proclamations, already hereinbefore noticed in
Chapter II., as representing merely "a government on paper," were
there no other proof. But among the insurgent captured papers we
found long afterward, there is a document containing the minutes of
a convention of the insurrecto presidentes from all the pueblos of
fifteen different provinces, on August 6, 1898, which throws a flood
of light on the subject now under consideration. [102] This convention
was held at Bacoor, then Aguinaldo's headquarters, a little town on
the bay shore between Manila and Cavite. The minutes of the convention
recite that its members had been previously chosen as presidentes
of their respective pueblos in the manner prescribed by previous
decrees issued by Aguinaldo (already noticed), and that thereafter
they had taken the oath of office before Aguinaldo as President of the
government, etc. They then declare that the Filipino people whom they
speak for are "not ambitious for power, nor honors, nor riches, aside
from the rational aspirations for a free and independent life," and
"proclaim solemnly, in the face of the whole world, the Independence
of the Philippines." They also re-affirm allegiance to Aguinaldo as
President of the government and request him to seek recognition of it
at the hands of the Powers, "because," says the paper, "to no one is it
permitted to * * * stifle the legitimate aspirations of a people"--as
if Europe cared a rap what we did to them except in the way of regret
that it did not have a finger in the pie. However, they were not only
apprehensive, on the one hand, lest we might be tempted to take their
country away from Spain for ourselves, but also, on the other hand,
lest we might in the wind-up decide to leave them to Spain at the end
of the war. That this last was not an idle fear is shown by the fact
that during the deliberations of the Paris Peace Commission, Judge
Gray urged, in behalf of his contention against taking the islands
at all, that if Dewey had sunk the Spanish fleet off Cadiz, instead
of in Manila Bay, and the Carlists had incidentally helped us about
that time, we would have been under no resulting obligation "to stay
by them at the conclusion of the war." [103] When the presidentes in
convention assembled as aforesaid got through with their whereases and
resolutions they presented them to His Excellency the President of the
Republic, Aguinaldo, who then issued a proclamation which recited,
among other things: "In these provinces [the fifteen represented
in the convention] complete order and perfect tranquillity reign,
administered by the authorities elected" [104] according to his
previous decrees as Dictator, which decrees have already been placed
before the reader. The proclamation claims that the new government
has 9,000 prisoners of war and 30,000 combatants. The former claim
no one having any acquaintance with those times and conditions
will question for a moment. As to the 30,000 combatants, if he had
11,000 men armed with guns on July 9th and 40,000 on August 29th,
why not 30,000 on August 6th? Of course, men without guns, bolo men,
do not count for much in a serious connection like this now being
considered. In November, 1899, at San José, in Nueva Ecija province,
I heard General Lawton tell Colonel Jack Hayes to disarm and turn
loose 175 bolo men the colonel had just captured and was lining up on
the public square as we rode into the town. But we are considering how
much of a government the Filipinos had in 1898, because the answer is
pertinent to what sort of a government they could run if permitted now
or at any time in the future; and, physical force being the ultimate
basis of stability in all government, when we come to estimate how much
of an army they had when their government was claiming recognition as a
legitimate living thing, we must remember that "It was just a question
of arming them. They could have had the whole population." [105]

Now the great significant fact about this Bacoor convention of
presidentes of August 6th--a week before Manila surrendered to our
forces--is that in it more than half the population of the island of
Luzon was represented. The total population of the Philippines is
about 7,600,000, [106] and, of these, one-half, or 3,800,000 [107]
live on Luzon. The other islands may be said to dangle from Luzon
like the tail of a kite. Taking the tables of the American census
of the Philippines of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123), as a basis on which
to judge what Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th amounted to if true,
the population of the provinces thus duly incorporated into the new
government and in working order on that date, was, in round numbers,
about as follows: South of Manila:--Cavite, 135,000; Batangas, 260,000;
Laguna, 150,000; Tayabas, 150,000; North of Manila:--Bulacan, 225,000;
Pampamga, 225,000; Nueva Ecija, 135,000; Tarlac, 135,000; Pangasinan,
400,000; Union, 140,000; Bataan, 45,000; Zambales, 105,000. This
represents a total of more than 2,000,000 of people.

But Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th are not the only evidence as to
the political status of the provinces of Luzon in August, 1898. Toward
the end of that month, Maj. J. F. Bell, Chief of General Merritt's
Bureau of Military Information, made a report on the situation as
it stood August 29th, the report being made after most careful
investigation, and intended as a summary of the then situation
according to the most reliable information obtainable, in order that
General Merritt might know, as far as practicable, what he would be
"up against" in the event of trouble with the insurgents. [108]

This report not only corroborates Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th,
but it also concedes to the Aguinaldo people eight other important
provinces--four south of the Pasig River with a total population of
about 630,000, [109] the only four of southern Luzon not included in
Aguinaldo's claim of August 6th, thus conceding him practically all
of Luzon south of the Pasig; and it furthermore concedes him four
great provinces of northern Luzon with a total population of nearly
600,000. [110] General Bell states that these last are "still in the
possession of the Spanish," but practically certain to be with the
insurgents in the very near future. "Insurgents have been dispatched
to attack the Spanish in these provinces," says the Bell report.

In this same report Major Bell said: "There is not a particle of doubt
but what Aguinaldo and his leaders will resist any attempt of any
government to reorganize a colonial government here." [111] When the
insurgent government was finally dislodged from its last capital and
Aguinaldo became a fugitive hotly pursued by our troops, he started
for the mountains of northern Luzon, passing through provinces he
had never visited before. The diary of one of his staff officers,
Major Villa, in describing a brief stop they made in a town en route
(Aringay, in Union province) says: "After the honorable President
had urged them [the townspeople] to be patriotic, we continued the
march." [112] They certainly did "continue the march." The Maccabebe
scouts, of which the writer commanded a company at the time, took
the town a few hours later, Aguinaldo's rear-guard retiring after
a brief resistance, following which we found, among the dead in the
trenches, a major other than Villa. Certainly, to read this little
extract from the diary of Aguinaldo's retreat is to feel the pulse
of northern Luzon as to its loyalty to the revolution at that time,
and is corroborative of these claims of Aguinaldo made in August,
1898, supplemented, as we have seen them, by General Bell's appraisal.

As to the political conditions which prevailed in southern Luzon,
particularly in the Camarines, in August and the fall of 1898,
information derived from one who was there then would seem appropriate
here. Major Blanton Winship, Judge Advocate's Corps, U. S. A., Major
Archibald W. Butt, the late lamented military aide to President Taft,
and the writer, lived together in Manila, in 1900, at the house of a
Spanish physician, a Dr. Lopez, who had been a "prisoner" at Nueva
Caceres, a town situated in one of the provinces of southern Luzon
(Camarines) in the fall of 1898. Dr. Lopez had a large family. They had
also been "prisoners" down there. No evil befell them at the hands of
their "captors." They had the freedom of the town they were in. They
had good reason to be pretty well scared as to what the insurgents
might do to them. But they were never maltreated. The main impression
we got from Dr. Lopez and his family was that the political grip of
the Aguinaldo government on southern Luzon was complete during the
time they were "prisoners" there. If anybody doubts the absoluteness
of the grip of the Revolutionary government on the situation in the
provinces which were represented at the Bacoor convention of August 6,
1898, above mentioned, when the Filipino Declaration of Independence
was signed and proclaimed, let him ask any American who had a part
in putting down the Philippine insurrection what a presidente, an
insurrecto presidente, in a Filipino town, was in 1899 and 1900. He
was "the whole thing." Even to-day the presidente of a pueblo is as
absolute boss of his town as Charles F. Murphy is of Tammany Hall. And
a town or pueblo in the Philippines is more than an area covered
by more or less contiguous buildings and grounds. It is more like a
township in Massachusetts. So that when you account governmentally for
the pueblos of a given province, you account for every square foot of
that province and for every man in it. For several years before our war
with Spain, nearly every Filipino of any education and spirit in the
archipelago belonged to the secret revolutionary society known as the
Katipunan. This had its organization in every town when Dewey sank the
Spanish fleet and landed Aguinaldo at Cavite. The rest may be imagined.

By September, 1898, Aguinaldo was absolute master of the whole of
Luzon. Before the Treaty of Paris was signed (December 10, 1898), in
fact while Judge Gray of the Peace Commission was cabling President
McKinley that not to leave the government of the Philippines to the
people thereof "would be to make a mockery of instructions," Aguinaldo
had become equally absolute master of the situation throughout the
rest of the archipelago outside of Manila.

Toward the end of July, 1898, our Manila Consul, Mr. Williams, who
was one of our consular triumvirate of would-be Warwicks, or "original
Aguinaldo men," of 1898, used to have nice talks with Aguinaldo about
the lion and the lamb lying down together without the lion eating the
lamb, and in one instance, at least, he goes so far as to represent
Aguinaldo as willing to some such arrangement--e. g., annexation, or
some vague scheme of dependence. But whenever we hear from Aguinaldo
over his own signature, we hear him saying whatever means in Tagalo
"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." For instance, at page 15, of Senate
Document 208, he writes Williams, under date of August 1st, with
fine courtesy:


    I congratulate you with all sincerity on the acuteness and
    ingenuity which you have displayed in painting in an admirable
    manner the benefits which, especially for me and my leaders, and
    in general for all my compatriots, would be secured by the union of
    these islands with the United States of America. Ah! that picture,
    so happy and so finished * * * This is not saying that I am not
    of your opinion * * * You say all this and yet more will result
    from annexing ourselves to your people * * * You are my friend
    and the friend of the Filipinos and have said it. But why should
    we say it? Will my people believe it? * * * I have done what they
    desire, establishing a government * * * not only because it was my
    duty, but also because had I acted in any other manner they would
    fail to recognize me as the interpreter of their aspirations,
    and would punish me as a traitor, replacing me by another more
    careful of his own honor and dignity.


Now that we know what was in the Filipino mind when General Merritt
arrived in the Philippines, let us see what was in the American
military mind out there at the same time. Says General Merritt:
"General Aguinaldo did not visit me on my arrival nor offer his
services as a subordinate leader." We trust the reason of this
at once suggests itself from what has preceded, including General
Anderson's dealings with the insurgent chief. The latter wanted some
understanding as to what the intentions of our government were, and
what was to be the programme afterward, should he and his countrymen
assist in the little fighting that now remained necessary to complete
the taking of Manila. Those intentions were precisely what Merritt
was determined to conceal. "As my instructions from the President
fully contemplated the occupation of the Islands by the American
land forces, and stated that 'the powers of the military occupant
are absolute and supreme and immediately operate upon the political
condition of the inhabitants,' I did not consider it wise to hold any
direct communication with the insurgent leader until I should be in
possession of the city of Manila." [113]

On one occasion General Merritt passed through the village of Bacoor
where Aguinaldo had his headquarters, but, says Mr. Millet [114]
in mentioning this, "They never met." After the taking of the city,
General Merritt remembered that with some 13,000 Spanish prisoners
to guard, and a city of 300,000 people, all but a sprinkling of whom
were in sympathy with the insurgent cause, on his hands, and an army
of at least 14,000 insurgents--probably far more than that--clamoring
without the gates of that city, and only 10,000 men of his own with
whom to handle such a situation, frankness was out of the question,
in view of his orders from the President. [115] Therefore, on the day
after the city surrendered, General Merritt issued a proclamation,
copying [116] verbatim from Mr. McKinley's instructions (ante)
such innocuous milk-and-water passages as the one which assured the
people that our government "has not come to wage war upon them * * *
but to protect them in their homes, in their employments, and in their
personal and religious rights; all persons who, by active aid or honest
submission, co-operate with the United States * * * will receive the
reward of its support and protection." But he carefully omitted the
words quoted above about the powers of the military occupant being
absolute and supreme, "lest his [Aguinaldo's] pretensions," to use
General Merritt's expression, "should clash with my designs." "For
these reasons," says General Merritt (p. 40), "the preparations for
the attack on the city were * * * conducted without reference to the
situation of the insurgent forces."

Here General Merritt is speaking frankly but not accurately. He means
he made his preparations without any more reference to the situation
of the insurgent forces than he could help. As a matter of fact,
their situation bothered him a good deal. They were in the way. For
instance, there was a whole brigade of them at one point between
our people and Manila. "This," says General Merritt (p. 41), "was
overcome by instructions to General Greene to arrange if possible
with the insurgent brigade commander in his immediate vicinity to
move to the right and allow the American forces unobstructed control
of the roads in their immediate front. No objection was made,"
etc. That reads very well--that about "arrange if possible," "no
objection was made," etc.,--does it not? Nothing there through which
"the lustre and the moral strength" of the motives that prompted the
Spanish war might be "dimmed by ulterior designs which might tempt
us," [117] is there? It was stated above that General Merritt was
speaking frankly in this report. He was. He probably did not know how
General Greene carried out the order to "arrange if possible with the
insurgent brigadier-commander." But it so happened that there was a
newspaper correspondent along with General Greene who has since told
us. This gentleman was Mr. Frank D. Millet, from whom we have already
above quoted, the correspondent of the London Times and of Harper's
Weekly. General Greene had known him years before in the campaigns of
the Turco-Russian war. Mr. Millet had been a war correspondent in those
campaigns also, and General Greene was there taking observations. So
that in the operations against Manila, Mr. Millet, being an old friend
of General Greene's, known to be a handy man to have around in a close
place, was acting as a civilian volunteer aide to the general. [118]
Here is Mr. Millet's account of what happened, taken from his book,
The Expedition to the Philippines:


    On the afternoon of the 28th [of July, 1898], General Greene
    received a verbal message from General Merritt suggesting that
    he juggle the insurgents out of part of their lines, always on
    his own responsibility, and without committing in any way the
    commanding general to any recognition of the native leaders
    or opening up the prospect of an alliance. This General Greene
    accomplished very cleverly.


Mr. Millet then goes on to tell how General Greene persuaded one
of Aguinaldo's generals (Noriel) to evacuate certain trenches so he
(Greene) could occupy them, "with a condition attached that General
Greene must give a written receipt for the entrenchments." This
condition, Mr. Millet says, was imposed by "the astute leader"
(Aguinaldo). General Greene's "cleverness" consisted in purposely
failing and omitting to give the receipt, which Mr. Millet says
"looked very much like a bargain concluded over a signature, and was
a little more formal than General Greene thought advisable." The key
to this sorry business may be found in the first paragraph of General
Merritt's instructions to all his generals at the time:


    No rupture with insurgents. This is imperative. Can ask insurgent
    generals or Aguinaldo for permission to occupy trenches, but if
    refused not to use force. [119]


"I am quite unable to explain," says Mr. Millet (p. 61), "why we
did not in the very beginning make them understand that we were
masters of the situation, and that they must come strictly under our
authority." The obvious reason was that a war of conquest to subjugate
a remote people struggling to be free from the yoke of alien domination
was sure to be more or less unpopular with many of the sovereign
voters of a republic, and more or less dangerous therefore, like all
unpopular wars, to the tenure of office of the party in power. So that
in entering upon a war for conquest, a republic must "play politics,"
using the military arm of the government for the twofold purpose of
crushing opposition and proving that there is none.

The maxim which makes all fair in war often covers a multitude of
sins. But let us turn for a moment from strategy to principle, and
see what two other distinguished American war correspondents were
thinking and saying about the same time. Writing to Harper's Weekly
from Cavite, under date of July 16th, concerning the work of the
Filipinos during the eight weeks before that, Mr. O. K. Davis said:
"The insurgents have driven them [the Spaniards] back over twenty
miles of country practically impassable for our men. * * * Aguinaldo
has saved our troops a lot of desperately hard campaigning * * *. The
insurgent works extend clear around Manila, and the Spaniards are
completely hemmed in. There is no hope for them but surrender." Writing
to the same paper under date of August 6th, Mr. John F. Bass says:
"We forget that they drove the Spaniards from Cavite to their present
intrenched position, thus saving us a long-continued fight through
the jungle." This gentleman did not tackle the question of inventing
a new definition of liberty consistent with alien domination. He
simply says: "Give them their liberty and guarantee it to them." In
the face of such plucky patriotism as he had witnessed, political
casuistry about "capacity for self-government" would have hung its
head. Yet Mr. Bass was by no means a novice. He had served with the
British army in Egypt in 1895, through the Armenian massacres of 1896,
and in the Cretan rebellion and Greek War of 1897. His sentiments were
simply precisely what those of the average American not under military
orders would have been at the time. After the fall of Manila he wrote
(August 17th): "I am inclined to think that the insurgents intend to
fight us if we stay and Spain if we go."

There were 8500 American troops in the taking of the city of Manila,
on August 13, 1898. The Filipinos were ignored by them, although they
afterwards claimed to have helped. As a matter of fact, the Spanish
officers in command were very anxious to surrender and get back to
Spain. The Filipinos had already made them "long for peace," to use
a famous expression of General J. F. Bell. The garrison only put up
a very slight resistance, "to save their face," as the Chinese say,
i. e., to save themselves from being court-martialed under some
quixotic article of the Spanish army regulations. The assault was
begun about 9.30 A.M., and early that afternoon the Spanish flag
had been lowered from the flag-staff in the main square and the
Stars and Stripes run up in its stead, amid the convulsive sobs of
dark-eyed señoritas and the muttered curses of melodramatic Spanish
cavaliers. Thanks to the Filipinos' three and one half months' work,
the performance only cost us five men killed out of the 8500. The
list of wounded totalled 43. Our antecedent loss in the trenches
prior to the day of the assault had been fourteen killed and sixty
wounded. So the job was completed, so far as the records show, at a
cost of less than a score of American lives. [120]

As Aguinaldo's troops surged forward in the wake of the American
advance they were stopped by orders from the American commander, and
prevented from following the retreating Spaniards into Manila. They
were not even allowed what is known to the modern small boy as "a
look-in." They were not permitted to come into the city to see the
surrender. President McKinley's message to Congress of December,
1898, describes "the last scene of the war" as having been "enacted
at Manila its starting place." [121] It says: "On August 13th,
after a brief assault upon the works by the land forces, in which the
squadron assisted, the capital surrendered unconditionally." In this
connection, by way of explaining Aguinaldo's treatment at the hands of
our generals from the beginning, the message says, "Divided victory
was not permissible." "It was fitting that whatever was to be done
* * * should be accomplished by the strong arm of the United States
alone." But what takes much of the virtue out of the "strong arm"
proposition is that Generals Merritt and Anderson were carrying out
President McKinley's orders all the time they were juggling Aguinaldo
out of his positions before Manila, and giving him evasive answers,
until the city could be taken by the said "strong arm" alone. For,
as the message puts it, in speaking of the taking of the city, "By
this the conquest of the Philippine Islands * * * was formally sealed."

When General Merritt left Manila on August 30th, he proceeded to Paris
to appear before the Peace Commission there. His views doubtless
had great weight with them on the momentous questions they had to
decide. But his views were wholly erroneous, and that they were so
is not surprising. As above stated, he did not even meet Aguinaldo,
purposely holding himself aloof from him and his leaders. He never did
know how deeply they were incensed at being shut out of Manila when
the city surrendered. In his report prepared aboard the steamship
China, en route for Paris, he says: "Doubtless much dissatisfaction
is felt by the rank and file of the insurgents, but * * * I am of the
opinion that the leaders will be able to prevent serious disturbances,"
etc. (p. 40). If General Merritt had caught the temper of the trenches
he would have known better, but he saw nothing of the fighting prior
to the final scene, nor did he take the field in person on the day of
the combined assault on the city, August 13th, and therefore missed
the supreme opportunity to understand how the Filipinos felt. Says
General Anderson in his report:


    I understood from the general commanding that he would be
    personally present on the day of battle. * * * On the morning of
    the 13th, General Babcock came to my headquarters and informed
    me that the major-general commanding would remain on a despatch
    boat. [122]


Indeed, so reduced was Manila, by reason of the long siege conducted by
the insurgents, that the assault of August 13th, not only was, but was
expected to be, little more than a sham battle. Says Lieutenant-Colonel
Pope, chief quartermaster, "On the evening of August 12th an order was
sent me to report with two battalions of the Second Oregon Volunteers,
under Colonel Summers the next day on the Kwong Hoi to the commanding
general on the Newport, as an escort on his entrance into Manila. At
the hour named, I reported etc." [123] As soon as Spanish "honor"
was satisfied, up went the white flag and General Merritt was duly
escorted ashore and into the city, where he received the surrender
of the Spanish general.

In the Civil War, General Merritt had received six successive
promotions for gallantry, at Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Five Forks,
etc., and had been with Sheridan at Winchester. So the way he
"commanded" the assault on Manila is proof only of the obligations
we then owed the Filipinos. They had left very little to be done.

In his account of General Merritt's original personal disembarkation
at Cavite, Mr. Frank Millet acquaints his readers with a Philippine
custom we afterwards grew quite familiar with and found quite useful,
of keeping your shoes dry in landing from a rowboat on a beach
by riding astride the shoulders of some husky native boatman. The
boatmen make it a point of special pride not to let their passengers
get their feet wet. Mr. Millet tells us that a general in uniform
looks neither dignified nor picturesque under such circumstances,
and that therefore he will not elaborate on the picture, but that it
is suggestive "more of the hilarious than of the heroic." Presumably
when General Merritt went ashore on August 13th, from the despatch
boat from which he had been watching the assault on Manila, to
receive the surrender of the Spanish general, he followed the same
custom of the country he had used on the occasion of his original
disembarkation. So that in the taking of Manila, we were probably
literally, as well as ethically, like General Mahone of Virginia as
he is pictured in a familiar post-bellum negro story, according to
which the general met a negro on a steep part of the road to heaven,
told him that St. Peter would only admit mounted parties, mounted
the negro with the latter's consent, rode on his back the rest of
the toilsome journey to the heavenly gate, dismounted, knocked,
and was cordially welcomed by the saint at the sacred portal thus:
"Why how d' ye do, General Mahone; jess tie yoh hoss and come in."






CHAPTER V

OTIS AND AGUINALDO

                            Where people and leaders are agreed,
                            What can the archon do?

                                                        Athenian Maxims.


Major-general Elwell S. Otis and staff arrived at Manila August 21,
1898. [124] He relieved General Merritt and succeeded to the command
of the American troops in the Philippines, August 29th. Archbishop
Chapelle, who was papal delegate to the Philippines in 1900, once
said to the writer at Manila, in that year, that General Otis was
"of about the right mental calibre to command a one-company post
in Arizona." The impatience manifested in the remark was due to
differences between him and the commanding-general about the Friar
question. The remark itself was of course intended, and understood, as
hyperbole. But the selection of General Otis to handle the Philippine
situation was a serious mistake. He was past sixty when he took
command. He continued in command from August 29, 1898, to May 5,
1900, a period of some twenty months. The insurrection was held in
abeyance for some five months after he took hold, the leaders hoping
against hope that the Treaty of Paris would leave their country to
them as it did Cuba to the Cubans; and during all that time General
Otis was apparently unable to see that war would be inevitable in the
event the decision at Paris was adverse to Filipino hopes. A member
of General Otis's staff once told me in speaking of the insurrection
period that his chief pooh-poohed the likelihood of an outbreak
right along up to the very day before the outbreak of February 4,
1899, occurred. Before the insurrection came he would not see it,
and after it came he--literally--did not see it; that is to say,
during fifteen months of fighting he commanded the Eighth Army Corps
from a desk in Manila and never once took the field. His Civil War
record was all right, but he was now getting well along in years. He
was also a graduate of the Harvard Law School of the Class of 1861,
rather prided himself on being "a pretty fair jack-leg lawyer," and had
a most absorbing passion for the details of administrative work. They
used to say that the only occasion on which General Otis ever went
out of Manila the whole time he was there was when he went up the
railroad once to Angeles to see that a proper valuation was put on a
then recently deceased Quartermaster's Department mule. When he left
the Islands he remarked to a newspaper man that he had had but one "day
off" since he had been there. Unswerving devotion to a desk in time of
war, on the part of the commanding general of the army in the field,
seemed to him an appropriate subject for just pride. This showed his
limitations. He was a man wholly unable to see the essentials of an
important situation, or to take in the whole horizon. He was known
to the Eighth Corps, his command, as a sort of "Fussy Grandpa," his
personality and general management of things always suggesting the
picture of a painfully near-sighted be-spectacled old gentleman busily
nosing over papers you had submitted, and finding fault to show he knew
a thing or two. However, he had many eminently respectable traits, and
did the best he knew how, though wholly devoid of that noble serenity
of vision which used to enable Mr. Lincoln, amid the darkest and most
tremendous of his problems, to say with a smile to Horace Greeley:
"Don't shoot the organist, he's doing the best he can."

Before General Otis relieved General Merritt, the latter had written
Aguinaldo politely requesting him to move his troops beyond certain
specified lines about the city, [125] and Aguinaldo had replied
August 27th, agreeing to do so, but asking that the Americans promise
to restore to him the positions thus vacated in the event under the
treaty the United States should leave the Philippines to Spain. [126]
August 31st, Otis notified Aguinaldo, then still at Bacoor, his first
capital, that General Merritt had been unexpectedly called away,
and that he, Otis, being unacquainted with the situation must take
time before answering the Aguinaldo letter to Merritt of the 27th. On
September 8th, he did answer, in a preposterously long communication
of about 3000 words, which says, among other things: "I have not been
instructed as to what policy the United States intends to pursue in
regard to its legitimate holdings here"; and therefore declines to
promise anything about restoring the insurgent positions in the event
we should leave the Islands to Spain under the treaty. Commenting
on this in the North American Review for February, 1900, General
Anderson says: "I believe we came to the parting of the ways when we
refused this request." General Anderson was right. General Merritt
had on August 21st sent Aguinaldo a memorandum by the hand of Major
J. Franklin Bell which promised: "Care will be taken to leave him
[Aguinaldo] in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the
government." [127] In the rôle of political henchman for President
McKinley, which General Otis seems to have conceived it his duty to
play from the very beginning in the Philippines, it thus appears that
he was not troubled about keeping unsullied the faith and honor of
the government as pledged by his predecessor. His 3000-word letter to
Aguinaldo of September 8th ignores Merritt's promise as coolly as if
it had never been made. His only concern appears to have been to leave
the government free to throw the Filipinos overboard if it should
wish to. He peevishly implies later on that Aguinaldo's requests in
this regard were merely a cloak for designs against us (p. 40). But
his real reason is given in a sort of stage "aside"--a letter to
the Adjutant-General of the army dated September 12, 1898, wherein he
explains: "Should I promise them that in case of the return of the city
to Spain, upon United States evacuation, their forces would be placed
by us in positions which they now occupy, I thoroughly believe that
they would evacuate at once. But, of course, under the international
obligations resting upon us * * * no such promise can be given." [128]
In the sacred name of National Honor what of the Merritt promise? You
only have to turn a few pages in the War Department Report for 1899
from the Merritt promise to the Otis repudiation of it. Yes, General
Anderson was right. It was when General Otis practically repudiated
in writing the written promise of his predecessor, General Merritt,
that we "came to the parting of the ways" in our relations with the
Filipinos. Let no American suppose for a moment that the author of
this volume is engaged in the ungracious, and frequently deservedly
thankless task of mere muck-raking. He never met General Otis but once,
and then for a very brief official interview of an agreeable nature. He
is only attempting to make a small contribution to the righting of a
great wrong unwittingly done by a great, free, and generous people to
another people then struggling to be free--a wrong which he doubts
not will one day be righted, whether he lives to see it so righted
or not. General Otis's letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of
September 12th, above quoted, shows that he was holding himself in
readiness to carry out in the Philippines any political programme the
Administration might determine upon, which would mean that he would
afterwards come home and tell how entirely righteous that programme
had been. Had the Administration hearkened back to Admiral Dewey's
suggestion that the Filipinos were far superior to the Cubans, and
decided to set before General Otis in the Philippines the same task
it had set before General Wood in Cuba, we would have heard nothing
about Filipino "incapacity for self-government." General Otis would
have taken his cue from the President, his commander-in chief, and
said: "I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey." Then he
would have gone to work in a spirit of generous rivalry to do in the
Philippines just what Wood did in Cuba. And the task would have been
easier. Had the Administration taken the view urged by Judge Gray,
as a member of the Paris Peace Commission, that "if we had captured
Cadiz and the Carlists had helped us [we] would not owe duty to stay
by them at the conclusion of the war," [129] and therefore we were not
bound to see the Filipinos through their struggle, General Otis would
have adopted that view with equal loyalty and in the presidential
campaign of 1900, he would have furnished the Administration with
arguments to justify that course. This would have been an easy task,
also, for two of Spain's fleets had been destroyed by us, leaving
her but one to guard her home coast cities, and making the sending
of reinforcements to the besieged and demoralized garrison of Manila
impossible. The native army she relied on throughout the archipelago
had gone over bodily to the patriot cause, and there was no hope
of successful resistance to it. But General Otis did not have the
boundless prestige of Admiral Dewey and so volunteered no advice. As
soon as the Administration chose its course, he set to work to prove
the correctness of it. From him, of course, came all the McKinley
Administration's original arguments against doing for the Filipinos
as we did in the case of Cuba. He was the only legitimate source
the American people could look to at that time to help them in their
dilemma. They were standing with reluctant feet where democracy and
its antithesis meet, and Otis was their sole guide. But the guide
was of the kind who wait until you point and ask "Is that the right
direction?" and then answer "Yes." Four days after General Otis sent
his above quoted letter of September 12th, to Adjutant-General Corbin,
Mr. McKinley signed his instructions to the Paris Peace Commissioners,
directing them to insist on the cession of Luzon at least, the
instructions being full of eloquent but specious argument about the
necessity of establishing a guardianship over people of whom we then
knew nothing. From that day forward General Otis bent himself to the
task of showing the righteousness of that course. "I will let nothing
go that will hurt the Administration," was his favorite expression
to the newspaper correspondents when they used to complain about
his press censorship. Hypocrisy is defined to be "a false assumption
of piety or virtue." The false assumption of piety or virtue which
has handicapped the American occupation of the Philippines from the
beginning, and which will always handicap it, until we throw off the
mask and honestly set to work to give the Filipinos a square deal on
the question of whether they can or cannot run a decent government of
their own if permitted, is traceable back to the Otis letter to the
Adjutant-General of September 12, 1898, ignoring General Merritt's
promise to leave Aguinaldo "in as good condition as he was found by
the forces of the government" in case we should, under the terms of
the treaty of peace, leave the Islands to Spain.

General Otis's letter of September 8th to Aguinaldo is apparently
intended to convince him that he ought to consider everything the
Americans had done up to date as exactly the correct thing, according
to the standards of up-to-date, philanthropic, liberty-loving nations
which pity double-dealing as mediæval; and that he should cheer up,
and feel grateful and happy, instead of sulking, Achilles-like, in his
tents; and furthermore--which was the crux--that he must move said
tents. General Otis does not forget "that the revolutionary forces
under your command have made many sacrifices in the interest of civil
liberty (observe, he does not call it independence) and for the welfare
of your people"; admits that they have "endured great hardships, and
have rendered aid"; and avers, as a reason for Aguinaldo's evacuating
that part of the environs of Manila occupied by his troops: "It [the
war with Spain] was undertaken by the United States for humanity's sake
* * * not for * * * aggrandizement or for any national profit." After
stating, as above indicated, that he does not yet know what the
policy of the United States is to be "in regard to its legitimate
holdings here," General Otis proceeds to declare that in any event
he will not be a party to any joint occupation of any part of the
city, bay, and harbor of Manila--the territory covered by the Peace
Protocol of August 13th--and that Aguinaldo must effect the evacuation
demanded in the letter of General Merritt "before Tuesday the 15th"
(of September), i.e., within a week. Aguinaldo finally withdrew his
troops, after much useless parleying and much waste of ink.

There was some of the parleying and ink, however, that was not wholly
wasted. But to properly appreciate it as illustrative of the fortitude
and tact which the early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in
a remarkable degree, some prefatory data are essential.

Aguinaldo's capital was then at Bacoor, one of the small coast villages
you pass through in going by land from Manila to Cavite. From Manila
over to Cavite by water is about seven miles, and by land about three
or four times that. The coast line from Manila to Cavite makes a
loop, so that a straight line over the water from Manila to Cavite
subtends a curve, near the Cavite end of which lies Bacoor. Thus,
Bacoor, being at the mercy of the big guns at Cavite, and also easily
accessible by a land force from Manila, to say nothing of Dewey's
mighty armada riding at anchor in the offing, was a good place to
move away from. There it lay, right in the lion's jaws, should the
lion happen to get hungry. Aguinaldo had reflected on all this,
and had determined to get himself a capital away from "the city,
bay, and harbor of Manila," that is to say, to take his head out
of the lion's jaws. General Otis's demand of September 8th that
he move his troops out of the suburbs of Manila determined him to
move his capital as well. He moved it to a place called Malolos, in
Bulacan province. Bulacan lies over on the north shore of Manila Bay,
opposite Cavite province on the south shore. Malolos is situated some
distance inland, out of sight and range of a fleet's guns, and about
twenty-odd miles by railroad northwest of Manila. Malolos was also
desirable because it was in the heart of an insurgent province having a
population of nearly a quarter of a million people, a province which,
by reason of being on the north side of the bay, was sure to be in
touch, strategically and politically, with all Luzon north of the
Pasig River, just as Cavite province, the birthplace of Aguinaldo,
and also of the revolutionary government, had been with all Luzon
south of the Pasig. Should the worst come to the worst--and as has
already been indicated, the insurgents played a sweepstake game from
the beginning for independence, with only war as the limit--northern
Luzon had more inaccessible mountains from which to conduct such
a struggle for an indefinite period than southern Luzon. But while
the Otis demand of September 8th decided the matter of the change
of capital, Aguinaldo could not afford to tell his troops that he
was moving them from the environs of Manila because made to. He was
going to accept war cheerfully when it should become necessary to
fight for independence, but he still had some hopes of the Paris
Peace Conference deciding to do with the Philippines as with Cuba,
and wished to await patiently the outcome of that conference. Besides,
he was getting in shipments of guns all the time, as fast as the
revenues of his government would permit, and thus his ability to
protract an ultimate war for independence was constantly enlarging
by accretion. The Hong Kong conference of the Filipino revolutionary
leaders held in the city named on May 4, 1898, at which Aguinaldo
presided, and which mapped out a programme covering every possible
contingency, has already been mentioned. Its minutes say:


    If Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental principles
    of its Constitution, it is most improbable that an attempt will
    be made to colonize the Philippines or annex them. [130]


On the other hand, the minutes of this same meeting as we saw
recognized that America might be tempted into entering upon a career
of colonization, once she should get a foothold in the islands. The
programme of Aguinaldo and his people was thus, from the beginning,
not to precipitate hostilities until it should become clear that,
in the matter of land-grabbing, the gleam of hope held out by the
American programme for Cuba was illusive. According to the minutes of
the meeting alluded to, such a contingency would, of course, "drive
them, the Filipinos * * * to a struggle for their independence,
even if they should succumb to the weight of the yoke," etc. Such
a struggle, as all the world knows, did ultimately ensue. That
part of the parleying following Otis's demand of September 8th
(that Aguinaldo move his troops) which was not useless was this:
In order to "save their face," with the rank and file of their
army, the Filipino Commissioners asked General Otis "if I [Otis,]
would express in writing a simple request to Aguinaldo to withdraw
to the lines which I designated--something which he could show to
the troops." [131] So, on September 13th, General Otis wrote such a
"request," and Aguinaldo moved his troops as demanded, but no farther
than demanded. He wanted to be in the best position possible in case
the United States should finally leave the Philippines to Spain,
and always so insisted. Long afterward General Otis insinuated in
his report that this insistence, which was uniformly pressed until
after the Treaty was signed, was mere dishonest pretence, to cloak
warlike intentions against the United States. Yet, as we have seen
above, one of our Peace Commissioners at Paris, Judge Gray, just
about the same time, was taking that contingency quite as seriously
as did Aguinaldo. And early in May, 1898, our Secretary of the Navy,
Mr. Long, had cabled Admiral Dewey "not to have political alliances
with the insurgents * * * that would incur liability to maintain their
cause in the future." [132] Before moving his troops pursuant to the
Otis demand of September 8th, the Otis "request" was duly published
to the insurgent army, and as the insurgents withdrew, the American
troops presented arms in most friendly fashion. "They certainly made a
brave show," says Mr. Millet (Expedition to the Philippines, p. 255),
"for they were neatly uniformed, had excellent rifles, marched well,
and looked very soldierly and intelligent." "The withdrawal," says
General Otis (p. 10), "was effected adroitly, as the insurgents marched
out in excellent spirits, cheering the American forces." Absolute
master of all Luzon outside Manila at this time, with complete
machinery of government in each province for all matters of justice,
taxes, and police, an army of some 30,000 men at his beck, and his
whole people a unit at his back, Aguinaldo formally inaugurated
his permanent government--permanent as opposed to the previous
provisional government--with a Constitution, Congress, and Cabinet,
patterned after our own, [133] just as the South American republics
had done before him when they were freed from Spain, at Malolos, the
new capital, on September 15, 1898. The next day, September 16th, at
Washington, President McKinley delivered to his Peace Commissioners,
then getting ready to start for the Paris Peace Conference, their
letter of instructions, directing them to insist on the cession by
Spain to the United States of the island of Luzon "at least." [134]
In other words, the day after the little Filipino republic, gay
with banners and glad with music, started forth on its journey,
Mr. McKinley signed its death-warrant. The political student of 1912
may say just here, "Oh, I read all that in the papers at the time,
or at least it was all ventilated in the Presidential campaign of
1900." Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Paris Peace Commission were
not made public until after the Presidential election of 1900. To be
specific, they were first printed and given out to the public in 1901,
in Senate Document 148, having been extracted from the jealous custody
of the Executive by a Senate resolution. It was not until then that the
veil was lifted. By that time, no American who was not transcendental
enough to have lost his love for the old maxim, "Right or wrong, my
country," cared to hear the details of the story. The Filipinos and
"our boys" had been diligently engaged in killing each other for a
couple of years, and the American people said, "A truce to scolding;
let us finish this war, now we are in it."

But to return from the death-warrant of the Philippine republic
signed by Mr. McKinley on September 16th, to its christening,
or inauguration, the day before. Mr. Millet gives an intensely
interesting account of the inaugural ceremonies of September 15th,
which as Manila correspondent of the London Times and Harper's Weekly
he had the good fortune to witness. Says he:


    The date was at last * * * fixed for September 15th. A few days
    before Aguinaldo had made a triumphant entry into Malolos in
    a carriage drawn by white horses, and there had been a general
    celebration of his arrival, with speeches, a gala dinner, open air
    concerts, and a military parade. Mr. Higgins (an Englishman), the
    manager of the Railway, kindly offered to take me up to Malolos to
    witness the ceremony of the inauguration of the new government.
    * * * The only other passenger was to be Aguinaldo's secretary
    * * * a small boyish-looking young man. * * * [135]


It seems there had been a strike of the native employees of the
railway up the road.


    Mr. Higgins calmly remarked to the secretary that, in his opinion,
    if the affairs of the Filipino government were managed in the
    future as they were at present, the proposed republic would be
    nothing but a cheap farce. The secretary timidly asked what there
    was to complain about.


Then came a tirade from Higgins, ending with, "I am going to lay this
* * * before Aguinaldo to-day, and I shall expect you to arrange an
interview for my friend and myself." Then, turning to the astonished
Millet, he said in English: "It does these chaps good to be talked
to straight from the shoulder. Since they came to Malolos, the earth
isn't big enough to hold them."

This scene on the train is, decidedly, as Thomas Carlyle would say,
"of real interest to universal history." Mr. Millet's Government was
a lion about to eat a lamb, but the head of his nation, Mr. McKinley,
clothed with absolute authority in the premises for the nonce, was
balking at the diet. Now, Mr. Millet rather admired the British
boldness, just as a Northern man likes to hear a Southerner talk
straight from the shoulder to a "darkey." As soon as the era of good
feeling was over, our people quit treating the Filipinos as Perry
did the Japanese in 1854, and began calling them "niggers." In fact
the commanding general found it necessary a little later to put a
stop to this pernicious practice among the soldiers by issuing a
General Order prohibiting it. But Mr. Millet's admiration would have
been somewhat toned down had he known what we found out later. The
real secret of Higgins's personal arrogance was this. The Filipino
government needed his railroad in its business. During the war
which followed, the insurgents long controlled a large part of this
railway, from Manila to Dagupan, which was the only railway in the
Philippines. The railway properties suffered much damage incident
to the war, and--just how willingly is beside the question--the
company rendered material aid to the insurgent cause. So much did
they render, that when Higgins had the assurance later to want our
Government to pay the damages his properties had suffered at the
hands of the insurgents, our government at Manila promptly turned his
claim down. Subsequently the London office of his company actually
inveigled the British Foreign Office into making representation to
our State Department about the matter--obviously a very grave step,
in international law. The claim was promptly turned down by Washington
also, and, happily, that "closed the incident." [136]

Having exploded Mr. Millet's bubble, let us resume the thread of
his story:


    We reached the station [at Malolos] in about an hour and a half.
    * * * The town numbers perhaps thirty or forty thousand people.
    * * * From the first humble nipa shack to the great square where
    the convent stands, thousands of insurgent flags fluttered from
    every window and every post. * * * Every man had an insurgent
    tri-color cockade in his hat.


Then follows a detailed account of being introduced, after some
ceremony, to Aguinaldo, who is described as "a small individual,
in full evening black suit, and flowing black tie." Higgins made his
complaint about the strikers, and Aguinaldo said, "I will attend to
this matter of the strikers," and then changed the topic, asking if
the visitors did not wish to attend the opening of the Congress--which
they did.

From Mr. Millet's account, it is evident that, like Admiral Dewey
and most of the Americans who first dealt with the Filipinos except
Generals Anderson, MacArthur, and J. F. Bell, he failed to take
the Filipinos as seriously as the facts demanded. At that time the
Japanese had not yet taught the world that national aspirations are
not necessarily to be treated with contumely because a people are small
of stature and not white of skin. Consul Wildman at Hong Kong at first
wrote the State Department quite peevishly that Aguinaldo seemed much
more concerned about the kind of cane he should wear than about the
figure he might make in history. Wildman did not then know, apparently,
that canes, with all Spanish-Filipino colonial officialdom, were
badges of official rank, like shoulder-straps are with us. The reader
will also remember the toothbrush incident hereinbefore reproduced,
told by Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee, in 1902. That incident,
naturally enough, amused the Committee not a little. But we who know
the Filipino know it was merely an awkward and embarrassed answer due
to diffidence, and made on the spur of the moment to cloak some real
reason which if disclosed would not seem so childish.

Misunderstanding is the principal cause of hate in this world. When
you understand people, hatred disappears in a way strikingly analogous
to the disappearance of darkness on the arrival of light. The more
you know of the educated patriotic Filipino, the more certain you
become that the government we destroyed in 1898 would have worked
quite as well as most any of the republics now in operation between
the Rio Grande and Patagonia. The masses of the people down there,
the peons, are probably quite as ignorant and docile as the Filipino
tao (peasant), and I question if the educated men of Latin America,
the class of men who, after all, control in every country, could,
after meeting and knowing the corresponding class in the Philippines,
get their own consent to declare the latter their inferiors either
in intelligence, character, or patriotism.

But to return to the inauguration. Mr. Millet saw the inaugural
ceremonies in the church, and heard Aguinaldo's address to the
Congress. Of the audience he says "few among them would have escaped
notice in a crowd for they were exceptionally alert, keen, and
intelligent in appearance." Of this same Congress and government,
Mr. John Barrett, who was American Minister to Siam about that
time, and is now (1912) head of the Bureau of American Republics
at Washington--an institution organized and run for the purpose
of persuading Latin-America that we do not belong to the Imperial
International Society for the Partition of the Earth and that we are
not in the business of gobbling up little countries on pretext of
"policing" them--said in an address before the Shanghai Chamber of
Commerce on January 12, 1899:


    He [Aguinaldo] has organized a government which has practically
    been administering the affairs of that great island [Luzon] since
    the American occupation of Manila, which is certainly better
    than the former administration; he has a properly constituted
    Cabinet and Congress, the members of which compare favorably with
    Japanese statesmen.


The present Philippine Assembly had not had its first meeting when I
left the Islands in the spring of 1905. It was organized in 1907. In
the summer of 1911, I had the pleasure of renewing an old and very
cordial acquaintance with Dr. Heiser, Director of Public Health
of the Philippine Islands, who is one of the most considerable men
connected with our government out there, and is also thoroughly in
sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present form. The
Doctor is a broad-gauged man likely to be worth to any government,
in matters of Public Health, whatever such government could reasonably
afford to pay in the way of salary, and is doubtless well-paid by the
Philippine Insular Government. He can hardly be blamed, therefore,
for being in sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present
form. Doctor Heiser is a man of too much genuine dignity to be very
much addicted to slang, but when I asked him about the Philippine
Assembly, I think he said it was "a cracker-jack." At any rate,
I have never heard any legislative body spoken of in more genuinely
complimentary terms than those in which he described the Philippine
Assembly. I learned from him incidentally that their "capacity for
self-government" is so crude, however, as yet, that the members have
not yet learned to read newspapers while a colleague whose seat is
next to theirs is addressing the house and trying to get the attention
of his fellows, nor do they keep up such a buzz of conversation that
the man who has the floor cannot hear himself talk. They listen to
the programme of the public business.

Some five years ago in an article written for the North American Review
concerning the Philippine problem, the author of the present volume
said, among other things: "During nearly four years of service on the
bench in the Philippines the writer heard as much genuine, impassioned,
and effective eloquence from Filipino lawyers, saw exhibited in the
trial of causes as much industrious preparation, and zealous, loyal
advocacy of the rights of clients, as any ordinary nisi prius judge
at home is likely to meet with in the same length of time." [137] Any
country that has plenty of good lawyers and plenty of good soldiers,
backed by plenty of good farmers, is capable of self-government. As
President Schurman of Cornell University, who headed the first
Philippine Commission, the one that went out in 1899, said in closing
his Founder's Day Address at that institution on January 11, 1902:
"Any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos is better
than the best possible government of Filipinos by Americans." The
Malolos government which Mr. Millet saw inaugurated on September 15,
1898, would probably have filled this bill. Had the Filipino people
then possessed the consciousness of racial and political unity as a
people which was developed by their subsequent long struggle against
us for independence, and which has been steadily developing more and
more under the mild sway of a quasi-freedom whose princely prodigality
in spreading education is marred only by its declared programme that
no living beneficiary thereof may hope to see the independence of
his country, and that the present generation must resign itself to
tariff schedules "fixed" at Washington, there is no reasonable doubt
that the original Malolos government of 1898 would have been a very
"decent kind of government."

All through the last four months of 1898, the two hostile armies faced
each other in a mood which it needed but a spark to ignite, awaiting
the outcome of the peace negotiations arranged for in September,
commenced in October, and concluded in December. While they are thus
engaged about Manila, let us turn to a happier picture, the situation
in the provinces under the Aguinaldo government.






CHAPTER VI

THE WILCOX-SARGENT TRIP

                A smiling, peaceful, and plenteous land
                As yet unblighted by the scourge of war;
                Where happiness and hospitality walk hand in hand
                And new-born Freedom bows to Law.

                                                              Anonymous.


In the last chapter, we saw Aguinaldo's republic formally established
at Malolos, September 15th, claiming jurisdiction over all Luzon. In
Chapter IV., entitled "Merritt and Aguinaldo," we saw the political
condition of southern Luzon in August, 1898, and the following months,
and verified the correctness of Aguinaldo's claims as to complete
mastery there then. Let us now examine the state of affairs in northern
Luzon in the fall of 1898.

In Senate Document 196, 56th Congress, 1st Session, dated February
26, 1900, transmitted by Secretary of the Navy Long, in response to
a Senate resolution, may be found a report of a tour of observation
through the half of Luzon Island which lies north of Manila and the
Pasig River, made between October 8 and November 20, 1898,--note
the dates, for the Paris Peace Conference began October 1st and
ended December 10th,--by Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and Naval Cadet
L. R. Sargent. This report was submitted by them to Admiral Dewey under
date of November 23, 1898, and by him forwarded to the Navy Department
for its information, with the comment that it "in my opinion contains
the most complete and reliable information obtainable in regard to the
present state of the northern part of Luzon Island." The Admiral's
endorsement was not sent to the Senate along with the report. It
appears in a book afterwards published by Paymaster Wilcox in 1901,
entitled Through Luzon on Highways and Byways. The book is merely an
elaboration of the report, and reproduces most of the report, if not
all of it, verbatim. The book of Paymaster Wilcox may be treated as,
practically, official, for historical purposes. The preface recites
that in October, 1898, American control was effective only in Manila
and Cavite, that the insurgents, under Aguinaldo, who had proclaimed
himself President of the whole Archipelago, immediately after Dewey's
victory, were in supposedly complete possession of every part of
the Island outside of these two cities, that their lines were so
close to the outposts of our army that their people could at times
converse with our soldiers, and that General Otis's authority did
not extend much beyond a three-mile radius from the centre of Manila,
while Admiral Dewey held and operated the navy-yard at Cavite. "Even
the country between Manila and Cavite was in the hands of Aguinaldo,
so much so that our officers had been refused permission to land at
any intermediate point by water, and were prohibited from traversing
the distance by road." Wilcox and Sargent procured leave of absence
from Admiral Dewey to make their trip. They went first to Malolos, but
failed to get anything in the way of safe-conduct from Aguinaldo. He
is described, however, as of "great force of character * * * and
he dominates all around him with a power that seems peculiar to
himself." Wilcox had seen him before at Cavite. "He adroitly read
between the lines that the Government of the United States did not
then, nor would it at any future time, recognize his authority,"
says the writer.

Our travellers left Manila, October 8, 1898, on the Manila-Dagupan
Railway, for a place called Bayambang, which is the capital of
Pangasinan province, about one hundred miles north of Manila. In
Pangasinan "the people were all very respectful and polite and offered
the hospitality of their homes." From Bayambang they struck off from
the railroad and proceeded eastward comfortably and unmolested a day's
journey, to a town in the adjoining province of Nueva Ecija (Rosales)
where they received a cordial reception at the hands of the Presidente
(Mayor)--Aguinaldo's Presidente of course, not the Presidente left
over from the Spanish régime. "At this time all the local government
of the different towns was in the hands of Aguinaldo's adherents,"
says the descriptive itinerary we are following. The tourists were
provided at Rosales by order of Aguinaldo with a military escort,
"which was continued by relays all the way to Aparri" (the northernmost
town of Luzon, at the mouth of the Cagayan River). Paymaster Wilcox
says he carried five hundred Mexican dollars in his saddle-bags,
but used only a trifling portion of this amount, "for in every town
my entertainment was given without pay." They went from Rosales to
Humingan, in Nueva Ecija. At Humingan they were again entertained
by the Presidente at dinner, with music following, and comfortably
housed. The Presidente made many inquiries about "the War with
Spain and their own future." Their future, as revealed by the raised
curtain of a year later, was that their country was being overrun by
Lawton's Division of the Eighth Army Corps, the author of this volume
having passed through this same town of Humingan in November, 1899,
as an officer of the scouts used to develop fire for General Lawton's
column. They journeyed eastward through the province of Nueva Ecija
from Humingan to a little village (Puncan) in the foothills of the
mountains they planned to cross. Of this place and the hospitality
there, our traveller remarks: "I shall never forget the welcome of the
local official" the Presidente. Thence they proceeded a few more stages
and parasangs, northward over the Caranglan pass, into Nueva Vizcaya
province, the watershed of north central Luzon, and thence down the
valley of the Cagayan River via Iligan and Tuguegarao to Aparri, being
always hospitably entertained in every town through which they passed
by the Presidente or Mayor of the town, the local representative of
the Philippine republic. In the New York Independent of September 14,
1899, Cadet Sargent, in an article about this trip, gives the words
of the new Filipino national Hymn, which he describes as sung with
great enthusiasm everywhere he and Wilcox were entertained in the
various towns. I desire to preserve a sample verse of it here. The
music it is set to is much like the Marseillaise--quite as stirring:


                    Del sueño de tres siglos
                    Hermanos Despertad!
                    Gritando "Fuera España!
                    Viva La Libertad!"


which, being interpreted, means:


                    From the sleep of three centuries
                    Brothers, awake!
                    Crying "Out with Spain!
                    Live Liberty!"


Had another Sargent and another Wilcox made a similar trip through
the provinces of southern Luzon about this same time, under similar
friendly auspices, before we turned friendship to hate and fear and
misery, in the name of Benevolent Assimilation, they would, we now
know, have found similar conditions.

Some suspicions were aroused on one or two occasions, but once the
local authorities became convinced that the trip was being made
by consent of "The Illustrious Presidente" (Aguinaldo--"El Egregio
Presidente" is the Spanish of it) all was sunshine again. The Mayor
of each town--the Presidente--would receive from the escort coming
with them from the last town they had stopped at, a letter from the
Mayor, or Presidente, of said last town; the old escort would return to
their town, and a new one would be provided to give them safe-conduct
to the next town. This was no new-fangled scheme of Aguinaldo's. It
was an ancient custom of the Spanish Government, and was an ideal
nucleus of administration for the new government. Curiously enough,
the army knew practically nothing of this trip in the days of the
early fighting. All that country was to us a terra incognita, until
overrun by Captain Bacthelor, with a part of the 25th Infantry
in the fall of 1899, the following year. So was the rest of the
archipelago a like terra incognita, until likewise slowly conquered
by hard fighting. That is why we so utterly failed to understand
what a wonderfully complete "going concern" Aguinaldo's government
had become throughout the Philippine archipelago before the Treaty of
Paris was signed. Descending from the watershed of north central Luzon
in the province of Nueva Viscaya already mentioned, our travellers
reached the town of Carig, in the foothills which fringe that side
of the watershed. There they were met by Simeon Villa, military
commander of Isabela province, the man who was chief of staff to
Aguinaldo afterwards, and was captured by General Funston along
with Aguinaldo in the spring of 1901. Villa's immediate superior was
Colonel Tirona, at Aparri, the colonel commanding all the insurgent
forces of the Cagayan valley. Villa was accompanied by his aide,
Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The latter is an old acquaintance of the
author of the present volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for
playing a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish army
committed under Villa's orders just prior to, or about the time of,
the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He was found guilty, and sentenced, but later
liberated under President Roosevelt's amnesty of 1902. He was guilty,
but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan valley used to say,
in being tortured to death, got only the same sort of medicine he had
often administered thereabouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory
of the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases. Villa was a Tagal
and had come up from Manila with the expedition commanded by Colonel
Tirona, which expedition was fitted out with guns furnished Aguinaldo
by Admiral Dewey, or, if not furnished, permitted to be furnished. But
Guzman was a member of one of the wealthiest and most influential
native families of that province (Isabela). General Otis's reports
are full of the most inexcusable blunders about how "the Tagals"
took possession of the various provinces and made the people do this
or that. Villa's relations with Guzman were just about those of a New
Yorker or a Bostonian sent up to Vermont in the days of the American
Revolution to help organize the resistance there, in conjunction with
one of the local leaders of the patriot cause in the Green Mountain
State. Both were members of the Katipunan, the Filipino Revolutionary
Secret Society, an organization patterned after Masonry, membership
in which was always treated by the Spaniards as sedition, and usually
visited with capital punishment. Nearly every Filipino of any spirit
belonged to it on May 1, 1898, the date of the naval battle of Manila
Bay. It is the all-pervading completeness of this organization at that
time--it could give old Tammany Hall cards and spades--which explains
the astonishing rapidity of Aguinaldo's political success, i.e., the
astonishing rapidity with which the Malolos Government acquired control
of Luzon between May and October, 1898. Their cabalistic watchword was
"Paisano" (fellow-countryman), their battle cry "Independence." In
the fall of 1898, at the time of this Wilcox-Sargent trip through
Luzon, the Filipinos really "had tasted the sweets of Independence,"
to use the phrase of the people of Iloilo in declining on that ground
to surrender to General Miller in December thereafter and electing the
arbitrament of war. The writer is perhaps as familiar with the history
of that Cagayan valley as almost any other American. It is true there
were cruelties practised by the Filipinos on the Spaniards. But they
were ebullitions of revenge for three centuries of tyranny. They do
not prove unfitness for self-government. I for one prefer to follow
the example set by the Roosevelt amnesty of 1902, and draw the veil
over all those matters. With the Spaniards it was a case of Sauve qui
peut. With the Filipinos, it was a case, as old man Dimas Guzman,
father to this Lieutenant Ventura we have just met, used to put
it, of Me las vais a pagar, which, liberally interpreted, means,
"The bad quarter of an hour has arrived for the Spaniards. The day
of reckoning has come." I sentenced both Dimas and Ventura to life
imprisonment for being accessory to the murder of the Spanish officer
above named, Lieutenant Piera. Villa officiated as archfiend of the
gruesome occasion. I am quite sure I would have hung Villa without any
compunction at that time, if I could have gotten hold of him. I tried
to get hold of him, but Governor Taft's Attorney-General, Mr. Wilfley,
wrote me that Villa was somewhere over on the mainland of Asia on
British territory, and extradition would involve application to the
London Foreign Office. The intimation was that we had trouble enough
of our own without borrowing any from feuds that had existed under
our predecessors in sovereignty. I have understood that Villa is now
practising medicine in Manila. More than one officer of the American
army that I know, afterwards did things to the Filipinos almost
as cruel as Villa did to that unhappy Spanish officer, Lieutenant
Piera. On the whole, I think President Roosevelt acted wisely and
humanely in wiping the slate. We had new problems to deal with, and
were not bound to handicap ourselves with the old ones left over from
the Spanish régime.

It appears that Villa became a little suspicious of the travellers. He
detained them at Carig seven days. Finally there came a telegram from
his chief at Aparri, Colonel Tirona, to our two travellers, which read:
"I salute you affectionately, and authorize Villa to accompany you to
Iligan." At Iligan, the capital of Isabela province, the travellers
were lavishly entertained. They were given a grand baile (ball) and
fiesta (feast), a kind of dinner-dance, we would call it. To the light
Messrs. Sargent and Wilcox throw on the then universal acknowledgment
of the authority of the Aguinaldo government, and the perfect
tranquillity and public order maintained under it, in the Cagayan
valley, I may add that as judge of that district in 1901-2 there came
before me a number of cases in the trial of which the fact would be
brought out of this or that difference among the local authorities
having been referred to the Malolos Government for settlement. And
they always waited until they heard from it. The doubting Thomas will
attribute this to the partiality of the Filipinos to procrastination
in general. I know it was due to the hearty co-operation of the
people with, and their loyalty to, the then existing government,
and to their pride in it. Mr. Sargent tells a characteristic story
of Villa, whose vengeful feeling toward the Spaniards showed on all
occasions. The former Spanish governor of the province was of course
a prisoner in Villa's custody. Villa had the ex-governor brought in,
for the travellers to see him, and remarked, in his presence to them,
"This is the man who robbed this province of $25,000 during the last
year of his office." From Iligan our travellers proceeded to Aparri,
cordially received everywhere, and finding the country in fact, as
Aguinaldo always claimed in his proclamations of that period seeking
recognition of his government by the Powers, in a state of profound
peace and tranquillity--free from brigandage and the like. At Aparri
the visitors were cordially welcomed by Colonel Tirona, and much
fêted. While they were there, Tirona transferred his authority to a
civil régime. Says Paymaster Wilcox:


    The steamer Saturnus, which had left the harbor the day before
    our arrival, brought news from Hong Kong papers that the Senators
    from the United States at the Congress at Paris favored the
    independence of the islands with an American protectorate. Colonel
    Tirona considered the information of sufficient reliability to
    justify him in regarding Philippine Independence as assured,
    and warfare in the Islands at an end.


He then goes on to describe the inauguration of civil government
in Cagayan province. I hope all this will not weary the American
reader. It was vividly interesting to me when I read it for the first
time thirteen years afterward, in 1911, because it was such unexpected
information, so surprising. It will be equally interesting to all other
Americans who participated in putting down the subsequent insurrection
and in setting up the Taft civil government in that same valley three
years later. I was in that town, for a similar purpose, with Governor
Taft in 1901, after a bloody war which almost certainly would not
have occurred had the Paris Peace Commission known the conditions then
existing, just like this, all over Luzon and the Visayan Islands. Of
course the Southern Islands were a little slower. But as Luzon goes,
so go the rest. The rest of the archipelago is but the tail to the
Luzon kite. Luzon contains 4,000,000 of the 8,000,000 people out there,
and Manila is to the Filipino people what Paris is to the French and to
France. Luzon is about the size of Ohio, and the other six islands that
really matter, [138] are in size mere little Connecticuts and Rhode
Islands, and in population mere Arizonas or New Mexicos. Describing
the ceremonies of the inauguration of civil government in Cagayan,
the Wilcox-Sargent report to Admiral Dewey says:


    The Presidentes of all the towns in the province were present at
    the ceremony. * * * Colonel Tirona made a short speech. * * * He
    then handed the staff of office to the man who had been elected
    "Jefe Provincial" [Governor of the Province]. This officer also
    made a speech in which he thanked the military forces * * * and
    assured them that the work they had begun would be perpetuated
    by the people, where every man, woman, and child stood ready to
    take up arms to defend their newly won liberty and to resist with
    the last drop of their blood the attempt of any nation whatever
    to bring them back to their former state of dependence. He then
    knelt, placed his hand on an open Bible, and took the oath of
    office. [139]


Does not such language in an official report made by officers of
the navy to Admiral Dewey in November, 1898, show an undercurrent
of deep feeling at the position the Administration had put Admiral
Dewey in with Aguinaldo, when it decided to take the Philippines,
and accordingly sent out an army whose generals ignored his protégé?

The speech of the provincial governor was followed, says the
Wilcox-Sargent report (same page) by speeches from "the other
officers who constitute the provincial government, the heads of
the three departments--justice, police, and internal revenue. Every
town in this province has the same organization." Article III. of
Aguinaldo's decree of June 18th, previous, providing an organic
law or constitution for his provisional government (see Chapter
II., ante) had provided precisely the organization which Wilcox
and Sargent thus saw working at Aparri and throughout the Cagayan
valley in October, 1898. The importance of all this to the question
of how the Filipinos feel toward us to-day, in this year of grace,
1912, and to the element of righteousness there is in that feeling,
is too obvious to need comment. Americans interested in business in
the Philippines come back to this country from time to time and give
out interviews in the papers declaring that the Filipinos do not want
independence. What they really mean is that it makes no difference
whether they want it or not, they are not going to get it. And it
is precisely these Americans, and their business associates in the
United States, who have gotten through Congress the legislation which
enables them to give the Filipino just half of what he got ten years
ago for his hemp, and other like legislation, and the Filipinos
know it. The gulf in the Philippines between the dominant and the
subject race will continue to widen as the years go by, so long as
indirect taxation without representation continues to be perpetrated
at Washington for the benefit of special interests having a powerful
lobby. If the American people themselves are groaning under this very
sort of thing, and apparently unable to help themselves, what is the a
priori probability as to our voteless and therefore defenceless little
brown brother. Like the sheep before the shearer, he is dumb. But to
return to our travellers and their journey.


    A Norwegian steamer came into port [meaning the harbor of Aparri]
    that afternoon, and this seemed our only hope. She was chartered by
    two Chinamen * * *. At first they refused us permission to embark,
    and declined to put in at any port on the west coast. No sooner
    was this related to Colonel Tirona than he sent notice that the
    ship could not clear without taking us and making a landing where
    we desired. This argument was convincing.


Colonel Tirona provided them with a letter addressed to Colonel
Tiño at Vigan, the chief town of the west coast of Luzon and the
capital of the province of Ilocos Sur, which province fronts the China
Sea. Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent proceeded aboard the Norwegian steamer
from Aparri westward, doubling the northwest corner of Luzon, and
steaming thence due south to the nearest port. Vigan was the Filipino
military headquarters of the western half of northern Luzon, just as
Aparri was at the same time of the eastern half. On the west coast
the travellers were treated always courteously, but with considerable
suspicion. The explanation is easy. That region is in closer touch
with Manila, and with what is going on and may be learned at the
capital, than is the Cagayan valley which our tourists had just
left. They bade the commanding officer at Vigan good-bye, November
13, 1898. Passing south through Namacpacan (which the command I was
with took a year or so later), they came to San Fernando de Union,
some twenty miles farther south along the coast road. Here they met
Colonel Tiño and presented their letter from Tirona. He gave them a
dinner, of course. How a Filipino does love to entertain, and make
you enjoy yourself! Talk about your "true Southern hospitality"! You
get it there. "Speeches were made, and great things promised by
the Philippine republic in the near future" says Mr. Wilcox. After
the dinner and speech-making came the inevitable dance. After that
Colonel Tiño started them off on their journey southward toward Manila
duly provided with carriages. Passing Aringay on November 18, 1898
[140] our travellers finally reached Dagupan, the northern terminus
of the Manila-Dagupan Railway, and there took a train for Manila,
120 miles away.

In his report covering the fall of 1898, General Otis always scoldingly
says of the Filipinos that in all the parleyings of his commissioners
with Aguinaldo's commissioners before the outbreak, the latter never
did know what they really wanted. The truth was they believed the
Americans were going to do with them exactly as every other white
race they knew of had done with every other brown race they knew of,
but they did not tell General Otis so. Mr. Wilcox, a more friendly
witness of that same period states their position thus at page twenty
of the report to Admiral Dewey: "They desire the protection of the
United States at sea, but fear any interference on land." "On one
point they seemed united, viz., that whatever our government may have
done for them, it had not gained the right to annex them," adding, in
relation to the physical preparations to make good this contention,
in the event of war, "The Philippine Government has an organized
force in every province we visited."

The whole tone of the Wilcox-Sargent report and the subsequent
Wilcox book is an implied reiteration, after intimate, extended,
and friendly contact with the people of all Luzon north of the Pasig
River, of Admiral Dewey's telegram sent to the Navy Department, June
23, 1898: "The people are far superior in intelligence and capacity
for self-government to the people of Cuba and I am familiar with both
races." In fact Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent do not raise the question of
"capacity for self-government" at all, any more than Commodore Perry
did when similarly welcomed in 1854 by the Japanese.






CHAPTER VII

THE TREATY OF PARIS

                                No man can serve two masters.

                                                        Matthew vi., 24.

                Confine the Empire within those limits which
                nature seems to have fixed as its natural bulwarks
                and boundaries.

                                                  Augustus Cæsar's Will.


This is a tale of three cities, Paris, Washington, and Manila.

Article III. of the Peace Protocol signed at Washington, August 12,
1898, provided:


    The United States will occupy and hold the city, bay, and harbor
    of Manila, pending the conclusion of a Treaty of Peace which
    shall determine the control, disposition, and government of the
    Philippines. [141]


The "Papers relating to the Treaty with Spain" including the
telegraphic correspondence between President McKinley and our Peace
Commissioners pending the negotiations, were sent to the Senate,
January 30, 1899, just one week before the final vote on the treaty,
but the injunction of secrecy was not removed until January 31,
1901--after the presidential election of 1900. They then were
published as Senate Document 148, 56th Congress, 2d Session. It was
not until then that the veil was lifted. The instructions to the Peace
Commissioners were dated September 16, 1898. The Commissioners were:
William R. Day, of Ohio, Republican, just previously Secretary of
State, now (1912) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
States; Whitelaw Reid, Republican, then editor of the New York Tribune,
now Ambassador to Great Britain, and three members of the United States
Senate, Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota, William P. Frye, of Maine,
Republicans, and George Gray, of Delaware, Democrat. Senator Davis
died in 1900, and Senator Frye in 1911. Senator Gray has been, since
1899, and is now, United States Circuit Judge for the 3d Judicial
District. Among other things, the President's instructions to the
Commissioners said:


    It is my earnest wish that the United States in making peace
    should follow the same high rule of conduct which guided it in
    facing war. * * * The lustre and the moral strength attaching
    to a cause which can be confidently rested upon the considerate
    judgment of the world should not under any illusion of the hour
    be dimmed by ulterior designs which might tempt us * * * into an
    adventurous departure on untried paths.


By elaborate rhetorical gradations, the instructions finally get down
to this:


    Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the commercial
    opportunity. * * * The United States cannot accept less than the
    cession in full right and sovereignty of the island of Luzon.


Though already noticed, we venture, in this connection, again to
recall that in the month previous (August, 1898) a gentleman high in
the councils of the Administration [142] declared in one of the great
reviews of the period: "We see with sudden clearness that some of the
most revered of our political maxims have outlived their force." Among
these "revered maxims" thus suddenly fossilized by his ipse dixit,
Mr. Vanderlip exuberantly includes the teachings of "Washington's
Farewell Address and the later crystallization of its main thought
by President Monroe"--the Monroe Doctrine, adding that in lieu of
these "A new mainspring * * * has become the directing force * * *
the mainspring of commercialism."

As permanent chairman of the Philadelphia convention which renominated
Mr. McKinley for the Presidency thereafter, in 1900, Senator Lodge,
speaking of the issues raised by the Treaty of Paris, said: "We make
no hypocritical pretence of being interested in the Philippines solely
on account of others. We believe in Trade Expansion."

"Philanthropy and five per cent. go hand in hand," said Mr. Vanderlip's
Chief, Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage, about the same
time. Such was the temper of the times when the treaty was made.

The first meeting with the Spanish Commissioners took place at Paris,
October 1st. The opening event of the meeting, the initial move of the
Spaniards, is extremely interesting in the light of subsequent events,
especially in connection with the Iloilo Fiasco, hereinafter described
(Chapter IX.).

"Spanish communication represents," says Judge Day's cablegram to
the President, [143] "that status quo has been altered and continues
to be altered to the prejudice of Spain by Tagalo rebels, whom it
describes as an auxiliary force to the regular American troops."

Even diplomacy, in a conciliatory communication limited to the obvious,
called the Filipinos our allies.

The Spanish initial move was more immediately prompted by the fact
that in point of absolute astronomical time Manila, though captured
when it was morning of August 13th there, was captured when it was
evening of August 12th, at Washington, and the protocol was signed
at Washington in the evening of August 12th. While this point was
material, because we had captured $900,000 in cash in the Spanish
treasury at Manila and much other property, the title to which, under
the laws of war between civilized nations, depended on just what
time it was captured, the matter was finally swallowed up and lost
sight of in the agreement to give Spain a lump $20,000,000 for the
archipelago. But the initial move had other aspects. In the event we
should take the Philippines off her hands, Spain was going to insist
that we should get back from the Filipinos, our "allies," and restore
to her all the Spaniards they captured after August 12th. She knew
that in all probability if we bought the Islands we would be buying
an insurrection, and she was "taking care of her own" at our expense.

The next feature of the proceedings entitled to attention in a
bird's-eye view like this, concerns the question whether we should
take only Luzon, or the whole archipelago. President McKinley cabled
Admiral Dewey on August 13th, the day after the protocol was signed,
asking as to "the desirability of the several islands," "coal and
other mineral deposits," and "in a naval and commercial sense which
(of the several islands) would be most advantageous." [144] Admiral
Dewey had replied, of course, that Luzon was "the most desirable,"
but volunteered no advice. He did state, "No coal of good quality can
be procured in the Philippine Islands," which is still true. Allusion
is made to this telegram in the proceedings, but no copy of it is
there set forth. On October 4th, our Commissioners wired President
McKinley suggesting that he cable out to the Admiral and ask him
"whether it would be better * * * to retain Luzon * * * or the whole
group." Mr. McKinley answered that he had asked Admiral Dewey before
General Merritt left Manila to give the latter his views in writing "on
general question of Philippines," and that "his report is in your hands
in response to both questions." But the commission replied that Admiral
Dewey had sent only a copy of a report of General Francis V. Greene's
and nothing else. There is no record of any further advice or opinion
from Admiral Dewey on the point except that in General Otis's Report
(p. 67) we get glimpses of a telegram that has never yet, apparently,
been published, sent by Dewey to Washington early in December, 1898,
suggesting that we "interfere as little as possible in the internal
affairs of the Islands." No; Admiral Dewey must be acquitted of having
ever counselled the McKinley Administration to buy the Philippines.

On October 7th the Commission telegraphed Washington that General
Merritt attaches much weight to the opinion of the Belgian Consul at
Manila, M. André, and that "Consul says United States must take all
or nothing"; that "if southern islands remained with Spain they would
be in constant revolt, and United States would have a second Cuba";
that "Spanish government would not improve," and "would still protect
monks in their extortion."

To this advice there was absolutely no answer. It was a case of "all or
nothing," and it had already become a case of "all" when on September
16th previous Mr. McKinley signed his original instructions to the
Commission stating "The United States cannot accept less than Luzon."

The Commission's telegram of October 7th goes on to quote from the
Belgian Consul's opinion that "Present rebellion represents only one
half of one per cent. of the inhabitants." The Consul was not before
them in person. They were quoting from a memorandum submitted by him
to General Merritt at Merritt's request, made at Manila and dated
August 29th, the day General Merritt sailed away from Manila bound
for Paris via the Suez Canal. He had brought the memorandum along
with him. From the previous chapters the reader will, of course,
understand that Americans and Europeans at Manila in August, 1898,
were paying very little attention to Aguinaldo and his claims as to
the extent of his authority in the provinces. It is therefore not
surprising that M. André's memorandum of August 29th should have made
the foolish statement, "Present rebellion represents only one half of
one per cent. of inhabitants." But it is eternally regrettable that his
statement on this point had any weight with the Commissioners, for it
was, or by that time at least (October 7th) had become, just about 99
1/2 per cent. wide of the mark. As a matter of fact, by October 7th
it would have been more accurate to have said, in lieu of the above,
"Present rebellion represents practically whole people." You see,
we started an insurrection in May, in October it had become a full
grown affair, and in December we bought it. The telegram of October
7th also quoted General Merritt as saying, "Insurgents would be
victorious unless Spaniards did better in future than in past,"
and as considering it "feasible for United States to take Luzon
and perhaps some adjacent islands and hold them as England does her
colonies." These are about the only two sound suggestions General
Merritt made to that Commission. In the next breath they quote him as
saying, "Natives could not resist 5000 troops." The fact that they
did resist more than 120,000 troops, that it took more than that,
all told, to put down the insurrection, is sufficient to show how
much General Merritt's advice was worth. He was right on two points,
as indicated. Both Spanish fleets had been destroyed and Spain had but
one left to protect her home coast cities. The death knell of her once
proud colonial empire had sounded. Decrepit as she was, she could not
possibly have sent any reinforcements to the Philippines. Besides the
Filipinos would have "eaten them up." General Merritt's suggestion to
"hold them as England does her colonies" was also sensible. In fact
that was the only thoroughly honest thing to have done, if we were
going to take them at all. England never acts the hypocrite with her
colonies. She makes them behave. She does not let native people preach
sedition in native newspapers, because of "sentimental bosh" about
freedom of the press, until the whole country becomes a smouldering
hot-bed of sedition. She has blown offending natives from the cannon's
mouth, when deemed necessary to cure them and their country of the
desire for independence. If we are going to have colonies at all, we
ought to govern them with the upright downright ruthless honesty of
the British. It is more merciful in the long run. But we ought not to
have colonies at all. For if there is one thing this republic stands
for, above all other things, it is the righteousness of aversion to
a foreign yoke.

In their telegram of October 7th, [145] the Peace Commissioners,
now squarely confronted with the question of forcible annexation,
begin to let the Administration down easy. They say:


    General Anderson in correspondence with Aguinaldo in June and
    July seemed to treat him and his forces as allies and native
    authorities, but subsequently changed his tone. Merritt and Dewey
    both kept clear of any compromising communications.


A despatch sent by Judge Day certainly comes from high authority. The
word "compromising" is therefore important. To say that Admiral
Dewey did not treat Aguinaldo as an ally is to raise a mere technical
point. But Aguinaldo never did get anything from him in writing. What
he got consisted more of deeds than words. And actions speak louder
than words. We had an alliance with Aguinaldo, a most "compromising"
alliance and afterwards repudiated it. Admiral Dewey made it and
General Merritt repudiated it. Dewey did, without the President's
knowledge, exactly what the President and the American people would
have had him do at the time. And Merritt did exactly what the President
ordered him to do. But between the making of the alliance, and the
repudiation of it, the President and the American people changed their
minds. I say the American people, because they afterwards ratified
all that Mr. McKinley did. You see the bitterness that lies away down
in the secret recesses of the hearts of the Filipino people to-day
has its source at this point. They had "a gentleman's agreement,"
as it were, with us, not in writing, made at a time when the thought
of a colony had never entered our minds. They fought in a common
cause with us on the faith of that agreement--drove the Spaniards
into Manila in numerous victorious engagements involving much loss
of life, on their part, keeping the Dons thereafter bottled up in
Manila on the land side while their "ally" Admiral Dewey was doing the
same on the sea side. The said Dons were living on horses and rats,
and famine was imminent when our troops arrived and began to finish
the work of taking the beleaguered city. And then, having changed our
minds and decided to annex the islands, we repudiated our "gentleman's
agreement," on the idea that the end justified the means. And the end,
as it has turned out, did not even justify the means, seeing that the
islands have proved a heavy financial liability instead of a profitable
asset. Judge Day's telegram to Secretary Hay of October 12th (p. 27)
contains this curious and surprising passage as to Cuba:


    Senator Gray in favor of accepting sovereignty unconditionally
    * * * that we may thereby avoid future complications with Cubans,
    claiming sovereignty while we are in process of pacifying island
    * * * We desire instructions on this point.


The future of Cuba, however, trembled in the balance but for
a moment. Before "the shell-burred cables" had had time to quit
vibrating with the question thus propounded, there came back this
splendidly clean-cut answer from the President:


    We must carry out the spirit and letter of the resolution of
    Congress [declaring war].


In characterizing Judge Gray's position, above indicated, as
"surprising," no reflection upon him is intended. On the contrary, such
a position, assumed by a man of such conceded intellectual probity,
is illuminating as to the attitude subsequently taken concerning the
Philippines by the Democratic Senators who voted for the treaty. This
attitude is stated by Senator Lodge, in his History of the War with
Spain, with all the incisive forcefulness to which the country has so
long been accustomed in the public utterances of that distinguished
man, and, seeing that no promise had been made, as in the case of
Cuba, Senator Lodge's statement of the position of those who voted
for the treaty should forever set at rest the stale injustice, still
occasionally repeated, that Mr. Bryan, "played politics" in 1898-9 in
urging his friends in the Senate to vote for its ratification. Says
Senator Lodge (History of the War with Spain, p. 231):


    The friends of ratification took the very simple ground that
    the treaty committed the United States to no policy, but left
    them free to do exactly as seemed best with all the islands;
    that the American people could be safely entrusted with this
    grave responsibility, and that patriotism and common sense alike
    demanded the end of the war and the re-establishment of peace,
    which could only be effected by the adoption of the treaty.


October 14th, Washington wires the commission that Admiral Dewey has
just cabled:


    It is important that the disposition of the Philippine Islands
    should be decided as soon as possible. * * * General anarchy
    prevails without the limits of the city and bay of Manila. Natives
    appear unable to govern.


In this cablegram the Admiral most unfortunately repeated as true some
wild rumors then currently accepted by the Europeans and Americans
at Manila which of course were impossible of verification. I say
"unfortunately" with some earnestness, because it does not appear on
the face of his message that they were mere rumors. And, that they
were wholly erroneous, in point of fact, has already been cleared
up in previous chapters, wherein the real state of peace, order and
tranquillity which prevailed throughout Luzon at that time has been,
it is believed, put beyond all doubt. But what manna in the wilderness
to the McKinley Administration, now that it was bent on taking the
islands, was that Dewey message of October 14th, "The natives appear
unable to govern"!

On October 17th, Mr. Day wires Mr. Hay that the Peace Commissioners
feel the importance of preserving, so far as possible, the condition
of things existing at the time of signing the protocol, to prevent
any change in the status quo. He says:


    Might not our government * * * take more active and positive
    measures than heretofore for preservation of order and protection
    of life and property in Philippine Islands?


How could we, when Aguinaldo and his people were in the saddle all
over Luzon, had taken the status quo between their teeth and run away
with it, and were prepared to fight if bidden to halt and dismount;
and, which is more, were preserving order perfectly themselves?

On October 19th, Mr. Hay repeated by wire to Mr. Day a cablegram from
General Otis which said: "Do not anticipate trouble with insurgents
* * * Affairs progressing favorably."

General Otis was making a desperate effort to humor Mr. McKinley's
"consent-of-the-governed" theory and programme. But it was a situation,
not a theory, which confronted him.

The date of the high-water mark of the Paris peace negotiations is
October 25th. On that day, Mr. Day wired Mr. Hay:


    Differences of opinion among commissioners concerning Philippine
    Islands are set forth in statements transmitted (by cable also)
    herewith. On these we request early consideration and explicit
    instructions. Liable now to be confronted with this question in
    joint commission almost immediately.


Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid, sent a joint signed statement. They
urged taking over the whole archipelago, saying that, as their
instructions provided for the retention at least of Luzon, "we do not
consider the question of remaining in the Philippine Islands as at
all now properly before us." They also urged that as Spain governed
and defended the islands from Manila, we became, with the destruction
of her fleet and the surrender of her army, "as complete masters of
the whole group as she had been, with nothing needed to complete the
conquest save to proceed with the ample forces we had at hand to take
unopposed possession." The vice of this proposition, from the strategic
as well as the ethical point of view, is of course clear enough now.

Spain's government was already tottering in the Philippines when the
Spanish-American war broke out. To be "as complete masters as she had
been" was like becoming the recipient of a quit-claim deed. Also, ours
was not a case of taking "unopposed possession." An adverse claimant,
relying on immemorial prescription, was in full possession; all the
tenants on the land had attorned to him, and he and they were ready to
defend their claim against all comers with their lives. They reminded
one of the recurrent small farmer whom some great timber or other
corporation seeks to oust, patrolling his land lines rifle in hand,
on the lookout for the corporation's agent and the sheriff with the
dispossessory warrant.

Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid go on to say:


    Military and naval witnesses agree that it would be practically
    as easy to hold and defend the whole as a part.


Hardly any one can fail to read with interest the following accurate
and vivid picture which they give of the physical strategic unity of
the Philippine Islands:


    There is hardly a single island in the group from which you cannot
    shoot across to one or more of the others--scarcely another
    archipelago in the world in which the islands are crowded so
    closely together and so interdependent.


This explains also why the Filipino people are a people. Whenever
the American people understand that, they will give them their
independence, unless they get an idea that government of their people
by their people for their people would be distasteful to them.

In the memorandum of their views telegraphed to Washington on October
25th, Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid also say:


    Public opinion in Europe, including that of Rome, expects us to
    retain whole of Philippine Islands.


Archbishop Chapelle was in Paris at the time of these negotiations. He
afterwards told the writer in Manila that he got that $20,000,000 put
in the Treaty of Paris. The Church preferred that our title should be
a title by purchase rather than a title by conquest, and Mr. McKinley
was vigorously urging the latter. Between the legal effects of the
two, there is a world of difference. The Church outgeneralled the
President--checkmated him with a bishop. Look at that part of the
treaty which affects church property:


    Article VIII. The * * * cession * * * cannot in any respect impair
    the property or rights * * * of * * * ecclesiastical * * * bodies.


The Church of Rome, or at least some of the ecclesiastical
bodies pertaining to it in the Philippines, owned the cream of the
agricultural estates. By the treaty they have not lost a dollar. It
might have been otherwise, had not Mr. McKinley's original claim of
title by conquest been overcome at Paris.

Judge Day's memorandum of his own views, telegraphed on October 25th
along with those of his colleagues, stated that he was unable to agree
that we should peremptorily demand the entire Philippine group; that


    In the spirit of our instructions, and bearing in mind the often
    declared disinterestedness of purpose and freedom from designs
    of conquest with which the war was undertaken, we should be
    consistent in demands in making peace * * * with due regard to
    our responsibility because of the conduct of our military and
    naval authorities in dealing with the insurgents.


Again, he says:


    We cannot leave the insurgents either to form a government [he of
    course did not know what a complete government they had already
    formed] or to battle against a foe which * * * might readily
    overcome them.


He also was of course unaware how thoroughly anxious the Spaniards then
in the Philippines were to get away, and how completely they were at
the mercy of the new Philippine Republic and its forces. "On all hands"
says Judge Day, "it is agreed that the inhabitants of the islands are
unfit for self-government." Of course we knew absolutely nothing worth
mentioning about the Filipinos at that time. Judge Day then proposes,
for the reasons indicated, to accept Luzon and some adjacent islands,
as being of "strategic advantage," and to leave Spain the rest, with
a "treaty stipulation for non-alienation without the consent of the
United States." It seems to me that Judge Day's scheme was the least
desirable of all.

Senator Gray's memorandum of the same date is a red-hot argument
against taking over any part of the archipelago. He begins thus:


    The undersigned cannot agree that it is wise to take Philippine
    Islands in whole or in part. To do so would be to reverse
    accepted continental policy of the country, declared and acted
    upon through our history. * * * It will make necessary * * *
    immense sums for fortifications and harbors * * * Climate and
    social conditions demoralizing to character of American youth * * *.
    On whole, instead of indemnity, injury * * *. Cannot agree that
    any obligation incurred to insurgents * * *. If we had captured
    Cadiz and Carlists had helped us, would not be our duty to stay by
    them at the conclusion of war * * *. No place for * * * government
    of subject people in American system * * *. Even conceding all
    benefits claimed for annexation, we thereby abandon * * * the moral
    grandeur and strength to be gained by keeping our word to nations
    of the world * * * for doubtful material advantages and shameful
    stepping down from high moral position boastfully assumed. * * *
    Now that we have achieved all and more than our object, let us
    simply keep our word * * *. Above all let us not make a mockery
    of the [President's] instructions, where, after stating that we
    took up arms only in obedience to the dictates of humanity * * *
    and that we had no designs of aggrandizement and no ambition for
    conquest, the President * * * eloquently says: "It is my earnest
    wish that the United States in making peace should follow the
    same high rule of conduct which guided it in facing war."


The next day, October 26th, came this laconic answer:


    The cession must be of the whole archipelago or none. The latter
    is wholly inadmissible and the former must be required.


Probably the one thing about the Paris Peace negotiations that is
sure to interest the average American most at this late date is the
matter of how we came to pay that twenty millions. It was this way. On
October 27th, the Commission wired Washington:


    Last night Spanish ambassador called upon Mr. Reid.


It seems they talked long and earnestly far into the night, trying to
find a way which would prevent the conference from resulting in sudden
disruption, and consequent resumption of the war. Mr. Reid made plain
the inflexible determination of the American people not to assume the
Cuban debt. The Ambassador said: "Montero Rios [146] could not return
to Madrid now if known to have accepted entire Cuban indebtedness,"
and asked delay to see "if some concessions elsewhere might not be
found which would save Spanish Commissioners from utter repudiation at
home." There is no doubt that the talk we are now considering was a
"heart-to-heart" affair, probably quite informal. Yet it is one of
the most important talks that have occurred between any two men in
this world in the last fifty years. Mr. Reid finally threw out a hint
to the effect that as the preponderance of American public sentiment
seemed rather inclined to retain the Philippines, "It was possible,"
he said, "but not probable that out of these conditions the Spanish
Commissioners might find something either in territory or debt [147]
which might seem to their people at least like a concession.!" [148]

It was the leaven of this hint that leavened the whole loaf. There
was doubtless much informal parleying after that, but finally, the
American Commissioners, having become satisfied that Spanish honor
would not be offended by an offer having the substance, if not the
form, of charity, and being very tired of Spain's sparring for wind
in the hope of a European coalition against us should war be resumed,
submitted the following proposal:


    The Government of the United States is unable to modify the
    proposal heretofore made for the cession of the entire archipelago
    of the Philippine Islands, but the American Commissioners are
    authorized to offer to Spain, in case the cession should be agreed
    to, the sum of $20,000,000.


This alluring offer was accompanied with the stern announcement that


    Upon the acceptance * * * of the proposals herein made * * *
    but not otherwise, it will be possible * * * to proceed to the
    consideration * * * of other matters.


Also, our Commissioners wired Washington:


    If the Spanish Commissioners refuse our proposition * * * nothing
    remains except to close the negotiations.


This was very American and very final. Washington answered: "Your
proposed action approved."

November 29th, Mr. Day wired Mr. Hay:


    Spanish Commissioners at to-day's conference presented a definite
    and final acceptance of our last proposition.


And that is how that twenty millions found its way into the treaty--not
forgetting the prayers and other contemporaneous activities of
Archbishop Chapelle.

After the tremendous eight weeks' tension had relaxed, and before
the final reduction to writing of all the details, we see this dear
little telegram, from Secretary of State Hay, himself a writer of note,
come bravely paddling into port, where it was cordially received by
both sides, taken in out of the wet, and put under the shelter of
the treaty:


    Mr. Hay to Mr. Day: In renewing conventional arrangements do not
    lose sight of copyright agreement.


And here is the last act of the drama:


    Mr. Day to Mr. Hay, Paris, December 10, 1898: Treaty signed at
    8.50 this evening.






CHAPTER VIII

THE BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION PROCLAMATION

    Prometheus stole the heavenly fire from the altar of Jupiter to
    benefit mankind, and Jupiter thereupon punished both Prometheus
    and the rest of mankind by creating and giving to them the woman
    Pandora, a supposed blessing but a real curse. Pandora brought
    along a box of blessings, and when she opened it, everything flew
    out and away but Hope.

                                                    Tales from Æschylus.


The ever-memorable Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, the Pandora
box of Philippine woes, was signed December 21, 1898, and its contents
were let loose in the Philippines on January 1, 1899.

Let us consider for a moment the total misapprehension of conditions
in the islands under which Mr. McKinley drafted and signed that famous
document--a misapprehension due to General Otis's curious blindness
to the great vital fact of the situation, viz., that the Filipinos
were bent on independence from the first, and preparing to fight
for it to the last. Take the following Otis utterance, for example,
concerning a date when practically everybody in the Eighth Army Corps,
and every newspaper correspondent in the Philippines, recognized that
war would be certain in the event the Paris Peace negotiations should
result, as common rumor then said they would result, in our taking
over the islands:


    My own confidence at this time in a satisfactory solution of
    the difficulties which confronted us may be gathered from a
    despatch sent to Washington on December 7th, wherein I stated
    that conditions were improving, and that there were signs of
    revolutionary disintegration. [149]


There can be no doubt that, at the date of that despatch, General
Otis had been given to understand that under the Treaty of Paris
we were going to keep the islands if the treaty should be ratified,
and also that the if might give the Administration trouble, should
trouble arise with the Filipinos before the if was disposed of at
home. As heretofore intimated, in addition to his preference for
legal and administrative work to the work of his profession, in the
Philippines General Otis constituted himself from the beginning a
political henchman. Ample evidence will be introduced later on to
show beyond all doubt that all through the early difficulties, when
the American people should have been frankly dealt with and given the
facts, General Otis would, in the exercise of his military powers
as press censor, always say to the war correspondents, "I will let
nothing go that will hurt the Administration."

Let us see what the real facts of the Philippine situation were at
the date of the Treaty of Paris, December 10th, or, which is the same
thing, when General Otis sent his despatch of December 7th. When
the Treaty of Paris was signed, General Otis was in possession of
Manila and Cavite, with less than 20,000 men under his command,
and Aguinaldo was in possession of practically all the rest of the
archipelago, with between 35,000 and 40,000 men under his command,
armed with guns, and the whole Filipino population were in sympathy
with the army of their country. We have already seen the conditions
in the various provinces at that time and also the inauguration of
the native central government. Let us now examine the military figures.

Ten thousand American soldiers were on hand when Manila was captured,
August 13th, and 5000 more had arrived under command of Major-General
Elwell S. Otis a week or so after the fall of the city. [150] They had
13,000 Spanish soldiers to guard. In addition to this, by the terms of
the capitulation, the city (population say 300,000), its inhabitants,
its churches and educational establishments, and its private property
of all descriptions had been placed "under the special safeguard of
the faith and honor of the American army." [151] Some 4500 to 5000
more troops began to swarm out of San Francisco bound for Manila in
the latter part of October, 1898, the last of them reaching Manila
December 11th, the day after the Treaty of Paris was signed. After
that there were no further additions to General Otis's command prior
to the outbreak of war with the Filipinos, February 4, 1899. [151] Of
these (approximately) 20,000 men, only 1500 to 2000 were regulars,
having the Krag-Jorgensen smokeless gun. The rest were State volunteers,
armed with the antiquated Springfield rifles, the same the 71st New
York and the 2d Massachusetts had been permitted to carry into the
Santiago campaign the summer before. Aguinaldo's people were equipped
entirely with Mausers captured from the Spaniards, and other rifles,
bought in Hong Kong mostly, using smokeless ammunition. Major (now
Major-General) J. F. Bell, who is, in the judgment of many, one of the
best all-round soldiers in the American army to-day, was in charge
of the "Division of Military Information" at Manila both before and
after the taking of the city. General Bell has done many fine things,
in the way of reckless bravery in battle at the critical moment and of
bold reconnoitring in campaign, and what he fails to find out about
an enemy, or a prospective enemy, is not apt to be ascertainable. In
a report bearing date August 29, 1898, [152] prepared in anticipation
of possible trouble with the Filipinos, he estimated the number of
men under arms that Aguinaldo had at between 35,000 and 40,000. This
estimate is based by General Bell in his report on the number of guns
out in the hands of the Filipinos, which he figures thus:


    Captured from Spanish militia                     12,500
    From Cavite arsenal                                2,500
    From Jackson & Evans (American merchants
        trading with Hong Kong)                        2,000
    From Spanish (captured in battle)                  8,000
    In hands of Filipinos previous to May 1, 1898     15,000
                                                      ------
                            Total                     40,000


From this number General Bell deducts several thousands as having
been recaptured by the Spaniards, or bought in. I at once hear some
former comrade-in-arms of the Philippine insurrection say: "Oh,
no. They couldn't have had as many as 40,000 guns, or near that." I
thought the same thing when I first read General Bell's report on the
matter. But he removes the doubt thus: "They are being continually
sent away to other provinces."

We did not understand Aguinaldo's movements then. All his troops were
not around Manila. From what I learned from General Lawton and his
staff in 1899, my belief is that Aguinaldo had perhaps 30,000 men
with guns around Manila, and out along the railroad, at the time of
the outbreak of February 4th. It is idle, of course, at this late
date, to claim that the Filipinos were not bent on independence
from the first. The matured plans of their leaders, formulated at
Hong Kong May 4, 1898, before they ever started the insurrection,
preserved in the captured minutes of the meeting already noticed,
[153] provide the programme to be adopted in the event we should be
tempted to keep the islands. In that event, they were prepared against
surprise, or any necessity for making new plans, and were agreed to
accept war as inevitable. From the first, they made ready for it.

Governmentally and strategically, the Philippine Islands, except
Mohammedan Mindanao, which is a separate and distinct problem,
may be described very simply and sufficiently as consisting of the
great island of Luzon, on which Manila is situated, and the Visayan
group. [154] We are already familiar with the conditions in Luzon in
December, 1898. You hear a great deal about the Philippine archipelago
consisting of a thousand and one islands, but there are only eight
that are, broadly speaking, worth considering here. The moment a jagged
submarine ledge peeps out of the water it becomes an island. And even
before that it may wreck a ship. But we are talking about islands
that need to be charted on the sea of world politics. The Visayan
Islands that really count at all in a great problem such as that we
are now considering, are but six in number: Panay, capital Iloilo;
Cebu, capital Cebu; Bohol, Negros, Samar, and Leyte. [155] Iloilo is
some three hundred and odd miles south of Manila, and, besides being
the capital of Panay, is the chief port of the Visayas and the second
city of the archipelago, Cebu being the third. Under the Spaniards,
as now under us, a vessel might clear from either of these places
for any part of the world. As we saw in the chapter preceding this,
as early as November 18th, Admiral Dewey had cabled Washington that
the entire island of Panay was in possession of insurgents, except
Iloilo. By the end of December, all the Spanish garrisons in the
Visayan Islands had surrendered to the insurgents. (Otis's Report,
p. 61.) Iloilo did not surrender to the insurgents until the day
before Christmas. But let us not anticipate.

December 13th, General Otis received a petition for protection signed
by the business men and firms of Iloilo (p. 54), sent of course
with the approval of the general commanding the imperilled Spanish
garrison. December 14th, he wired Washington for instructions as
to what action he should take on this petition, saying, among other
things, "Spanish authorities are still holding out, but will receive
American troops"; and adding one of his inevitable notes of optimism as
to the tameness of Filipino aspirations (at Iloilo) for independence:
"Insurgents reported favorable to American annexation."

General Otis knew the Spanish troops were hard pressed by the
insurgents down at Iloilo, and eagerly awaited a reply. President
McKinley was then away from Washington, on a southern trip, to Atlanta
and Macon, Georgia, and other points, and nobody at home was giving
any thought to the Filipinos, while they were knocking successively
at the gates of the various Visayan capitals, and receiving the
surrender of their Spanish defenders. It was getting toward the
yuletide season. President McKinley was engaged, quite seasonably,
in putting the finishing touches to the great work of his life,
which was welding the North and the South together forever by wise
and kindly manipulation of the countless opportunities to do so
presented by the latest war. It was a season of general peace and
rejoicing in a thrice-blessed land, and nobody in the United States
was looking for trouble with the Filipinos. With our people it was a
case of ignorance being bliss, so far as the Philippine Islands and
their inhabitants were concerned. In his Autobiography of Seventy
Years, Senator Hoar tells of an interview with President McKinley
concerning his (the Senator's) attitude toward the Treaty of Paris,
early in December, 1898. [156] "He greeted me with the delightful and
affectionate cordiality which I always found in him. He took me by the
hand, and said: 'How are you feeling this winter, Mr. Senator?' I was
determined there should be no misunderstanding. I replied at once:
'Pretty pugnacious, I confess, Mr. President.' The tears came into
his eyes and he said, grasping my hand again: 'I shall always love
you whatever you do.'"

It behooves this nation, and all nations, to consider those
tears. They explain all the subsequent history of the Philippines
to date. Mr. McKinley had proved himself a gallant soldier in his
youth, and he knew something of the horrors of war. He was also
one of the most amiable gentlemen that ever lived. But it is no
disrespect to his memory to say that while Mr. McKinley was a good
man, Senator Hoar was his superior in moral fibre, and he knew it,
and he knew the country knew it. He knew that Senator Hoar was going
to fight the ratification of the treaty to the last ditch, speaking
for the Rights of Man and such old "worn out formulæ," and that his
only defence before the bar of history would have to rest on "Trade
Expansion," alias the "Almighty Dollar." Those tears were harbingers
of the coming strife in the Philippines. They were shed for such lives
as that strife might cost. They were an assumption of responsibility
for such shedding of blood as the treaty might entail. The President
returned to Washington from his southern trip on December 21st, and
on December 23d (p. 55) cabled General Otis the following reply to
his request of December 14th for instructions:


    Send necessary troops to Iloilo, to preserve the peace and protect
    life and property. It is most important that there should be no
    conflict with the insurgents. Be conciliatory but firm.


Senator Hoar had put Mr. McKinley on notice that he was going to
present the ethics of the case in the debate on the treaty. Congress
had gone home for the holidays, and after it re-assembled in January
the treaty would come up. The vote was sure to be close, and a too
vigorous manifestation of belief on the part of the Filipinos that
this nation was not closing the war with Spain animated by "the same
high rule of conduct which guided it in facing war" (Mr. McKinley's
instructions to the Peace Commissioners) might defeat the ratification
of the treaty. Indeed, the final vote of February 6th, was so
close that the Administration had but one vote to spare. The final
vote was fifty-seven to twenty-seven--just one over the necessary
two-thirds. The smoke of a battle to subjugate the Filipinos might
"dim the lustre and the moral strength," as Mr. McKinley had expressed
it in his instructions to the Peace Commissioners, of a war to free
the Cubans. Therefore there must be no trouble, at least until after
the ratification of the treaty. President McKinley had invented in
the case of Cuba a very catchy phrase, "Forcible annexation would be
criminal aggression," and every time anybody now quoted it on him
it tended to take the wind out of his sails. So benevolently eager
was that truly kind-hearted and Christian gentleman to avoid the
appearance of "criminal aggression" that he evidently got to thinking
about that telegram of December 23d in which he had authorized General
Otis to send troops to the relief of the beleaguered Spanish garrison
at Iloilo, and also about the message from Admiral Dewey received
November 18th previous, to the effect that the entire island of Panay
except Iloilo was then already in the hands of the insurgents. The
result was that he decided not to let his conciliatory proclamation
of December 21st await the slow process of the mails, and therefore,
though it consisted of something like one thousand words, he had it
cabled out to General Otis in full on December 27th. It is now here
reproduced in full because it precipitated the war in the Philippines,
and is the key to all our subsequent dealings with them [157]:


    THE BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION PROCLAMATION

    Executive Mansion, Washington,
          December 21, 1898.


    The destruction of the Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila
    by the United States naval squadron commanded by Rear-Admiral
    Dewey, followed by the reduction of the city and the surrender
    of the Spanish forces, practically effected the conquest of the
    Philippine Islands and the suspension of Spanish sovereignty
    therein. With the signature of the treaty of peace between the
    United States and Spain by their respective plenipotentiaries at
    Paris on the 10th instant, and as a result of the victories of
    American arms, the future control, disposition, and government
    of the Philippine Islands are ceded to the United States. In
    the fulfilment of the rights of sovereignty thus acquired and
    the responsible obligations of government thus assumed, the
    actual occupation and administration of the entire group of the
    Philippine Islands becomes immediately necessary, and the military
    government heretofore maintained by the United States in the city,
    harbor, and bay of Manila is to be extended with all possible
    despatch to the whole of the ceded territory. In performing this
    duty the military commander of the United States is enjoined to
    make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that in
    succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing the former
    political relations, and in establishing a new political power, the
    authority of the United States is to be exerted for the securing
    of the persons and property of the people of the islands and for
    the confirmation of all their private rights and relations. It
    will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to
    announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not
    as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives
    in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and
    religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by
    honest submission, co-operate with the Government of the United
    States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive
    the reward of its support and protection. All others will be
    brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness
    if need be, but without severity, so far as possible. Within the
    absolute domain of military authority, which necessarily is and
    must remain supreme in the ceded territory until the legislation
    of the United States shall otherwise provide, the municipal laws
    of the territory in respect to private rights and property and
    the repression of crime are to be considered as continuing in
    force, and to be administered by the ordinary tribunals, so far
    as practicable. The operations of civil and municipal government
    are to be performed by such officers as may accept the supremacy
    of the United States by taking the oath of allegiance, or by
    officers chosen, as far as practicable, from the inhabitants of
    the islands. While the control of all the public property and
    the revenues of the state passes with the cession, and while
    the use and management of all public means of transportation
    are necessarily reserved to the authority of the United States,
    private property, whether belonging to individuals or corporations,
    is to be respected except for cause duly established. The taxes
    and duties heretofore payable by the inhabitants to the late
    government become payable to the authorities of the United States
    unless it be seen fit to substitute for them other reasonable rates
    or modes of contribution to the expenses of government, whether
    general or local. If private property be taken for military use,
    it shall be paid for when possible in cash, at a fair valuation,
    and when payment in cash is not practicable, receipts are to be
    given. All ports and places in the Philippine Islands in the actual
    possession of the land and naval forces of the United States will
    be opened to the commerce of all friendly nations. All goods and
    wares not prohibited for military reasons by due announcement
    of the military authority will be admitted upon payment of such
    duties and other charges as shall be in force at the time of their
    importation. Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount
    aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect,
    and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring
    them in every possible way that full measure of individual
    rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and
    by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of

    BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION

    substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary
    rule. In the fulfilment of this high mission, supporting the
    temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the
    governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of
    authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles
    to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government
    upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of
    the United States.


        William McKinley.


The words used in the foregoing proclamation which were regarded by
the Filipinos as "fighting words," i. e., as making certain the long
anticipated probability of a war for independence, are those which
appear in italics. The rest of the proclamation counted for nothing
with them. They had been used to the hollow rhetoric and flowery
promises of equally eloquent Spanish proclamations all their lives,
they and their fathers before them.

In suing to President McKinley for peace on July 22d, previous, the
Prime Minister of Spain had justified all the atrocities committed
and permitted by his government in Cuba during the thirty years'
struggle for independence there which preceded the Spanish-American
War by saying that what Spain had done had been prompted only by a
"desire to spare the great island from the dangers of premature
independence." [158]

Clearly, from the Filipino point of view, the United States was now
determined "to spare them from the dangers of premature independence,"
using such force as might be necessary for the accomplishment of that
pious purpose.

The truth is that, Prometheus-like, we stole the sacred fire from the
altar of Freedom whereupon the flames of the Spanish War were kindled,
and gave it to the Filipinos, justifying the means by the end; and
"the links of the lame Lemnian" have been festering in our flesh ever
since. The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was a kind of Pandora
Box, supposed to contain all the blessings of Liberty, but when the
lid was taken off, woes innumerable befell the intended beneficiaries,
and left them only the Hope of Freedom--from us. Verily there is
nothing new under the sun. It is written: "Thou shalt not steal"
anything--not even "sacred fire." There is no such thing as nimble
morality. The lesson of the old Greek poet fits our case. So also,
indeed, do those of the modern sage, Maeterlinck, for the Filipinos
could have found their own Bluebird for happiness. The record of
our experience in the Philippines is full of reminders, which will
multiply as the years go by, that, after all, every people have an
"unalienable right" to pursue happiness in their own way as opposed to
somebody else's way. That is the law of God, as God gives me to see the
right. Conceived during the Christmas holiday season and in the spirit
of that blessed season and presented to the Filipino people on New
Year's Day, received by them practically as a declaration of war and
baptized in the blood of thousands of them in the battle of February
4th thereafter, the manner of the reception of this famous document,
the initial reversal and subsequent evolution of its policies, and
all the lights and shadows of Benevolent Assimilation will be traced
in the chapters which follow.






CHAPTER IX

THE ILOILO FIASCO

            The King of France with forty thousand men
            Marched up the hill and then marched down again.

                                                     Old English Ballad.


We have already seen how busily Aguinaldo occupied himself during
the protracted peace negotiations at Paris in getting his government
and people ready for the struggle for independence which he early and
shrewdly guessed would be ultimately forthcoming. General Otis was in
no position to preserve the status quo. The status quo was a worm in
hot ashes that would not stay still. The revolution was a snow-ball
that would roll. The day after Christmas, General Otis at last sent
an expedition under General Marcus P. Miller to the relief of Iloilo,
but when it arrived, December 28th, the Spaniards had already turned
the town over to the insurgent authorities, and sailed away. When
General Miller arrived, being under imperative orders from Washington
to be conciliatory, and under no circumstances to have a clash with
the insurgents, the Administration's most earnest solicitude being
to avoid a clash, at least until the treaty of peace with Spain
should be ratified by the United States Senate, he courteously asked
permission to land, several times, being refused each time. With
a request of this sort sent ashore January 1, 1899, he transmitted
a copy of the proclamation set forth in the preceding chapter. The
insurgent reply defiantly forbade him to land. Therefore he did not
land--because Washington was pulling the strings--until after the
treaty was ratified. "So here we are at Iloilo, an exploded bluff,"
wrote war correspondent J. F. Bass to his paper, Harper's Weekly.

By the time the treaty was ratified the battle of Manila of February
4th had occurred, and the pusillanimity of self-doubting diplomacy
had given way to the red honesty of war. [159]

As was noticed in the chapter preceding this, by the end of December,
1898, all military stations outside Luzon, with the exception of
Zamboanga, in the extreme south of the great Mohammedan island of
Mindanao near Borneo, had been turned over by the Spaniards to the
insurgents. When General Miller, commanding the expedition to Iloilo,
arrived in the harbor of that city with his teeming troop-ships and
naval escorts on December 28th, an aide of the Filipino commanding
general came aboard the boat he was on and "desired to know," says
General Miller's report, [160] "if we had anything against them--were
we going to interfere with them." General Miller then sent some of
his own aides ashore with a letter to the insurgent authorities,
explaining the peaceful nature of his errand. They at once asked if
our people had brought down any instructions from Aguinaldo. Answering
in the negative, General Miller's aides handed them his olive-branch
letter. They read it and said they could do nothing without orders
from Aguinaldo "in cases affecting their Federal Government." The grim
veteran commanding the American troops smoked on this for a day or
so, and then asked a delegation of insurgents that were visiting his
ship by his invitation--they would not let him land, you see--whether
if he landed they would meet him with armed resistance. The Malay
reverence for the relation of host and guest resulted in an evasive
reply. They could not answer. But after they went back to the city
they did answer. And this is what they wrote:


    Upon the return of your commissioners last night, we * * *
    discussed the situation and attitude of this region of Bisayas in
    regard to its relations and dependence upon the central government
    of Luzon (the Aguinaldo government, of course); and * * * I have
    the honor to notify you that, in conjunction with the people,
    the army, and the committee, we insist upon our pretension not
    to consent * * * to any foreign interference without express
    orders from the central government of Luzon * * * with which we
    are one in ideas, as we have been until now in sacrifices. * * *
    If you insist * * * upon disembarking your forces, this is our
    final attitude. May God forgive you, etc."

                                        Iloilo, December 30, 1898. [161]


This letter is recited in General Miller's report to be from "President
Lopez, of the Federal Government of Visayas." General Miller then
wrote Otis begging permission to attack on the ground that upon the
success of the expedition he was in charge of "depends the future
speedy yielding of insurrectionary movements in the islands." War
correspondent Bass, who was on the ground at the time, also wrote
his paper: "The effect on the natives will be incalculable all over
the islands." But General Otis was trying to help Mr. McKinley nurse
the treaty through the Senate on the idea that there weren't going to
be any "insurrectionary movements in the islands," that all dark and
misguided conspiracies of selfishly ambitious leaders looking to such
impious ends would fade before the sunlight of Benevolent Assimilation.

Cautioning Otis against any clash at Iloilo, Mr. McKinley wired January
9th: "Conflict would be most unfortunate, considering the present.
* * * Time given the insurgents cannot injure us, and must weaken and
discourage them. They will see our benevolent purpose, etc." [162]

The Iloilo fiasco did indeed furnish to the insurgent cause aid and
comfort at the psychologic moment when it most needed encouragement to
bring things to a head. It presented a spectacle of vacillation and
seeming cowardice which heartened the timid among the insurgents and
started among them a general eagerness for war which had been lacking
before. In one of his bulletins [163] to Otis, General Miller tells of
two boats' crews of the 51st Iowa landing on January 5th, and being met
by a force of armed natives who "asked them their business and warned
them off," whereupon they heeded the warning and returned to their
transport. This regiment had then been cooped up on their transport
continuously since leaving San Francisco November 3d, previous,
sixty-three days. They were kept lying off Iloilo until January 29th,
and then brought back to Manila and landed, after eighty-nine days
aboard ship, all idea of taking Iloilo before the Senate should act
having been abandoned.

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was received by cable in
cipher, at Manila, December 29th, and as soon as it had been written
out in long hand General Otis hurried a copy down to General Miller
at Iloilo by a ship sailing that day, so that General Miller might
"understand the position and policy of our government." But he
forgot to tell Miller to conceal the policy for the present. [164]
So the latter, on January 1st, not only sent a copy of it to the
"President of the Federal Government of Visayas," Mr. Lopez, [165]
but in the note of transmittal he "asked," says his report, "that they
permit the entry of my troops." [166] What a fatal mistake! Here was
a proclamation representing all the "majesty, dominion, and power" of
the American Government, signed by the President of the United States,
in terms asserting immediate, absolute, and supreme authority, and the
natives were "asked" if they would "permit" its enforcement. General
Miller's report says that he also had the proclamation "translated
into Spanish and distributed to the people." [167] "The people laugh
at it," he says. "The insurgents call us cowards and are fortifying
at the point of the peninsula, and are mounting old smooth-bore
guns left by the Spaniards. They are intrenching everywhere,
are bent on having one fight, and are confident of victory. The
longer we wait before the attack the harder it will be to put down
the insurrection." This is especially interesting in the light of
President McKinley's justification of the wisdom of temporizing--on
the idea that delay would weaken the insurgents and could not hurt
us. "Let no one convince you," writes Miller to Otis on January 5th,
"that peaceful means can settle the difficulty here."

The appeal to Otis to permit commencement of operations was without
avail. Otis was the Manila agent of the Aldrich Old Guard in the
Senate, in charge of the pending treaty. He would simply send the
disgusted Miller messages not to be hasty, assuring him that the
firing of a shot at Iloilo would mean the precipitation of general
conflict about Manila and all over the place, and that this would
be "most disappointing to the President of the United States, who
continually urges extreme caution and no conflict." [168]

The Administration was counting senatorial noses at the time, and
that its anxiety was justified is apparent from the fact already
noted, that on the final vote whereby the treaty was ratified it had
but one vote to spare. So General Miller sat sunning himself on the
deck of his transport, and watching the insurgents working like ants
at their fortifications, and vainly wishing his 2500 men could get
ashore at least long enough to stretch themselves a bit. John F. Bass,
correspondent for Harper's Weekly, left Iloilo, returned to Manila,
and wrote his paper on January 23d: "I returned to Manila well knowing
that there was nothing more to be done in Iloilo until the Senate
voted on the Treaty of Peace."

On the eighth day after General Miller had asked permission of the
Iloilo village Hampdens to enforce the orders of the President of
the United States, the "Federal Government of the Visayas," through
its President, Señor Lopez, finally deigned to notice Mr. McKinley's
proclamation. It said under date of January 9th:


    General: We have the high honor of having received your message,
    dated January 1st, of this year, enclosing letter of President
    McKinley. You say in one clause of your message: "As indicated in
    the President's cablegram, under these conditions the inhabitants
    of the island of Panay ought to obey the political authority of the
    United States, and they will incur a grave responsibility if, after
    deliberating, they decide to resist said authority." So the council
    of state of this region of Visayas are, at this present moment,
    between the authority of the United States, that you try to impose
    on us, and the authority of the central government of Malolos.


Then follows this remarkable statement of the case for the Filipinos:


    The supposed authority of the United States began with the
    Treaty of Paris, on the 10th of December, 1898. The authority of
    the Central Government of Malolos is founded in the sacred and
    natural bonds of blood, language, uses, customs, ideas, (and)
    sacrifices. [169]


General Otis was fond of throwing cold water on any particularly
eloquent Filipino insurrecto document he had occasion to put in
his reports by saying that Mabini was "the brains of" the Malolos
Government--meaning the only brains it had [170]--and that he probably
wrote such document, whatever it might be. But here is a piece of
real eloquence, originating away down in the Visayan Islands, as
far away from Malolos as Colonel Stark and his "Green Mountain Boys"
were from Washington and Hamilton in 1776 and after. What then is the
explanation of composition so forceful in its impassioned simplicity,
and in the light of subsequent events, so pathetic? There is but
one explanation. It came from the heart. It was the cry of the Soul
of Humanity seeking its natural affiliations. It was the language
of what Aguinaldo's early state papers always used to call the
"legitimate aspirations of" his people--legitimate aspirations which
we later strangled. The reason of the writer's earnestness is that a
few months later he helped do some of the strangling. Thirteen years
afterwards, a thorough acquaintance with the Filipino side of the
matter, derived from an examination of the information which has been
gradually accumulated and published by our government during that time,
causes him to say, "Father forgive me, for I knew not what I did." The
35,000 volunteers of 1899 knew nothing about the Filipinos or their
side of the case. We were like the deputy sheriff who goes out with
a warrant duly issued to arrest a man charged with unlawful breach
of the peace. It is not his business to inquire whether the man is
guilty or not. If the man resists arrest, he takes the consequences.

On the second day after the above defiance of the President of the
United States was served up to General Miller, that gallant officer
having dutifully swallowed it, sent an officer ashore on a diplomatic
mission. The name and rank of this military ambassador were Acting
Assistant Surgeon Henry DuR. Phelan, who clearly appears to have been
a man of keen insight and considerable ability. His written report
to General Miller of what transpired is a document of permanent
interest and importance to the annals of men's struggles for free
institutions. [171] It states that at the meeting the spokesman
of the Filipinos, Attorney Raimundo Melliza, began by saying that
"all the Americans owned was Manila." That was unquestionably true,
so our ambassador, it seems, did not gainsay it. Dr. Phelan suggested
that the Americans had sacrificed lives and money in destroying the
power of Spain. The spokesman, Attorney Melliza, replied that "they
also had made great sacrifice in lives, and that they had a right to
their country which they had fought for, and that we are here now to
take from them what they had won by fighting; that they had been our
allies, and we had used them as such." Dr. Phelan's report goes on to
say: "I replied that military occupation was a necessity for a time,
* * * and that as soon as order was assured it would be withdrawn
* * *. They smiled at this." Well they might. Fourteen years have
elapsed since then, and the law-making power of the United States has
never yet declared whether the American occupation of the Philippine
Islands is to be temporary, like our occupation of Cuba was, or
permanent, like the British occupation of Egypt is. True, Dr. Phelan
said "military" occupation, but the smile was provoked by the
suggestion of temporariness. After the committee smiled, they remarked:


    We have fought for independence and feel that we have the power
    of governing and need no assistance. We are showing it now. You
    might inquire of the foreigners if it is not so.


Dr. Phelan's report proceeds:


    They stated that their orders were not to allow us to disembark,
    and that they were powerless to allow us to come in without
    express orders from their government.


In regard to the Treaty of Paris, the spokesman, Lawyer Melliza, said:


    International law forbids a nation to make a contract in regard
    to taking the liberties of its colonies.


Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said "the law of righteousness,"
instead of "international law," his proposition, thus amended, would
have been incontrovertible. On September 19, 1911, one of the great
newspapers of this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members
of the Congress of the United States, and to "The Fourth Estate" also,
the newspaper editors, a circular letter proposing that we sell the
Philippine Islands to Japan. A member of the United States Senate
sent this answer:


    I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands means selling
    the inhabitants. The question of traffic in human beings, whether
    by wholesale or retail, was forever settled by the Civil War.


About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia had an editorial
on the Denver Post's proposition, the most conspicuous feature of
which was that Japan was too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate
selling the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the matter
at length.

No; Lawyer Melliza's proposition has no standing in international
law yet. But it has with what Mr. Lincoln's First Inaugural called
"the better angels of our nature," if we stop to reflect.

Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to General Miller
is the following:


    I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could occupy the
    city would they agree to it. He replied most emphatically that
    they would.


At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on the treaty was
in progress in the United States Senate, there was hardly a province
in that archipelago where you would not have encountered the same
inflexible adherence to the Aguinaldo government.

Dr. Phelan's report closes thus:


    At the conclusion of the meeting it was said that as this question
    involved the integrity of the entire republic, it could not
    be further discussed here, but must be referred to the Malolos
    Government.


There is one other statement made by the spokesman of the Filipinos,
at their meeting with Dr. Phelan, which arrested and gripped my
attention. That it may interest the reader as it did me, it will need
but a word or so as preface. In the fall of that same year, 1899,
when my regiment, the 29th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, reached the
Islands, it was supposed that the insurrection had about played out,
i.e., that it had been "beaten to a frazzle," because the Filipinos no
longer offered to do battle in force in the open. Yet all that fall,
and all through 1900 and after, a most obstinate guerrilla warfare
was kept up. Anywhere in the archipelago you were liable to be fired
on from ambush. At first we could not understand this. Later we found
out it was the result of an order of Aguinaldo's, faithfully carried
out, not to assemble in large commands, but to conduct a systematic
guerrilla warfare indefinitely. We learned this by capturing a copy
of the order, which was quite elaborate. Dr. Phelan's report says:


    I told him [Melliza] that the city was in our power, and that we
    could destroy it at any time * * *. Lawyer Melliza replied that
    he cared nothing about the city; that we could destroy it if we
    wished * * *. "We will withdraw to the mountains and repeat the
    North American Indian warfare. You must not forget that."


Later, they did.

On January 15th, General Otis wrote General Miller [172] again
cautioning him against any clash at Iloilo, and saying of conditions
at Manila and Malolos: "The revolutionary government is very anxious
for peaceful relations."

Three days later Senator Bacon saw the situation with clearer vision
from the other side of the world than General Otis could see it
under his nose, and said on the floor of the Senate on January 18th
concerning the conditions at Manila and Malolos:


    While there is no declaration of war, while there is no avowal
    of hostile intent, with two such armies fronting each other with
    such divers intents and resolves, it will take but a spark to
    ignite the magazines which is to explode. [173]


The spark was ignited on February 4, 1899, by a sentinel of the
Nebraska regiment firing on some Filipino soldiers who disregarded
his challenge to halt, and killing one of them. War once on, General
Miller was directed on February 10th, after he had lain in Iloilo
harbor for forty-four days, to take the city. So at last he gave
written notice to the insurgents in Iloilo demanding the surrender
of the city and garrison "before sunset Saturday, the 11th instant"
and requesting them to give warning to all non-combatants. [174]
Thereupon the insurgents set fire to the city and departed.






CHAPTER X

OTIS AND AGUINALDO (Continued)

                A word spoken in due season, how good is it!

                                                       Proverbs xv., 23.


In the last chapter we saw the début of the Benevolent Assimilation
programme at Iloilo. We are now to observe it at Manila. General Otis
says in his report for 1899 [175]:


    After fully considering the President's proclamation and the
    temper of the Tagalos with whom I was daily discussing political
    problems and the friendly intentions of the United States
    Government toward them, I concluded that there were certain
    words and expressions therein, such as "sovereignty," "right of
    cession," and those which directed immediate occupation, etc.,
    * * * which might be advantageously used by the Tagalo war party to
    incite widespread hostilities among the natives. * * * It was my
    opinion, therefore, that I would be justified in so amending the
    paper that the beneficent object of the United States Government
    would be clearly brought within the comprehension of the people.


Accordingly, he published a proclamation as indicated, on January 4th,
at Manila. In a less formal communication concerning this proclamation,
viz., a letter to General Miller at Iloilo, General Otis comes to
the point more quickly thus:


    After some deliberation we put out one of our own which it was
    believed would suit the temper of the people. [176]


The only thing in the Otis proclamation specifically directed toward
soothing "the temper of the people" was a hint that the United
States would, under the government it was going to impose, "appoint
the representative men now forming the controlling element of the
Filipinos to civil positions of responsibility and trust" (p. 69). And
this, far from soothing Filipino temper, was interpreted as an offer
of a bribe if they would desert the cause of their country. The bona
fides of the offer they did not doubt for a moment. In fact it caught
a number of the more timid prominent men, especially the elderly ones
of the ultraconservative element preferring submission to strife. But
the younger and bolder spirits were faithful, many of them unto death,
and all of them unto many battles and much "hiking." [177]

General Otis's report goes on to tell how, about the middle of January,
after he had published his sugar-coated edition of the presidential
proclamation at Manila, it then at last occurred to him that General
Miller might have published the original text of it in full at Iloilo,
and, "fearing that," says he, "I again despatched Lieut. Col. Potter to
Iloilo"--evidently post-haste. But it appears that when the breathless
Potter arrived, the lid was already off. The horse had left the stable
and the door was open, as we saw in the preceding chapter. However,
as the Otis report indicates in this connection (p. 67), copies of
the original McKinley proclamation, as published in full at Iloilo by
General Miller, were of course promptly forwarded by the insurgents at
Iloilo to the insurgent government at Malolos. So all that General Otis
got for his pains was detection in the attempt to conceal the crucial
words asserting American sovereignty in plain English. He tells us
himself that as soon as the Malolos people discovered the trick, "it
[the proclamation] became"--in the light of the Otis doctoring--"the
object of venomous attack." His report was of course written long after
all these matters occurred, but its language shows a total failure
on the part of its author, even then, to understand the cause of the
bitterness he denominates "venom." This bitterness grew naturally
out of what seemed to the Filipinos an evident purpose of the United
States to take and keep the Islands and an accompanying unwillingness
to acknowledge that purpose, as shown by the conspicuous discrepancies
between the original text of the proclamation as published at Iloilo
by General Miller, on January 1st, and the modified version of it
given out by General Otis at Manila on January 4th. "The ablest of
the insurgent newspapers," says he (p. 69), "which was now issued
at Malolos and edited by the uncompromising Luna * * * attacked the
policy * * * as declared in the proclamation, and its assumption of
sovereignty * * * with all the vigor of which he was capable." The
nature of Editor Luna's philippics is not described by General Otis
in detail, the only specific notion we get of them being from General
Otis's echo of their tone, which, he tells us, was to the effect that
"everything tended simply to a change of masters." But in another part
of the Otis Report (p. 163) we find an epistle written about that
time by one partisan of the revolution to another, whose key-note,
given in the following extracts, was doubtless in harmony with the
Luna editorials:


    We shall not have them (Filipinos enough to conduct a decent
    government) in 10, 20, or a 100 years, because the Yankees
    will never acknowledge the aptitude of an "inferior" race to
    govern the country. Do not dream that when American sovereignty
    is implanted in the country the American office-holders will
    give up. Never! If * * * it depends upon them to say whether the
    Filipinos have sufficient men for the government of the country
    * * * they will never say it."


Is not the American who pretends that he would have done anything but
just what the Filipinos did, had he been in their place, i.e., fought
to the last ditch for the independence of his country, the rankest
sort of a hypocrite? General Otis was a soldier, and his views may
have been honestly colored by his environment. But how at this late
date can any fair-minded man read the above extracts illustrative
of the temper in which the Filipinos went to war with us without
acknowledging the righteousness of the motives which impelled them?

Aguinaldo promptly met General Otis's proclamation of January 4th
by a counter-proclamation put out the very next day, in which he
indignantly protested against the United States assuming sovereignty
over the Islands. "Even the women," says General Otis (p. 70), "in a
document numerously signed by them, gave me to understand that after
the men were all killed off they were prepared to shed their patriotic
blood for the liberty and independence of their country." General
Otis actually intended this last as a sly touch of humor. But when
we recollect Mr. Millet's description (Chapter IV. ante) of the women
coming to the trenches and cooking rice for the men while the Filipinos
were slowly drawing their cordon ever closer about the doomed Spanish
garrison of Manila in July and August previous, fighting their way over
the ground between them and the besieged main body of their ancient
enemies inch by inch, while Admiral Dewey blockaded them by sea,
General Otis's sly touch of humor loses some of its slyness. "The
insurgent army also," he says (p. 70), "was especially affected * * *
and only awaited an opportunity to demonstrate its invincibility
in war with the United States troops * * * whom it had commenced to
insult and charge with cowardice."

The benighted condition of the insurgents in this regard was directly
traceable to the Iloilo fiasco. It was that, principally, which made
the insurgents so foolishly over-confident and the subsequent slaughter
of them so tremendous. Further on in his report General Otis says, with
perceptible petulance, in summing up his case against the Filipinos:


    The pretext that the United States was about to substitute itself
    for Spain * * * was resorted to and had its effect on the ignorant
    masses.


Speaking of his own modified version of the Benevolent Assimilation
Proclamation, General Otis says (p. 76):


    No sooner was it published than it brought out a virtual
    declaration of war from, in this instance at least, the wretchedly
    advised President Aguinaldo, who, on January 5th, issued the
    following


--giving the reply proclamation in full. No man can read the Otis
report itself without feeling that if he, the reader, had been playing
Aguinaldo's hand he would have played it exactly as Aguinaldo did. To
General Otis the government at Malolos--"their Malolos arrangement," he
used to call it--seemed quite an impudent little opera-bouffe affair,
"a tin-horn government," as Senator Spooner suggested in the same
debate on the treaty, in which he called his rugged and fiery friend
from South Carolina, Senator Tillman, "the Senator from Aguinaldo,"
and immediately thereafter, with that engaging frankness that always so
endeared him to his colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, removed
the sting from the jest by admitting that neither he (Spooner),
nor Tillman, nor anybody else in the United States, knew anything
about Aguinaldo or his government. But in the calmer retrospect of
many years after, we have seen, through the official documents which
have become available in the interval, that said government was in
complete and effective control of practically the whole archipelago,
and had the moral support of the whole population at a time when our
troops controlled absolutely nothing but the two towns of Manila and
Cavite. Therefore, when we read in the Aguinaldo proclamation such
phrases as, "In view of this, I summoned a council of my generals and
asked the advice of my cabinet, and in conformity with the opinion of
both bodies I" did so and so; "My government cannot remain indifferent
to" this or that act of the Americans assuming sovereignty over the
islands; "Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities
if" etc.; they do not sound to us so irritatingly bombastic as they
did to General Otis, distributed under his nose as the proclamation
containing them at once was, by thousands, throughout a city of which
he was nominally in possession, but nine-tenths of whose 300,000
inhabitants he was obliged to believe in sympathy with the insurgents.

"My government," says the Aguinaldo proclamation, "rules the whole
of Luzon, the Visayan Islands, and a part of Mindanao." Except as to
Mindanao, which cut absolutely no figure in the insurrection until well
toward the end of the guerrilla part of it, we have already examined
this claim and found by careful analysis that it was absolutely true
by the end of December, 1898.

After a rapid review of how he had been aided and encouraged in
starting the revolution against the Spaniards by Admiral Dewey, and
then given the cold shoulder by the army when it came, Aguinaldo's
manifesto says:


    It was also taken for granted that the American forces would
    necessarily sympathize with the revolution which they had managed
    to encourage, and which had saved them much blood and great
    hardships; and, above all, we entertained absolute confidence
    in the history and traditions of a people which fought for its
    independence and for the abolition of slavery, and which posed as
    the champion and liberator of oppressed peoples. We felt ourselves
    under the safeguard of a free people.


That this statement also was authorized by the facts is evident from
the minutes of the Hong Kong meeting of May 4th, already noticed,
presided over by Aguinaldo, and called to formulate the programme
for the insurrection he was about to sail for the Philippines to
inaugurate, in which, after much discussion among the revolutionary
leaders it was agreed that while they must be prepared for all possible
contingencies, yet,


    if Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental principles
    of its constitution, it is most improbable that an attempt will
    be made to colonize the Filipinos or annex them. [178]


In short, the Aguinaldo proclamation of January 5th suggests with
a briefness which Filipino familiarity with the great mass of
facts already laid before the reader in the preceding chapters made
appropriate, all the causes for which the Malolos Government was ready,
if need be, to declare war, and winds up by boldly serving General
Otis with notice that if the Americans try to take Iloilo and the
Visayan Islands "my government is disposed to open hostilities."

On January 9th President McKinley cabled out to General Otis asking
if it would help matters to send a commission out to explain to
the Filipinos our benevolent intentions. This idea thus suggested
materialized, a few weeks later, in the Schurman Commission, of which
more anon. The next day, January 10th, General Otis answered endorsing
the sending of "commissioners of tact and discretion," and adding: [178]


    Great difficulty is that leaders cannot control ignorant
    classes. [179]


As a matter of fact the leaders were leading. They were not arguing
with the tide. They were merely riding the crest of it. Actually,
General Otis would have stopped "The Six Hundred Marseillaise Who
Knew How to Die"--the ones whose march to Paris, according to Thomas
Carlyle, inspired the composition of the French national air, "The
Marseillaise"--and tried to parley with the head of the column on the
idea of getting them to abandon their enterprise and disperse to their
several homes. He also says, in the cablegram under consideration:


    If peace kept for several days more immediate danger will have
    passed.


In other words, he was holding off the calf as best he could pending
the ratification of the treaty. From the text itself, however, of
General Otis's report, it is clear enough, that even he was getting
anxious to give the Filipinos a drubbing as soon as the treaty should
be safely passed. Referring to a message from the President enjoining
avoidance of a clash with the Filipinos he says (p. 80):


    The injunction of his Excellency the President of the United
    States to exert ourselves to preserve the peace had an excellent
    effect upon the command. Officers and men * * * were restless
    under the restraints * * * imposed, and * * * eager to avenge the
    insults received. Now they submit very quietly to the taunts and
    aggressive demonstrations of the insurgent army who continue to
    throng the streets of the business portion of the city.


See the lamb kick the lion viciously in the face, and observe the
lion as he first lifts his eyes heavenward and says meekly: "Thy
will be done. This is Benevolent Assimilation"; and then turns them
Senate-ward and murmurs: "I cannot stand this much longer, kind
sirs. Say when!" The way war correspondent John F. Bass puts the
situation about this time in a letter to his paper, Harper's Weekly,
was this:


    Jimmie Green [180] bites his lip, hangs on to himself, and finds
    comfort in the idea that his time will come.


After Aguinaldo's ultimatum of January 5th about fighting if we took
Iloilo, General Otis refrained from taking Iloilo, and continued to
communicate with the insurgent chieftain, appointing commissioners
to meet commissioners appointed by him. These held divers and sundry
sessions, whose only result was to kill time, or at least to mark
time, while the Administration was getting the treaty through the
Senate. The object of these meetings is thus set forth in the military
order of January 9, 1899, appointing the Otis portion of the Joint
High Parleying Board:


    To meet a commission of like number appointed by General Aguinaldo,
    and to confer with regard to the situation of affairs and to arrive
    at a mutual understanding of the intent, purposes, aim, and desires
    of the Filipino people and the people of the United States, that
    peace and harmonious relations between these respective peoples
    may be continued. [181]


The minutes of the first meeting of this board, prepared by the
Spanish-speaking clerk or recorder, recite the above declared
purpose verbatim, in all its verbosity, and then go on to say that
our side asked


    That the commissioners appointed by General Aguinaldo give
    their opinion as to what were the purposes, aspirations, aims,
    and desires of the people of the archipelago.


The next paragraph is almost Pickwickian in its unconscious terseness:


    To this request the commissioners appointed by General Aguinaldo
    made response that in their opinion the aspirations, purposes,
    and desires of the Philippine people might be summed up in two
    words "Absolute Independence."


Of course even General Otis does not reproduce this laconic answer
as part of his petulant summing up of how little the Filipinos knew,
before the outbreak of February 4th, as to what they really wanted. He
merely alludes to it as being of record elsewhere. It is one o£
the various pieces of jetsam and flotsam that have floated from the
sea of those great events to the shores of government publications
since. The minutes of these meetings may be found among the hearings
before the Senate Committee of 1902. [182]

General Otis's report complains that Aguinaldo's commissioners did not
know what they wanted, "could not give any satisfactory explanation"
of the "measure of protection" they wanted, they having declared
that they would greatly prefer the United States to establish a
protectorate over them to keep them from being annexed by some other
power. But he fails to state, which is a fact shown by the minutes of
the meeting of January 14 (p. 2721), that the Filipino commissioners
did say that this was a question which would only be reached between
their government and ours when the latter should agree to officially
recognize the former. To quote their exact language, which is rather
clumsily translated, they said: "The aspiration of the Filipino
people is the independence with the restrictions resulting from the
conditions which its government may agree with the American, when
the latter agree to officially recognize the former."

It is perfectly clear from the voluminous minutes of the proceedings
that the Filipinos were only seeking some declaration of the purpose
of our government which would satisfy their people that the programme
was something more than a mere change of masters. "They begged,"
says General Otis (p. 82), "for some tangible concession from the
United States Government--one which they could present to the people
and which might serve to allay excitement." General Otis of course had
no authority to bind the government and so could make no promise. But
the day this Otis-Aguinaldo parleying board had its second meeting,
January 11th, and probably with no more knowledge of its existence
than the reader has of what is going on in the Fiji Islands at the
moment he reads these lines, Senator Bacon introduced in the United
States Senate some resolutions which were precisely the medicine the
case required and precisely the thing the Filipinos were pleading
for. These resolutions concluded thus:


    That the United States hereby disclaim any disposition or
    intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over
    said islands except for the pacification thereof, and assert their
    determination when an independent government shall have been duly
    erected therein entitled to recognition as such, to transfer to
    said government, upon terms which shall be reasonable and just,
    all rights secured under the cession by Spain, and to thereupon
    leave the government and control of the islands to their people.


They were a twin brother to the Teller Cuban resolution which was
incorporated into the resolution declaring war against Spain, being
verbatim the same, except with the necessary changes of name, of
"islands" for "island," etc.

On January 18th, while the futile parleying board aforesaid was still
futilely parleying at Manila, Senator Bacon made an argument in the
Senate in support of his resolution, whose far-sighted statesmanship,
considered in relation to the analogies of its historic setting,
most strikingly reminds us of Burke's great speech on conciliation
with America delivered under similar circumstances nearly a century
and a quarter earlier. After alluding to the naturalness of the
apprehension of the Filipinos "that it is the purpose of the United
States Government to maintain permanent dominion over them," [183]
Senator Bacon urged:


    The fundamental requirement in these resolutions is that the
    Government of the United States will not undertake to exercise
    permanent dominion over the Philippine Islands. The resolutions
    are intentionally made broad, so that those who agree on that
    fundamental proposition may stand upon them even though they
    may differ materially as to a great many other things relative
    to the future course of the government in connection with the
    Philippine Islands.


Senator Bacon then quoted the following from some remarks Senator
Foraker had previously made in the course of the great debate on
the treaty:


    I do not understand anybody to be proposing to take the Philippine
    Islands with the idea and view of permanently holding them.
    * * * The President of the United States does not, I know, and no
    Senator in this chamber has made any such statement;


and added:


    If the views expressed by the learned Senator from Ohio in
    his speech * * * are those upon which we are to act, there is
    very little difference between us; and there will be no future
    contention between us * * * if we can have an authoritative
    expression from The Law-Making Power of the United States in a
    joint resolution that such is the purpose of the future. [184]


Says the Holy Scripture: "A word spoken in season, how good is it!"
Had the Bacon resolutions passed the United States Senate in January,
1899, we never would have had any war with the Filipinos. [185]
They would have presented at the psychologic moment the very thing
the best and bravest of the Filipino leaders were then pleading
with General Otis for, something "tangible," something "which they
could present to their people and which would allay excitement,"
by allaying the universal fear that we were going to do with them
exactly as all other white men they had ever heard of had done with
all other brown men they had ever heard of under like circumstances,
viz., keep them under permanent dominion with a view of profit.

In his letter accepting the nomination for the Presidency in 1900,
Mr. McKinley sought to show the Filipinos to have been the aggressors
in the war by a reference to the fact that the outbreak occurred
while the Bacon resolution was under discussion in the Senate. This
hardly came with good grace from an Administration whose friends in
the Senate had all along opposed not only the Bacon resolution but
also all other resolutions frankly declaratory of the purpose of our
government. The supreme need of the hour then was, and the supreme
need of every hour of every day we have been in the Philippines since
has been, "an authoritative expression from the law-making power of
the United States"--not mere surmises of a President, confessedly
devoid of binding force, but an authoritative expression from the
law-making power, declaratory of the purpose of our government with
regard to the Philippine Islands. Secretary of War Taft visited Manila
in 1907 to be present at the opening of the Philippine Assembly. In
view of the universal longing which he knew existed for some definite
authoritative declaration as to whether our government intends to
keep the Islands permanently or not, he said:


    I cannot speak with authority * * *. The policy to be pursued
    with respect to them is, therefore, ultimately for Congress to
    determine. * * * I have no authority to speak for Congress in
    respect to the ultimate disposition of the Islands. [186]


This bitter disappointment of the public expectation and hope
of something definite, certainly did not lessen the belief of
the Filipinos that we have no notion of ever giving them their
independence. Had the Senate known what the Filipino commissioners
were so earnestly asking of the Otis commissioners in January,
1899, the Bacon resolution would probably have passed. In fact it
is demonstrable almost mathematically that, had the Administration's
friends in the Senate allowed that resolution to come to a vote before
the outbreak of February 4th, instead of filibustering against it until
after that event, it would have passed. As stated in the foot-note, the
roll-call on the final vote on it, which was not taken until February
14th, showed a tie--29 to 29, the Vice-President of the United States
casting the deciding vote which defeated it. Much dealing with real
life and real death has blunted my artistic sensibilities to thrills
from the mere pantomime of the stage. But as here was a vote where,
had a single Senator who voted No voted Aye, some 300,000,000 of
dollars, over a thousand lives of American soldiers killed in battle,
some 16,000 lives of Filipino soldiers killed in battle, and possibly
100,000 Filipino lives snuffed out through famine, pestilence, and
other ills consequent on the war, would have been saved, I can not
refrain from reproducing the vote--perhaps the most uniquely momentous
single roll-call in the parliamentary history of Christendom [187]:


Ayes

            Bacon                   Jones of Nevada
            Bate                    Lindsay
            Berry                   McLaurin
            Caffery                 Martin
            Chilton                 Money
            Clay                    Murphy
            Cockrell                Perkins
            Faulkner                Pettigrew
            Gorman                  Pettus
            Gray                    Quay
            Hale                    Rawlins
            Harris                  Smith
            Heitfield               Tillman
            Hoar                    Turner
            Jones of Arkansas


Nays

            Allison                 Mantle
            Burrows                 Morgan
            Carter                  Nelson
            Chandler                Penrose
            Deboe                   Platt of Connecticut
            Fairbanks               Platt of New York
            Frye                    Pritchard
            Gear                    Ross
            Hanna                   Shoup
            Hawley                  Simon
            Kyle                    Stewart
            Lodge                   Teller
            McBride                 Warren
            McEnery                 Wolcott
            McMillan


In January, 1899, the out-and-out land-grabbers had not yet made bold
to show their hand, the friends of the treaty confining themselves
to the alleged shame of doing as we had done with Cuba, on account
of the supposed semi-barbarous condition of "the various tribes out
there," leaving the possibility of profit to quietly suggest itself
amid the noisy exhortations of altruism. It was not until after the
milk of human kindness had been spilled in war that Senator Lodge
said at the Philadelphia National Republican Convention of 1900:


    We make no hypocritical pretence of being interested in the
    Philippines solely on account of others. We believe in Trade
    Expansion.


Speaking (p. 82) of the meetings of what for lack of a better term
I have above called the Otis-Aguinaldo Joint High Parleying Board,
General Otis says in his report:


    Finally, the conferences became the object of insurgent suspicion,
    * * * and * * * amusement.


The Filipino newspapers called attention to the fact that large
reinforcements of American troops were on the way to Manila, and very
plausibly inferred that the parleying was for delay only. By January
26th the politeness of both the American and the Filipino commissioners
had been worn to a frazzle, and they adjourned, each recognizing that
the differences between them could ultimately be settled only on the
field of battle, in the event of the ratification of the treaty.

January 27th, General Otis cabled to Washington a letter from
Aguinaldo, of which he says in his report: "I was surprised * * *
because of the boldness with which he therein indicated his purpose
to continue his assumptions and establish their correctness by the
arbitrament of war" (p. 84). General Otis was "surprised" to the
last. Aguinaldo's letter is not at all surprising, though extremely
interesting. It sends General Otis a proclamation issued January 21st,
announcing the publication of a constitution modelled substantially
after that of the United States, even beginning with the familiar
words about "securing the blessings of liberty, promoting the general
welfare," etc., and concludes with an expression of confident hope that
the United States will recognize his government, and a bold implication
of determination to fight if it does not. On the evening of February
4th an insurgent soldier approaching an American picket failed to
halt or answer when challenged, and was shot and killed. Nearly
six months of nervous tension thereupon pressed for liberation in
a general engagement which continued throughout the night and until
toward sundown of the next day, thus finally unleashing the dogs of
war. In the Washington Post of February 6, 1899, Senator Bacon is
quoted as saying:


    I will cheerfully vote all the money that may be necessary to
    carry on the war in the Philippines, but I still maintain that we
    could have avoided a conflict with those people had the Senate
    adopted my resolution, or a similar resolution announcing our
    honest intentions with regard to the Philippines.


Said the New York Criterion of February 11, 1899:


    Whether we like it or not, we must go on slaughtering the natives
    in the English fashion, and taking what muddy glory lies in this
    wholesale killing until they have learned to respect our arms. The
    more difficult task of getting them to respect our intentions
    will follow.


The Washington Post of February 6, 1899, may not have quoted Senator
Bacon with exactitude. But what the Senator did say on the floor of
the Senate is important, historically. Under date of February 22,
1912, Senator Bacon writes me, in answer to an inquiry:


    I enclose a speech made by me upon the subject in the Senate
    February 27, 1899, and upon pages 6, 7, and 8 of which you will
    find a statement of my position, and the reasons given by me
    therefor. Of course you cannot go at length into that question
    in your narration of the events of that day, but my position was
    that, while I did not approve of the war, and did not approve
    of the enslavement of the Filipinos, and while if I had my way I
    would immediately set them free, at the same time, as war was then
    flagrant, and there were then some twenty odd thousand American
    troops in the Philippine Islands, we must either support them or
    leave them to defeat and death. I do not know how far you can use
    anything then said by me, but if you make allusion to the fact
    that I was willing to supply money and troops to carry on the war
    in the Philippines, I would be glad for it to be accompanied by a
    very brief statement of the ground upon which I based such action.


The above makes it unnecessary to quote at length from the speech
referred to, which may be found at pp. 2456 et seq of the Congressional
Record for February 27, 1899. However, there is one passage in the
speech to which I especially say Amen, and invite all whose creed of
patriotism is not too sublimated for such a common feeling to join
me in so doing. Senator Bacon will now state the creed:


    The oft-repeated expression "our country, right or wrong" has a
    vital principle in it, and upon that principle I stand.


The Senator immediately follows his creed with these commentaries:


    In this annexation of the Philippine Islands through the
    ratification of the treaty, and in waging war to subjugate the
    Filipinos, I think the country, acting through constitutional
    authorities, is wrong. But it is not for me to say because the
    country has been committed to a policy that I do not favor and
    have opposed, in consequence of which there is war, that I will
    not support the government.


Under the civilizing influence of Krag-Jorgensen rifles and the moral
uplift of high explosive projectiles, what our soldiers used to call,
with questionable piety, "the fear of God," was finally put into the
hearts of the Filipinos, after much carnage by wholesale in battle
formation and later by retail in a species of guerrilla warfare as
irritating as it was obstinate. But they have never yet learned to
respect our intentions, because under the guidance of three successive
Presidents we have studiously refrained from any authoritative
declaration as to what those intentions are. We are loth to hark back
to the only right course, a course similar to our action in Cuba,
because of the expense we have been to in the Philippines. But we also
know that the islands are and are likely to continue, a costly burden,
a nuisance, and a distinct strategic disadvantage in the event of war;
and that Mr. Cleveland was right when he said:


    The government of remote and alien people should have no permanent
    place in the purposes of our national life.


The mistaken policy which involved us in a war to subjugate the
Filipinos, following our war to free the Cubans, will never stand
atoned for before the bar of history, nor can the Filipinos ever in
reason be expected to respect our intentions, until the law-making
power of the government shall have authoritatively declared what
those intentions are--i. e., what we intend ultimately to do with the
islands. Senator Bacon's resolutions of 1899 were, are, and always
will be the last word on the first act needed to rectify the original
Philippine blunder, "announcing" as they would, to use the language
attributed to their distinguished author by the Washington Post of
February 6, 1899, above-quoted, "our honest intentions with regard to
the Philippines." So eager is the exploiter to exploit the islands,
and so apprehensive is the Filipino that the exploiter will have more
influence at Washington than himself and therefore be able ultimately
to bring about a practical industrial slavery, that common honesty
demands such a declaration. To doctor present Filipino discontent
with Benevolent Uncertainty is a mere makeshift. The remedy the
situation needs is simple, but as yet untried--Frankness. The chief
of the causes of the present discontent among the Filipinos with
American rule is precisely the same old serpent that precipitated
the war thirteen years ago, to wit, lack of a frank and honest
declaration of our purpose. The trouble then lay, and still lies,
and, in the absence of some such declaration as that proposed by
the Bacon resolution, will always lie in what seemed then, and still
seems, to the Filipinos "an evident purpose to keep the islands and
an accompanying unwillingness to acknowledge that purpose." Some
may object that one Congress cannot bind another. The same argument
would have killed the Teller amendment to the declaration of war with
Spain avowing our purpose as to Cuba. Such an argument assumes that
this nation has no sense of honor, and that it should cling for a
while longer to the stale Micawberism that the Islands may yet pay,
before it decides whether it will do right or not, and signalizes
such decision by formal announcement through Congress. To men capable
of such an assumption as the one just indicated, this book is not
addressed. Three successive Presidents, Messrs. McKinley, Roosevelt,
and Taft, have with earnest asseveration of benevolent intention tried
without success all these years to win the affections of the Filipino
people, and to make them feel that "our flag had not lost its gift of
benediction in its world-wide journey to their shores," as Mr. McKinley
used to say. But the corner-stone of the policy was laid before we
knew anything about how the land lay, and on the assumption, made
practically without any knowledge whatever on the subject, that the
Filipino people were incapable of self-government. The corner-stone
of our Philippine policy has been from the beginning precisely that
urged by Spain for not freeing Cuba, viz., "to spare the people from
the dangers of premature independence." The three Presidents named
above have always been willing to imply independence, but never to
promise it. And the unwillingness to declare a purpose ultimately to
give the Filipinos their independence has always been due to the desire
to catch the vote of those who are determined they shall never have
it. In this inexorable and unchangeable political necessity lies the
essential contemptibleness of republican imperialism, and the secret
of why the Filipinos, notwithstanding our good intentions, do not like
us, and never will under the present policy. How can you blame them?

Yet the more you know of the Filipinos, the better you like
them. Self-sacrificing, brave, and faithful unto death in war, they
are gentle, generous, and tractable in peace. Moreover, respect
for constituted authority, as such, is innate in practically every
Filipino, which I am not sure can be predicated concerning each and
every citizen of my beloved native land. And we can win the grateful
and lasting affection of the whole seven or eight millions of them any
day we wish to. How? Have done with vague, vote-catching Presidential
obiter, and through your Congress declare your purpose!






CHAPTER XI

OTIS AND THE WAR

                Am I the boss, or am I a tool,
                Am I Governor-General or a hobo--hobo;
                Now I'd like to know who's the boss of the show,
                Is it me, or Emilio Aguinaldo?

                                Army Song of the Philippines under Otis.


"The thing is on," said General Hughes, Provost Marshal of Manila, to
General Otis, at Malacañan palace, on the night of February 4, 1899,
about half past eight o'clock, as soon as the firing started. [188]
He was talking about something which every American in Manila except
General Otis had for months frankly recognized as inevitable--the war.

On the day of the outbreak of February 4th, General Otis had under
his command 838 officers and 20,032 enlisted men, say in round numbers
a total of 21,000. Of these some 15,500 were State volunteers mostly
from the Western States, and the rest were regulars. All the volunteers
and 1650 of the regulars were, or were about to become, entitled to
their discharge, and their right was perfected by the exchange of
ratifications of the treaty of peace with Spain on April 11, 1899. The
total force which he was thus entitled to command for any considerable
period consisted of less than 4000. Of the 21,000 men on hand as
aforesaid, on February 4th, deducting those at Cavite and Iloilo,
the sick and wounded, those serving in civil departments, and in the
staff organizations, the effective fighting force was 14,000, and of
these 3000 constituted the Provost Guard in the great and hostile
city of Manila. [189] Thus there were only 11,000 men, including
those entitled to discharge, available to engage the insurgent army,
"which," says Secretary of War Root, "was two or three times that
number, well armed and equipped, and included many of the native
troops formerly comprised in the Spanish army."

Such was the predicament into which General Otis's supremely zealous
efforts to help the Administration get the treaty through the Senate
by withholding from the American people the knowledge of facts which
might have put them on notice that they were paying $20,000,000 for
a $200,000,000 insurrection, had brought us. This is not a tale of
woe. It is a tale of the disgust--good-humored, because stoical--which
finally found expression at the time in the army song that heads this
chapter, disgust at unnecessary sacrifice of American life which could
so easily have been prevented had General Otis only revealed the real
situation in time to have had plenty of troops on hand. It is a requiem
over those brave men of the Eighth Army Corps from Pennsylvania,
Tennessee, and the Western States that bore the brunt of the early
fighting, whose lives were needlessly sacrificed in 1899 as the
result of an unpreparedness for war due to anxiety not to embarrass
Mr. McKinley in his efforts to get the treaty through the Senate,
an unpreparedness which remained long unremedied thereafter in order
to conceal from the people of the United States the unanimity of the
desire of the Filipinos for Independence.

It is quite true that none of our people then in the Islands realized
this unanimity in all its pathos at the outset, but it soon became
clear to everybody except the commanding general. It naturally dawned
on him last of all, because he did not visit the most reliable sources
of information, to wit, the battlefields during the fighting, and
therefore did not see how tenaciously the Filipinos fought for the
independence of their country. Moreover, General Otis tried to think
till the last along lines in harmony with the original theory of
Benevolent Assimilation. Hence Mr. Root's nonsense of 1899 and 1900
about "the patient and unconsenting millions" dominated by "the Tagalo
tribe," which nonsense was immensely serviceable in a campaign for the
presidency wherein antidotes for sympathy with a people struggling
to be free were of supreme practical political value. General Otis
actually had Mr. McKinley believing as late as December, 1899, at
least, that the opposition to a change of masters in lieu of Freedom
was confined to a little coterie of self-seeking politicians who were
in the business for what they could get out of it, and that the great
majority would prefer him, Otis, to Aguinaldo, as governor-general. It
is difficult on first blush to accept this statement as dispassionately
correct, but there is no escape from the record. Mr. McKinley said
in his annual message to Congress in December, 1899, in reviewing
the direction he gave to the Paris peace negotiations which ended
in the purchase of the islands, and the war with the Filipinos which
had followed, and had then been raging since February 4th previous,
"I had every reason to believe, and still believe that the transfer
of sovereignty was in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of
the great mass of the Filipino people."

Yet every American soldier who served in the Philippines at the time
knows that Aguinaldo held the whole people in the hollow of his hand,
because he was their recognized leader, the incarnation of their
aspirations. [190]

During the presidential campaign of 1900, while the war with the
Filipinos was still raging, partisan rancour bitterly called in
question the sincerity of President McKinley's statement in his annual
message to Congress of December, 1899, that he then still believed "the
transfer of sovereignty was in accord with the wishes and aspirations
of the great mass of the Filipino people," on the ground that he must
by the time he made that statement have understood how grossly--however
honestly--General Otis had misled him as to the unanimity and tenacity
of the Filipino purpose. But it is only necessary to read Admiral
Dewey's testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902 to understand
Mr. McKinley's allusion in this same message to Congress of 1899 to
"the sinister ambition of a few leaders," and this, once understood,
explains the other statement of the message. Admiral Dewey came
home in the fall of 1899 and undoubtedly filled Mr. McKinley with
the estimate of Aguinaldo which makes such painful reading in the
Admiral's testimony of 1902 before the Senate Committee, where he
abused Aguinaldo like a pick-pocket, so to speak, saying his original
motive was principally loot. [191] In the fall of 1899 Aguinaldo had
issued a proclamation claiming that Admiral Dewey originally promised
him independence, and Admiral Dewey had bitterly denounced this as a
falsehood, so that the Admiral always cherished a very real resentment
against the insurgent chief thereafter. His estimate of the Filipino
leader as being in the insurrection merely for what he could get out
of it was wholly erroneous, and has long since been exploded, all our
generals of the early fighting and all Americans who have known him
since being unanimous that Aguinaldo was and is a sincere patriot;
but it undoubtedly explains Mr. McKinley's still clinging, in 1899,
to the notion derived from General Otis that the insurrection did not
have the moral and material backing of the whole Filipino people. The
Filipino leaders were familiar with the spirit of our institutions. The
men who controlled their counsels were high-minded, educated, patriotic
men. "For myself and the officers and men under my command," wrote
General Merritt to Aguinaldo in August, 1898, just after the fall
of Manila, "I can say that we have conceived a high respect for the
abilities and qualities of the Filipinos, and if called upon by the
Government to express an opinion, it will be to that effect." [192]

The leaders believed that the American people did not fully understand
the identity of the Philippine situation with that in Cuba, and that
if they had, the treaty would not have been ratified. They also knew
the supreme futility of trying to get the facts before the American
people by peaceful means. And it was really with the abandon of genuine
patriotism that they plunged their country into war. We did not know
it then, but we do know it now. It would be simply wooden-headed to
affirm that they ever expected to succeed in a war with us. Of course
some of the jeunesse dorée, as General Bell calls them in one of his
early reports, [193] grew very aggressive and insulting toward the
last. But the thinking men went into the war for independence in a
spirit of "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," to correct the
impression General Otis had communicated to Mr. McKinley, and through
him to our people, in the hope that the more lives they sacrificed
in such a war (they risked--and many of them lost--their own also),
the nearer they would come to refuting the idea that they did not
know what they wanted. It was the only way they had to appeal to
Cæsar, i.e., to the great heart of the American people. As the war
grew more and more unpopular in the United States, the impression
was more and more nursed here at home that the people did not really
want independence, but were being coerced; and that they were like
dumb driven cattle. The striking similarity of these suggestions
to those by which tyranny has always met the struggles of men to
be free, did not seem to occur to the American public. They were
accepted as authoritative, being convenient also as an antidote to
sympathy. General Otis had suppressed such words as "sovereignty,"
"protection," and the like from his original sugar-coated edition
of the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, offering an elaborate
cock-and-bull explanation of why he did so. The Filipino answer to
this took the form of a very clever newspaper cartoon, representing an
American in a carromata--a kind of two-wheeled buggy--with a Filipino
between the shafts pulling it; which cartoon of course, never reached
the United States. The Filipinos had never heard the story on General
Mahone about "tie yoh hoss an' come in," [194] but they had heard of
the jinrickshaws of Japan, and they had read in Holy Writ and elsewhere
of conquered people becoming hewers of wood and drawers of water to
invading conquerors. And they are not without a sense of humor. It is
a common mistake with many Americans--for quite a few among us suffer
intellectually from over-sophistication--to suppose we monopolize all
the sense of humor there is, and that that alone is proof of a due
sense of proportion. At any rate, the Filipinos, with all due respect
to General Otis's good intentions, understood that "sovereignty" and
"protection" meant alien domination, so there was nothing in the Otis
notion that for them those words had a "peculiar meaning which might
be advantageously used by the Tagalo war party to incite," etc. [195]

Having now gotten into a war on the theory that only a small fraction
of the Filipino people were opposed to a new and unknown yoke in
lieu of the old one, General Otis still continued to try to square
his theory with the facts. For many months he sat at his desk in
Manila cheerily waging war with an inadequate force, and retaining in
the service and on the firing line after their terms of enlistment
expired, under pretence that they consented to it willingly, a lot
of fellows from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Western States, who
had volunteered for the war with Spain, with intent to kill Spaniards
in order to free Cubans, and not with intent to kill Filipinos for
also wanting to be free. Seeing nothing of the fighting himself,
he of course failed to get a correct estimate of the tenacity of
the Filipino purpose. No purpose is here entertained to suggest
that any of those early volunteers went around preaching mutiny,
or feeling mutinous. They did not originally like the Filipinos
especially; furthermore, they liked the Philippines less than they
did the Filipinos, and they had a vague notion that some one had
blundered. But it was not theirs to ask the reason why. Besides,
the orders from Washington being not to clash with the Filipinos
at least until the treaty was ratified, the Filipino soldiers and
subaltern officers had been calling them cowards for some time with
impunity. So that as soon as the treaty was safely "put over," they
were very glad to let off steam by killing a few hundred of them. But
their hearts were not in the fight, in the sense of clear and profound
conviction of the righteousness of the war. However, war is war, and
they were soldiers, and "orders is orders," as Tommy Atkins says. So
let us turn to an honester, if grimmer, side of the picture.

The first battle of the war began about 8:30 o'clock on the night
of February 4th, and lasted all through that night and until about
5 o'clock in the afternoon of the next day. Our casualties numbered
about 250 killed and wounded. The insurgent loss was estimated at
3000. "Those of the insurgents will never be known," says General
Otis. [196] "We buried 700 of them." [197] There was fighting pretty
much all around Manila, for the insurgents had the city almost hemmed
in. An arc of a circle, broken in places possibly, but several miles
long, drawn about the city, would probably suggest the general idea
of the enemy's lines. They had been allowed to dig trenches without
interference while the debate in the Senate on the treaty was in
progress, pursuant to the temporary "peace-at-any-price" programme. The
arc was broken into smithereens by 5 P.M. of February 5th. When the
morning of February 6th came Col. James F. Smith, commanding the First
Californias, was non est inventus, and so was a large part of his
regiment. "No one seemed to know definitely his location," says the
Otis Report. [198] As a matter of fact he had taken two battalions of
his regiment and waded clean through the enemy's lines, and had to be
sent for to come back to form again with the line of battle needed to
protect the city. So the Californias probably carried off the pick of
the laurels of the first day's fighting. General Anderson, commanding
the First Division of the Eighth Corps, threw them some very handsome
well earned bouquets in his report, stating also that their colonel
had shown "the very best qualities of a volunteer officer"--why he
limited it to "volunteer" does not appear, but is inferable from the
well-known disposition of all regulars to consider all volunteers
"rookies" [199]--and recommended that he be made a brigadier general,
which shortly afterward was done. [200]

It would be invidious to follow the various phases of the subsequent
early fighting, and single out one or more States [201] and tell of the
hard earned and well deserved honors they won, because space forbids
a proper tribute to the heroism of all of them. As for the regulars,
[202] they were the same they were at Santiago de Cuba, the same
they always are anywhere you put them. When a newspaper man would
come around a regular regiment during the fighting before Santiago
he would be told that they had no news to give him, "We ain't heroes,
we're regulars," they would say. After the outbreak of February 4th,
all our people did well, acted nobly, "Angels could no more." Neither
could devils, as shown by the losses inflicted on the enemy.

There was more fighting outside Manila during the next two or three
days, and when that was done the somewhat shattered insurgent legions
had recoiled to the distantly visible foot-hills, convinced that
their notion they could take Manila was very foolish and very rash.

At the town of Caloocan, some three or four miles out to the north
of Manila, were located the shops and round houses of the Manila and
Dagupan Railway, which runs from Manila in a northwesterly direction
about 120 miles to Dagupan, and was then the only railroad in the
archipelago. It was fed by a vast rich farming country, the great
plain of central Luzon. Naturally, the central plain which fed the
railroad that traversed it and kept its teeming myriads of small
farmers in touch with the great outside world was to be sooner or
later, the theatre of war. To seize transportation is instinctively
the first tactical move of a military man. Lieutenant-General Luna,
commander-in-chief, next to Aguinaldo, of the revolutionary forces, the
man whom later Aguinaldo had shot, was just then at Caloocan with 4000
men. So it fell to General MacArthur, commanding the Second Division of
the Eighth Corps, to move on Caloocan, which he did on February 10th.

John F. Bass, correspondent for Harper's Weekly, writing from Manila
a short time after this, describes this movement. It was our first
move away from the city of Manila. With a few masterly strokes of the
pen, which I regret there is not space to reproduce here in full,
Mr. Bass gives a vivid picture of the various engagements, and of
"a background of burning villages, smoke, fire, shot, and shell, the
ceaseless tramp of tired and often bleeding feet," etc. "Heroism,"
he says, "became a matter of course and death an incident." Finally
his story pauses for a moment thus: "The natural comment is that
all this is merely war--the business of the soldier. True, nor do
I think Jimmie Green [Mr. Bass's name for our "Tommy Atkins"] is
troubled with heroics. He accepts the situation without excitement
or hysterics. He has little feeling in this matter for his heart is
not in this fight." Here brother Bass's moralizing ceases abruptly,
and the contagious excitement of the hour catches him, just as it
always does the average man under such circumstances:


    From La Loma church you may get the full view of our long line
    crossing the open field, evenly, steadily, irresistibly, like an
    inrolling wave on the beach * * *. Watch the regiments go forward,
    and form under fire, and move on and on, and you will exclaim:
    "Magnificent," and you will gulp a little and feel proud without
    exactly knowing why. Then gradually the power of that line will
    force itself upon you, and you will feel that you must follow,
    that wherever that line goes you must go also. By and by you will
    be sorry, but for the present the might of an American regiment
    has got possession of you.


Anybody who has ever been with an American regiment in action knows
exactly how the man who wrote that felt. The American who has never
had the experience Mr. Bass describes above has missed one way of
realizing the majesty of the power of the republic whereof he is
privileged to be a citizen. For if there is one national trait which
more than any other explains the greatness of our country, it is the
instinct for organization, the fondness for self-multiplication to
the nth power by intelligent co-operation with one's fellows to a
common end. Especially is the experience in question inspiring where
the example of the field officers is particularly appropriate to the
occasion. Take for instance the following, concerning the conduct of
Major J. Franklin Bell in this advance on Caloocan, from the report
of Major Kobbe, Commanding the Artillery:


    As the right cleared the head of the ravine, I could see
    Maj. J. F. Bell * * * leading a company of Montana troops in front
    of the right * * * advancing, firing, toward intrenchments * * *.
    He was on a black horse to the last * * * leading and cheering
    the men. His work was most gallant and * * * especially cheering
    to me. [203]


No mere scribe can magnify General Bell's matchless efficiency in
action, but it is certainly inspiring to contemplate. There are no
"fuss and feathers" about him. Yet his power, proven on many a field
in the Philippines, to kindle martial ardor by example, suggests the
ubiquitous "Helmet of Navarre" of Lord Macaulay's poem.

A little later correspondent Bass develops what he meant by "by
and by you will be sorry." You see it is not comfortable business,
this of hustling about among the dead and dying. In the excitement,
you are so liable to step on the face of some poor devil you knew
well, maybe a once warm friend. In this connection Mr. Bass says:
"There is this difference between the manner in which American and
Filipino soldiers die. The American falls in a heap and dies hard;
the Filipino stretches himself out, and when dead is always found in
some easy attitude, generally with his head on his arms. They die
the way a wild animal dies--in just such a position as one finds a
deer or an antelope which one has shot in the woods."

So far as the writer is advised and believes, nobody who knows
John F. Bass ever suspected him of being a quitter. He must have
been reading the London Standard, which said about that time:
"It is a little startling to find the liberators of Cuba engaged
in suppressing a youthful republic which claims the sacred right of
self-government." Bass had written his newspaper in August previous,
after observing how pluckily the Filipinos had fought and licked
the Spaniards: "Give them their independence and guarantee it to
them." The overwhelming sentiment of the Eighth Army Corps when we
took the Philippines was against taking them; and those who had kept
informed knew that the Senate had ratified the treaty by a majority
only one more than enough to squeeze it through, the vote having been
57 to 27, at least 56 being thus indispensable to make the necessary
constitutional two-thirds of the 84 votes cast; and that Wall Street
and the White Man's Burden or land-grabbing contingent--"Philanthropy
and Five per cent," as Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage put
it at the time--were responsible for these shambles Mr. Bass describes.

At this juncture some soft-headed gentleman asks: "What is this
man who writes this book driving at? Is he trying to show that the
American soldiers in the Philippines in February, 1899, all wanted
to quit as soon as the war broke out?" Not at all. In the first
place it hardly lay in American soldier nature to want to quit when
Aguinaldo was telling us "if you don't take your flag down and out of
these islands at once and promptly get out yourselves along with it,
I will proceed to kick you out and throw it out." And in the next
place, in the war with the Filipinos, as in all other wars, fuel was
added to the flame as soon as the war broke out. Among the Americans,
charges soon came into general circulation and acceptance that the
Filipinos had planned (but been frustrated in) a plot looking to a
general massacre of all foreigners in Manila. This alleged plot was
supposed to have been scheduled to be carried out on a certain night
shortly after February 15, 1899. Among the Filipinos, on the other
hand, counter-charges soon followed, and met with general credence,
that the Americans made a practise of killing prisoners taken in
battle, including the wounded. Neither charge was ever proven, but
both served the purpose, at the psychologic moment, of possessing
each side with the desire to kill, which is the business of war. Let
us glance briefly at these recriminations.

Between pages 1916 and 1917 of Senate Document 331, part 2 [204] may
be found a photo-lithograph of the celebrated alleged order of the
Filipino Revolutionary Government of February 15, 1899, to massacre
all foreign residents of Manila. In his report for 1899 [205] General
Otis himself describes this order as one "which for barbarous intent
is unequalled in these modern times in civilized warfare," and speaks
of it as "issued by the Malolos Government through the responsible
officer who had raised and organized the hostile inhabitants within
the city." After Aguinaldo was captured in 1901, according to an
account given by General MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902, of
a conversation with the insurgent leader, the latter was shown a copy
of this document purporting to have been signed by General Luna, one of
his generals. He disclaimed having in any way sanctioned it, in fact
disclaimed any prior knowledge of it whatsoever, [206] a disclaimer
which General MacArthur appears to have accepted as true, frankly and
entirely. At page 1890 of the same volume, Captain J. R. M. Taylor,
14th U. S. Infantry, a gallant soldier and an accomplished scholar,
who was in charge in 1901 of the captured insurgent records at Manila,
states that he was "informed" that the document was originally "signed
by Sandico, then Secretary of the Interior" of the revolutionary
government. Captain Taylor made an attempt to run the matter down,
but obtained no evidence convincing to him. A like investigation by
General MacArthur in 1901 had a like result. [207]

On the other hand, Major Wm. H. Bishop, of the 20th Kansas, was
credited in a soldier's letter written home, which first came to light
in this country, with killing unarmed prisoners during the advance on
Caloocan. The charges originated with a private of that regiment. Major
Bishop denied the charges. [208] An investigation followed, in the
course of which somebody made an innuendo, or charge--it is not
important which--that other officers used their influence to prevent
a full ventilation of the matter, specifically, General Funston,
then Colonel of the 20th Kansas, and Major Metcalf, of the same
regiment. These last two also made a most vigorous general denial,
and nothing whatever was established against them. The whole matter
was finally disposed of by being forwarded to the War Department at
Washington by General Otis on July 13, 1899, some six months after the
occurrences alleged, with the remark that he (General Otis) "doubted
the wisdom of a court-martial" of the soldier who had made the charge
against Major Bishop, "as it would give the insurgent authorities a
knowledge of what was taking place, and they would assert positively
that our troops practised inhumanities, whether the charges could
be proven or not" and that they would use the incident "as an excuse
to defend their own barbarities." [209] The last endorsement on the
papers preceding General Otis's final endorsement was one by Colonel
Crowder, now (1912) Judge Advocate General of the United States Army,
in which he said: "I am not convinced from a careful reading of this
report, that Private Brenner has made a false charge against Captain
Bishop"; adding that "considerations of public policy, sufficiently
grave to silence every other demand, require that no further action
be taken in this case." [210] The "considerations of public policy"
were of course those indicated in General Otis's final endorsement on
the papers, already quoted. They were compellingly controlling, in my
judgment, independently of the merits. Washing one's soiled linen in
public is never advisable, and placing a weapon in your enemy's hand
in time of war is at least equally unwise. Some shreds of this once
much mooted matter doubtless still linger in the public memory. It
has been thus briefly ventilated here solely to trace the genesis of
the bitterness of that war, and of numerous later barbarities avenged
in kind. The bitterness thus early begun grew as the war went on,
until every time a hapless Filipino peasant soldier speaking only
two or three words of Spanish would falsely explain, when captured,
that he was a non-combatant, an amigo (friend), it usually at once
filled the captor with vivid recollections of slain comrades, and of
rumored or sometimes proven mutilation of their bodies after death,
and these reflections would at once fill him with a yearning desire
to blow the top of the amigo's head off, whether he yielded to the
desire or not. Of no instance where he did so yield am I aware. But
I do know that the invariable statement of all Filipinos unarmed and
un-uniformed when captured, to the effect that they were amigos, became
to the American soldier not remotely dissimilar to the waving of a red
rag at a bull. Of course this was also due, largely, to the guerrilla
practice of hiding guns when hard-pressed and actually plunging at
once into some make-believe agricultural pursuit. As for Major Bishop,
it is inconceivable to me that he gave any order to kill unarmed
prisoners. Even admitting for the sake of the argument that he is a
fiend, he is not a fool. As a matter of fact, he was a brave soldier,
as all the reports show, and is a reputable lawyer, having many warm
friends whose opinion of any man would command respect anywhere. The
truth of the whole matter probably is that just before going into
battle, when our troops were in an ugly temper by reason of the
rumors of barbarities alleged to have been perpetrated by the enemy,
or contemplated by him, the word was passed along the line to "Take no
more prisoners than we have to," and that that thought originated with
some irresponsible private soldier of the line inflamed by stories
of mutilation of our dead or of maltreatment of our wounded. Such a
"word," so passed from man to man, can, in the heat of conflict,
very soon evolve into something having for practical purposes all
the force and effect of an order.

Through the foregoing, and like causes, including the "water cure,"
later invented to persuade amigos to discover the whereabouts of hidden
insurgent guns or give information as to the movements of the enemy,
[211] our war with the Filipinos became, before it was over, a rather
"dark and bloody" affair, accentuated as it was, from time to time,
by occasional Filipino success in surprising detachments from ambush,
or by taking them unawares and off their guard in their quarters,
and eliminating them, the most notable instance of the first being
the crumpling of a large command of the 15th Infantry by General Juan
Cailles, in southern Luzon, and the most indelibly remembered and
important example of the second being the massacre of the 9th Infantry
people at Balangiga, in Samar, in the fall of 1901. Certainly more
than one American in that long-drawn-out war did things unworthy of
any civilized man, things he would have believed it impossible, before
he went out there, ever to come to. Personally, I have heard, so far
as I now recollect, of comparatively few barbarities perpetrated
by Filipinos on captured American soldiers. Barbarities on their
side seemed to have been reserved for those of their own race whom
they found disloyal to the cause of their country. Personally I
have never seen the water-cure administered. But I once went on
a confidential mission by direction of General MacArthur, in the
course of which I reported first, on arriving in the neighborhood
of the contemplated destination, to a general officer of the regular
army who is still such to-day. [212] That night the general was good
enough to extend the usual courtesy of a cot to sleep on, in the
headquarters building. Toward dusk I went to dine with a certain
lieutenant, also of the regular army. [213] As we approached the
lieutenant's quarters a sergeant came up with a prisoner, and asked
instructions as to what to do with him. The lieutenant said: "Take
him out and find out what he knows. Do you understand, Sergeant?" The
sergeant saluted, answered in the affirmative, and moved away with
his prisoner. We went in to the lieutenant's quarters, and while at
dinner heard groans outside. I said "What is that, Jones?" [214]
Jones said: "That's the water-cure he's giving that hombre. [215]
Want to see it?" I replied that I certainly did not. Returning that
night to the general's headquarters, after breakfast the next morning
I met my friend Jones coming out of the general's office. I said:
"What's the matter, what are you doing here," he having mentioned
the evening before an expedition planned for the morrow. He said:
"Well, I've just had a talk with the general to see if I could get my
resignation from the army accepted?" "Why?" said I. "Well," was the
reply, "that ----" (designating the prisoner of the night before by a
double barrelled epithet) "died on me last night." Just how the matter
was hushed up I have never known, but Jones was never punished. More
than one general officer of the United States Army in the Philippines
during our war with the Filipinos at least winked at the water-cure
as a means of getting information, and quite a number of subalterns
made a custom of applying it for that purpose. It was practically
the only way you could get them to betray their countrymen. Did
I report the incident to General MacArthur? Certainly not. It was
the business of the general commanding the district. The water-cure,
though very painful, was seldom fatal, and when not fatal was almost
never permanently damaging, and it was about the only way to shake
the loyalty of the average Filipino and make him give information
as to hidden insurgent guns, guerrilla bands, etc. It was a part of
Benevolent Assimilation.

Let us now return to the early battlefields about Manila which we
left, initially, to analyze the extreme bitterness of the feeling
between the combatants that very early began to develop.

We left war correspondent John F. Bass among the dead and dying on
one of these fields, supposedly musing on the White Man's Burden,
or Land-Grabbing, or Trust-for-Civilization theory, or whatever it
was that moved the fifty-seven senators whose votes had ratified
the treaty by a majority of just one more than the constitutionally
necessary two-thirds.

The reason the writer lays so much stress on Mr. Bass's letters to
Harper's Weekly on the early fighting in the Philippines, is because
his remarks come direct from the battlefield, and are, as it were,
res gestæ. They were made dum fervet opus, to use a law Latin phrase
which in plain English means "while the iron is hot." They reflect
more or less accurately the feelings of the men whose deeds he was
recording. He, and O. K. Davis, now Washington correspondent of the
New York Times, and John T. McCutcheon, of Chicago, the now famous
cartoonist (who was with Dewey in the battle of Manila Bay), and
Robert Collins, now London correspondent of the Associated Press, and
"Dick" Little of the Chicago Tribune,--a little man about six feet
three,--and lots of other good men and true, were all through that
fighting, and we will later come to an issue of personal veracity
between them and General Otis which culminated in the retirement from
office of Secretary of War Alger, and ought to have resulted in the
recall of General Otis, but did not, because to have acknowledged
what a blunderer General Otis had been and to have relieved him from
command, as he should have been relieved, would have been to "swap
horses crossing a stream," as Mr. Lincoln used to put it in declining
to change generals during a given campaign. The object here is to
bring out the truth of history as to how the men who bore the brunt of
the early fighting felt about it. Testimony as to what the officers
and men of the army said would be of no value, because a complaining
soldier's complaints are too often only a proof of "cold feet." [216]

These newspaper men, not under military orders, were daily risking
their lives voluntarily, just to keep the American public informed,
and the American public were kept in darkness and only vouchsafed
bulletins giving them the progressive lists of their dead and wounded,
and this last only on demand made upon Secretary Alger by the people
of Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc., through their senators. The War
Department did not want the people to know, did not want to admit
itself, how plucky, vigorous, and patriotic the resistance was. The
period of the fighting done by the State Volunteers from February
until fall, when public opinion finally forced the Administration
to send General Otis an adequate force, is slurred by Secretary of
War Root in his report for 1899. I do not mean that it was slurred
intentionally. But the Philippines were a long way off, and Mr. Root
and Mr. McKinley naturally relied for their information on their
commanding general on the spot. There were gallant deeds done in the
Philippines by those Western fellows of the State regiments which
volunteered for the war with Spain, that would have made the little
fighting around Santiago look like--well, to borrow from "Chimmie"
Fadden's fertile vocabulary, "like 30 cents." But General Otis was
not in a position to get the thrill of such things from his office
window, so very few of them were given much prominence by him in his
despatches to the Adjutant-General of the army. This was wise enough
from a political standpoint, seeing that a presidential campaign
was to ensue in 1900 predicated on the proposition that American
sovereignty was "in accord with the wishes and aspirations of the
great mass of the Filipinos," to use the words of the President's
message to Congress of December, 1899.

Caloocan was taken by General MacArthur on February 10th. The natural
line of advance thereafter was of course up the railroad, because
the insurgents held it, and needed it as much as we would. Throughout
February there were engagements too numerous to mention. The navy also
entertained the enemy whenever he came too near the shores of Manila
Bay. One incident in particular is worthy of note, and worthy of
the best traditions of the navy. I refer to the conduct of Assistant
Engineer Emory Winship off Malabon, March 4, 1899. Malabon is five
miles north of Manila, on the bay, not far from Caloocan. On the day
named, a landing party of 125 men from the U. S. S. Bennington went
ashore near Malabon to make photographs, in aid of navy gunnery, of
certain entrenchments and buildings that had been struck by shells
from the Monadnock. They foolishly failed to throw out scouts ahead
of their column, and were suddenly greeted with a withering fire from
a whole regiment of insurgents who had seen them first and lain in
wait for them. They retired with considerably more haste than they
had gone forth. The insurgents advanced, firing, at double quick,
toward the comparative handful of Americans, and would undoubtedly
have killed the last man jack of them, but Engineer Winship, who
had been left in charge of the tug that brought the landing party
shoreward, to keep up steam, saw the situation and promptly met it. He
unlimbered a 37mm. Hotchkiss revolving machine gun which stood in
the bow of the tug, and opened up with accurate aim on the advancing
regiment of Filipinos. Naturally he at once became a more important
target than the retreating body. Nevertheless, he kept pumping lead
into that long howling murderous advancing brown line until, when
within two hundred yards of where the tug lay, the line recoiled and
retreated, and the landing party got safely back to the ship. It was,
literally, a case of saving the lives of more than a hundred men,
by fearless promptness and dogged tenacity in the intelligent and
skilful performance of duty. The awnings of the tug were torn in
shreds by the enemy's rain of bullets, and her woodwork was much
peppered. Winship was hit five times, and still carries the bullets
in his body, having been retired on account of disability resulting
therefrom, after being promoted in recognition of his work.

Soon after March 25th, General MacArthur, commanding the Second
Division of the Eighth Army Corps, advanced from Caloocan up the
railroad to Malolos, the insurgent capital, some twenty miles
away. Malolos was taken March 31st. Our February killed were six
officers and seventy-one enlisted men, total seventy-seven, and a total
of 378 wounded. By the end of March the list swelled to twelve officers
and 127 enlisted men killed, total 139, and a total of 881 wounded,
making our total casualties, as reported April 1st, 1020. Also 15%
of the command, or about 2500, were on sick report on that date from
heat prostrations and the like. [217] For these and other reasons,
farther advance up the railroad was halted for a while.

Meantime, General Lawton, with his staff, consisting of Colonel
Edwards, Major Starr, and Captains King and Sewall, "the big four" they
were called, had come out from New York City by way of the Suez Canal,
bringing most welcome reinforcements, the 4th and 17th Infantry. These
people arrived between the 10th and the 22d of March. What happened
soon after, as a result of their arrival, must now become for a brief
moment, a part of the panorama, the lay of the land General Lawton
first swept over being first indicated.

Luzon is practically bisected, east and west, by the Pasig River
and a lake out of which it flows almost due west into Manila Bay,
Manila being at the mouth of the river. Under the Spaniards,
all Luzon north of the Pasig had been one military district and
all Luzon south of the Pasig another. The Eighth Army Corps always
spoke of northern Luzon as "the north line," and of southern Luzon as
"the south line." The lake above mentioned is called the Laguna de
Bay. It is nearly as big as Manila Bay, which last is called twenty
odd miles wide by thirty long. On the map, the Laguna de Bay roughly
resembles a half-moon, the man in which looks north, the western
horn being near Manila, and the eastern near the Pacific coast of
Luzon. General Otis had learned that at a place called Santa Cruz,
toward the eastern end of the Laguna de Bay, there were a lot of steam
launches and a Spanish gun-boat, which, if captured, would prove
invaluable for river fighting and transportation of supplies along
the Rio Grande de Pampanga and the other streams that watered the
great central plain through which the railroad ran and which would
have to be occupied later. So as soon as possible after General
Lawton arrived and the necessary men could be spared, he was sent
with 1500 troops to seize and bring back the boats in question. Of
course the country he should overrun would have to be overrun again,
because there were not troops enough to spare to garrison and hold
it. But for the present, the launches would help. This expedition was
successful, leaving the head of the lake nearest Manila on April 9th,
and returning April 17th. It met with some good hard fighting on the
way, sweeping everything before it of course, inflicting considerable
loss, and suffering some. General Lawton's report mentions, among
other officers whose conspicuous gallantry and efficiency in action
attracted his attention, Colonel Clarence R. Edwards, now Chief of
the Bureau of Insular Affairs of the War Department, of whose conduct
in the capture of Santa Cruz on the morning of April 10th, he says:
"No line of battle could have been more courageously or intelligently
led." [218] The resistance was pretty real to Colonel Edwards then,
i.e., the Benevolent Assimilation was quite strenuous, and it continued
to be so until his great commander was shot through the breast in the
forefront of battle in the hour of victory in December thereafter,
and the colonel came home with the general's body. Since then the
colonel has soldiered no more, but has remained on duty at Washington,
the birthplace of the original theory that the Filipinos welcomed our
rule, charged with the duty of yearning over the erring Filipino who
thinks he can govern himself but is mistaken, and also with the still
more difficult task of trying to live up to the original theory as
far as circumstances will permit. As a matter of fact, the Filipinos
would probably have gotten along much better than the Cubans if we
had let General Lawton do there what he and General Wood were set to
work doing in Cuba shortly after Santiago fell. Public opinion is a
very dangerous thing to trifle with, and when, in September, 1899,
there was a story going the rounds of the American newspapers that
Lawton, the hero of El Caney, the man who had reflected more glory
on American arms in striking the shackles of Spain from Cuba than any
other one soldier in the army, had called the war in the Philippines
"this accursed war," the War Department got busy over the cable to
General Otis and obtained from him a denial that General Lawton had
made such a remark. But the public knew its Lawton and what he had done
in Cuba, and had a suspicion there might be some truth in the rumor. So
the War Department cabled out saying "Newspapers say Lawton's denial
insufficient," and then repeating the words attributed to him. So
General Otis sent another denial that filled the bill. [219] Of course
General Lawton made no such remark. He was too good a soldier. It would
have demoralized his whole command. But I served under him in both
hemispheres, and I will always believe that he had a certain amount
of regret at having to fight the Filipinos to keep them from having
independence, when they were a so much likelier lot, take it all in
all, than the Cubans we saw about Santiago. Moreover, I believe that
had it not been then too late to ask him, he would have subscribed
to the opinion Admiral Dewey had cabled home the previous summer:
"These people are far superior in their intelligence and more capable
of self-government than the natives of Cuba, and I am familiar with
both races."

After the expedition down the lake, General Lawton went on "The North
Line." So let us now turn thither also. For wherever Lawton was,
there was fighting.

In the latter half of April, General MacArthur advanced north along the
railroad, and took Calumpit, where the railroad crosses the Rio Grande,
on April 28th. This was the place where under cover of "the accurate
concentrated fire of the guns of the Utah Light Artillery commanded by
Major Young" [220] a few Kansas men with ropes tied to their bodies
swam the river in the face of a heavy fire from the enemy, fastened
the ropes to some boats on the enemy's side, and were pulled back
in the boats, by their comrades, to the side they had come from; the
Kansans then crossing the river under the lead of the gallant Funston,
and driving the enemy from his trenches. The desperate bravery of
the performance, like so many other things General Funston did in the
Philippines, was so superb that one forgets how contrary it was to all
known rules of the game of war. If it was Providence that saved Funston
and his Kansans from annihilation, certainly Providence was ably
assisted on that occasion by Major Young and his Utah Battery. [221]

Shortly after this General MacArthur entered San Fernando, the second
insurgent capital, which is forty miles or so up the railroad from
Manila.

During the month of May General Lawton kept the insurgents busy to
the east of the railroad, between it and the Pacific coast range,
taking San Isidro, whither the third insurgent capital was moved after
Malolos fell, on May 17th. Here he made his headquarters for a time,
as did General MacArthur at San Fernando.

It had been supposed that practically the whole body of the insurgent
army was concentrated in the country to the north of Manila, but this
proved a mistake. They now began to threaten Manila from the country
south of the Pasig. Says General Otis:


    The enemy had become again boldly demonstrative at the South and
    it became necessary to throw him back once more. [222]


General Lawton was directed to concentrate his troops in the country
about San Isidro, turn them over to the command of some one else,
and come to Manila to organize for a campaign on the south line. The
details of this expedition belong to a military history, which this
is not. The expedition left its initial point of concentration near
Manila on June 9th. Its great event was the battle of Zapote River on
June 13th. Along this river in 1896 the insurgents had gained a great
victory over the Spaniards. They had trenches on the farther side of
the river which they deemed impregnable. General Lawton attacked them
in these intrenchments June 13th. At three o'clock that afternoon
he wired General Otis at Manila giving him an idea of the battle
and stating that the enemy was fighting in strong force and with
determination. At 3:30 o'clock he wired:


    We are having a beautiful battle. Hurry up ammunition; we will
    need it;


and at 4 o'clock:


    We have the bridge. It has cost us dearly. Battle not yet over. It
    is a battle however. [223]


It was in this battle of Zapote River that Lieutenant William L. Kenly,
of the regular artillery, did what was perhaps the finest single bit
of soldier work of the whole war, [224] in recognition of which his
conduct in the battle was characterized as "magnificent" by so thorough
a soldier as General Lawton, who recommended him to be brevetted for
distinguished gallantry in the presence of the enemy, with this remark:


    As General Ovenshine says, speaking of Lieutenant Kenly and
    his battery, "This is probably the first time in history that a
    battery has been advanced and fought without cover within thirty
    yards of strongly manned trenches." [225]


For what he did on that occasion, Kenly ought to have had a medal
of honor, which, except life insurance and a good education, is the
finest legacy any government can enable a soldier to bequeath to his
children. If the war had been backed by the sentiment of the whole
country, as the Spanish War was, he would have gotten it. As it was,
the only thing he ever got for it, so far as the writer is advised,
was to have his name spelt wrong in an account of the incident in
the only book wherein there has yet been attempted a record of the
many deeds of splendid daring that marked the only war into which
this nation ever blundered. [226]

While there were divers and sundry movements of our troops hither
and thither, and much sacrifice of life, after General Lawton's
Zapote River campaign in June, no substantial progress was made in
conquering and occupying the Islands until the fall following the
Zapote River campaign above mentioned, when the twenty-five regiments
of volunteers were organized and sent out. All that was done until
then, after the capture of San Fernando, may be summed up broadly,
by saying that we protected Manila and held the railroad, as far as
we had fought our way up it. It is true that the city of Iloilo had
been occupied on February 11th, the city of Cebu shortly afterward,
the island of Negros, an oasis of comparative quiet in a great desert
of hostility, a little later; also that a small Spanish garrison at
the little port of Jolo in the Mohammedan country near Borneo had
also been relieved by a small American force on the 19th of May. But
these irresolute movements accomplished nothing except to deprive
our force at the front of about 4000 men and to awaken the Visayan
Islands to active and thorough organization against us.

Preparatory to an understanding of the fall campaign, in which
patchwork and piecemeal warfare was superseded by the real thing, it
will now be necessary to consider the political--or let us call it,
the politico-military--aspect of the first half year of the war.

General Otis's folly had led him to advise Washington as early as
November, 1898, that he could get along with 25,000 troops, [227]
and the Otis under-estimate of the resistance we would meet if we
took the Islands had undoubtedly influenced Mr. McKinley in deciding
to take them. Twenty-five thousand troops was only 5000 more than
General Otis had with him at the time he made the recommendation, and
signified that he was not expecting trouble. The Treaty of Paris was
signed on December 10, 1898, and on December 16th, President McKinley's
Secretary of War informed Congress that 25,000 troops would be enough
for the Philippines. [228] When the treaty was ratified February 6,
1899, the war in the Philippines had already broken out. On March 2,
1899, two days before the 55th Congress expired, in fact on the very
day that Congress appropriated the $20,000,000 to pay Spain for the
Islands, an act was passed authorizing the President to enlist 35,000
volunteers to put down the insurrection in the Islands. The term
of enlistment of these volunteers was to expire June 30, 1901. As
the New Thought people would say "Hold the Thought!" June 30, 1901,
is the end of our government's fiscal year. That date, the date of
expiration of the enlistment of the volunteer army raised under the
act of March 2, 1899, is a convenient key to the whole history of the
American occupation of the Philippines since the outbreak of our war
with the Filipinos, February 4, 1899, including the titanic efforts of
the McKinley Administration in the latter half of 1899 and the first
half of 1900 to retrieve the Otis blunders; the premature resumption
by Judge Taft, during and in aid of Mr. McKinley's campaign for the
Presidency in 1900, of the original McKinley Benevolent Assimilation
programme, on the theory, already wholly exploded by a long and bitter
war, that the great majority of the people welcomed American rule and
had only been coerced into opposing us; and the premature setting up
of the Civil Government on July 4, 1901. No candid mind seeking only
the truth of history can fail to see that when President McKinley
sent the Taft Commission to the Philippines in the spring of 1900,
part of their problem was to facilitate Mr. McKinley in avoiding later
on any further call for volunteers to take the place of those whose
terms would expire June 30, 1901. The amount of force that has been
needed to saddle our government firmly on the Filipino people is the
only honest test by which to examine the claim that it is unto them
as Castoria unto children. In February, 1899, the dogs of war being
already let loose, President McKinley had resumed his now wholly
impossible Benevolent Assimilation programme, by sending out the
Schurman Commission, which was the prototype of the Taft Commission,
to yearningly explain our intentions to the insurgents, and to make
clear to them how unqualifiedly benevolent those intentions were. The
scheme was like trying to put salt on a bird's tail after you have
flushed him. This commission was headed by President Schurman, of
Cornell University. It arrived in March, armed with instructions
as benevolent in their rhetoric as any the Filipinos had ever read
in the days of our predecessors in sovereignty, the Spaniards. And
the commission were of course duly astounded that their publication
had no effect. The Filipinos in Manila tore them down as soon as
they were put up. The instructions clothed the commission with
authority to yield every point in issue except the only one in
dispute--Independence. On this alone they were firm. But so were
the people who had already submitted the issue to the arbitrament
of war. Of course the Schurman Commission, therefore, accomplished
nothing. It held frequent communication with the enemy in the field
and came near an open rupture with General Otis, who was nominally a
member of it. But even that unwise man knew war when he saw it, and
knew the futility of trying to mix peace with war. War being hell,
the sooner 'tis over the better for all concerned. After Professor
Schurman had been quite optimistically explaining our intentions for
about three months, under the tragically mistaken notion Mr. McKinley
had originally derived from General Otis that the insurrection had
been brought about by "the sinister ambition of a few leaders,"
[229] General Otis wired Washington, on June 4th, "Negotiations and
conferences with insurgent leaders cost soldiers' lives and prolong our
difficulties," [230] adding with regard to the Schurman Commission:
"Ostensibly it will be supported * * * here, and to the outside
world gentle peace shall prevail," but intimating that he would be
very much gratified if the Department would allow him to handle the
enemy, and stop Dr. Schurman from having their leaders come in under
flags of truce to parley. After that Dr. Schurman's activities seem
to have been confined to the less mischievous business of gathering
statistics. His mistake was simply the one he had brought with him,
derived from President McKinley. He came back home, however, thoroughly
satisfied that the Filipinos did of a verity want the independence
they were fighting for, and quite as sure that republics should not
have colonies as General Anderson's experience had previously made
him. It has long been known throughout the length and breadth of the
United States that Dr. Schurman is in favor of Philippine independence.

On June 26th, just thirteen days after the Zapote River fight had
stopped the insurgents on the south line from threatening almost the
very gates of the city of Manila itself, General Otis had another
attack of optimism. On that date he wired Washington: "Insurgent cause
may collapse at any time." [231] Finally, the war correspondents at
Manila, wearied with the military press censorship whereby General
Otis had so long kept the situation from the people at home, with his
eternal "situation-well-in-hand" telegrams, got together, inspired no
doubt by the example of the Roosevelt round robin that had rescued the
Fifth Army Corps from Cuba after the fighting down there, and prepared
a round robin of their own--a protest against further misrepresentation
of the facts. This they of course knew General Otis would not let
them cable home. However, they asked his permission to do so, the
committee appointed to beard the lion in his den being O. K. Davis,
John T. McCutcheon, Robert Collins, and John F. Bass. General Otis
threatened to "put them off the island." This did not bother them in
the least. General Otis told the War Department afterwards that he
did not punish them because they were "courting martyrdom," or words
to that effect. As a matter of fact, they were merely determined that
the American people should know the facts. That of "putting them off
the island" was just a fussy phrase of "Mother" Otis, long familiar to
them. They were under his jurisdiction. But they were Americans, and
reputable gentlemen, and he knew he was responsible for their right
treatment. After General Otis had duly put the expected veto on the
proposed cablegram of protest, the newspaper men sent their protest
over to Hong Kong by mail, and had it cabled to the United States from
there. It was published in the newspapers of this country July 17,
1899. A copy of it may be found in any public library which keeps
the bound copies of the great magazines, in the Review of Reviews
for August, 1899, pp. 137-8. It read as follows:


    The undersigned, being all staff correspondents of American
    newspapers stationed in Manila, unite in the following statement:

    We believe that, owing to official despatches from Manila made
    public in Washington, the people of the United States have not
    received a correct impression of the situation in the Philippines,
    but that those despatches have presented an ultra-optimistic view
    that is not shared by the general officers in the field.

    We believe the despatches incorrectly represent the existing
    conditions among the Filipinos in respect to internal dissension
    and demoralization resulting from the American campaign and to
    the brigand character of their army.

    We believe the despatches err in the declaration that "the
    situation is well in hand," and in the assumption that the
    insurrection can be speedily ended without a greatly increased
    force.

    We think the tenacity of the Filipino purpose has been
    under-estimated, and that the statements are unfounded that
    volunteers are willing to engage in further service.

    The censorship has compelled us to participate in this
    misrepresentation by excising or altering uncontroverted statements
    of facts on the plea that "they would alarm the people at home,"
    or "have the people of the United States by the ears."


The men of the pen had been so long under military rule and had seen
so much of courts-martial that their document savored of military
jurisprudence. After making the above charges, it set forth what it
called "specifications." These were:


    Prohibition of hospital reports; suppression of full reports
    of field operations in the event of failure; numbers of heat
    prostrations in the field; systematic minimization of naval
    operations; and suppression of complete reports of the situation.


The paper was signed by John T. McCutcheon and Harry Armstrong,
representing the Chicago Record; O. K. Davis and P. G. MacDonnell,
representing the New York Sun; Robert M. Collins, John P. Dunning,
and L. Jones, representing the Associated Press; John F. Bass and
William Dinwiddie, representing the New York Herald; E. D. Skeene,
representing the Scripps-McRae Association; and Richard Little,
representing the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Collins, the Associated Press
representative, wrote his people an account of this whole episode,
which was also given wide publicity. After describing the committee's
interview with the General down to a certain point, he says:


    But when General Otis came down to the frank admission that it
    was his purpose to keep the knowledge of conditions here from the
    public at home, and when the censor had repeatedly told us, in
    ruling out plain statements of undisputed facts, "My instructions
    are to let nothing go that can hurt the Administration," we
    concluded that protest was justifiable.


Collins had written what he considered a conservative review of
the situation in June, saying reinforcements were needed. Of the
suppression of this he says:


    The censor's comment (I made a note of it) was: "Of course we all
    know that we are in a terrible mess out here, but we don't want the
    people to get excited about it. If you fellows will only keep quiet
    now we will pull through in time [232] without any fuss at home!"


Mr. Collins's letter proceeds: "When I went to see him [Otis] he
repeated the same old story about the insurrection going to pieces."

As to the charge of suppressing the real condition of our sick in
the hospitals, Mr. Collins says that General Otis remarked that the
"hospitals were full of perfectly well men who were shirking and should
be turned out." On June 2, 1899, according to General Otis's report
(p. 121), sixty per cent. of one of the State volunteer regiments
were in hospital sick or wounded and there were in its ranks an
average of but eight men to a company fit for duty. The report of
the regimental surgeon stating this was forwarded by General Otis
to Washington with the comment that there were few cases of serious
illness; that the then "present station of these troops"--the place
where the fighting was hottest, San Fernando--"is considered by the
Filipinos as a health resort," and that "when orders to take passage
to the United States are issued, both the Montana and South Dakota
troops will recover with astonishing rapidity." [233]

This round robin of course produced a profound sensation in the United
States. It was just what the American public had long suspected was
the case. Shortly afterward Secretary of War Alger resigned. Coming
as it did on the heels of the scandal about "embalmed beef" having
been furnished to the army in Cuba, it made him too much of a load
for the Administration to carry. He was succeeded by Mr. Root,
an eminent member of the New York Bar, whose masterful mind soon
saw the essentials of the situation and proceeded to get a volunteer
army recruited, equipped, and sent to the Philippines without further
unnecessary delay.






CHAPTER XII

OTIS AND THE WAR (Continued)

              And now, a man of head being at the centre of it,
              the whole matter gets vital.--Carlyle's French Revolution.


There can surely be little doubt in any quarter that Mr. Root is, in
intellectual endowment and equipment at least, one of the greatest,
if he is not the greatest, of living American statesmen. Mankind will
always yield due acclaim to men who, in great emergencies, see the
essentials of a given situation, and at once proceed to get the thing
done that ought to be done. Whether the war in the Philippines was
regrettable or not, it had become, by midsummer of 1899, supremely
important, from any rational and patriotic standpoint, to end it as
soon as possible.

Mr. Root had not been in office as Secretary of War very long before
fleets of troop-ships, carrying some twenty-five well-equipped
volunteer regiments, [234] were swarming out of New York harbor
bound for Manila by way of the Suez Canal, and out of the Golden
Gate for the same destination via Honolulu. Nor was there any
confusion as in the Cuban helter-skelter. Everything went as if by
clockwork. Moreover, along with the new and ample force, went a clear,
masterly, comprehensive plan of campaign, prepared, not by General
Otis at Manila, but in the War Department at Washington, by officers
already familiar with the islands.

It was the purpose of this government at last to demonstrate
conclusively to the Filipino people that the representative of the
United States at Manila was "the boss of the show," and that Aguinaldo
was not--a demonstration then sorely needed by the exigencies of
American prestige. The purpose can readily be appreciated, but to
understand the plan of campaign, and the method of its execution,
somewhat of the geography of Luzon must now be considered. Before
we approach the shores of Luzon and the city of Manila, however,
let us consider from a distance, in a bird's-eye view, as it were,
the relation of Luzon to the rest of the archipelago, so as to know,
in a comprehensive way, what we are "going out for to see." We may as
well pause at this point, long enough to learn all we will ever need to
know, for the purposes of the scope of this narrative, concerning the
general geography of the Philippine archipelago, and the governmental
problems it presents. (See folding map at end of volume.)

It is a common saying that Paris is France. In the same sense Manila
is the Philippines. In fact, the latter expression is more accurate
than the former, for Manila, besides being the capital city of the
country, and its chief port, is a city of over 200,000 people, while
no one of the two or three cities next to it in rank in population
had more than 20,000. [235] By parity of reasoning it may be said that
Luzon was the Philippines, so far as the problem which confronted us
when we went there was concerned, relatively both to the original
conception in 1898 of the struggle for independence, its birth in
1899, its life, and its slow, lingering obstinate death in 1900-1902,
in which last year the insurrection was finally correctly stated
to be practically ended. To know just how and why this was true,
is necessary to a clear understanding of that struggle, including
not only its genesis and its exodus, but also its gospels, its acts,
its revelations, and the multitudinous subsequent commentaries thereon.

The total land area of the Philippine archipelago, according to the
American Census of 1903, is 115,000 square miles. [236] The area of
Luzon, the principal island, on which Manila is situated, is 41,000
square miles, and that of Mindanao, the only other large island, is
36,000. [237] Between these two large islands, Luzon on the north,
and Mindanao on the south, there are a number of smaller ones,
but acquaintance with only six of these is essential to a clear
understanding of the American occupation. Many Americans, too busy
to have paid much attention to the Philippine Islands, which are,
and must ever remain, a thing wholly apart from American life, have a
vague notion that there are several thousand of them. This is true, in
a way. American energy has made, for the first time in their history,
an actual count of them, "including everything which at high tide
appeared as a separate island." [238] The work was done for our Census
of 1903 by Mr. George R. Putnam, now head of the Lighthouse Board of
the United States. Mr. Putnam, counted 3141 of them. [239] Of these,
of course, many--many hundred perhaps--are merely rocks fit only for a
resting place for birds. 2775, have an area of less than a square mile
each, 262 have an area of between 1 and 10 square miles, 73 between 10
and 100 square miles, and 20 between 100 and 1000 square miles. This
accounts for, and may dismiss at once from consideration 3130--all but
11. Most of these 3130 that are large enough to demand even so much
as a single word here are poorly adapted to human habitation, being
in most instances, without good harbors or other landing places, and
usually covered either with dense jungle or inhospitable mountains, or
both. Their total area is only about 8500 square miles, of the 115,500
square miles of land in the archipelago. None of them have ever had
any political significance, either in Spain's time, or our own, and
therefore, the whole 3130 may at once be eliminated from consideration,
leaving 11 only requiring any special notice at all--the 11 largest
islands. Of these, Luzon and Mindanao have already been mentioned. The
remaining 9, with their respective areas and populations, are:


    Island                Area [240]        Population [241]
                          in Square Miles

    Panay                 4,611               743,646
    Negros                4,881               560,776
    Cebu                  1,762               592,247
    Bohol                 1,411               243,148
    Samar                 5,031               222,690
    Leyte                 2,722 [242]         357,641
    Mindoro               3,851                28,361
    Masbate               1,236                29,451
    Paragua               4,027 [243]          10,918
                         ------             ---------
         Total           29,532             2,788,878


The political or governmental problem being now reduced from 3141
islands to eleven, the last three of the nine contained in the above
table may also be eliminated as follows: (See map at end of volume.)

Paragua, the long narrow island seen at the extreme lower left of any
map of the archipelago, extending northeast southwest at an angle
of about 45°, is practically worthless, being fit for nothing much
except a penal colony, for which purpose it is in fact now used.

Masbate--easily located on the map at a glance, because the twelfth
parallel of north latitude intersects the 124th meridian of longitude
east of Greenwich in its southeast corner--though noted for cattle
and other quadrupeds, is not essential to a clear understanding of
the human problem in its broader governmental aspects.

Mindoro, the large island just south of the main bulk of Luzon,
pierced by the 121st meridian of longitude east of Greenwich, is
thick with densely wooded mountains and jungle over a large part
of its area, has a reputation of being very unhealthy (malarious),
is also very sparsely settled, and does not now, nor has it ever,
cut any figure politically, as a disturbing factor. [244]

Eliminating Paragua, Masbate, and Mindoro as not essential to a
substantially correct general idea of the strategic and governmental
problems presented by the Philippine Islands, we have left, besides
Luzon and Mindanao, nothing but the half-dozen islands which appear
in large type in the above table: Panay, Negros, Cebu, Bohol, Samar,
Leyte, with a total area of 20,500 square miles. Add these to Luzon's
41,000 square miles and Mindanao's 36,000, and you have the Philippine
archipelago as we are to consider it in this book, that is to say,
two big islands with a half dozen little ones in between, the eight
having a total area of 97,500 square miles, of which the two big
islands represent nearly four-fifths.

While the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao, near Borneo, with
its 36,000 square miles [245] of area, requires that the Philippine
archipelago be described as stretching over more than 1000 miles
from north to south, still, inasmuch as Mindanao only contains
about 500,000 people all told, [246] half of them semi-civilized,
[247] the governmental problem it presents has no more to do with
the main problem of whether, if ever, we are to grant independence
to the 7,000,000 Christians of the other islands, than the questions
that have to be passed on by our Commissioner of Indian Affairs have
to do with the tariff.

Mindanao's 36,000 square miles constitute nearly a third of
the total area of the Philippine archipelago, and more than that
fraction of the 97,500 square miles of territory to a consideration
of which our attention is reduced by the process of elimination
above indicated. Turning over Mindanao to those crudely Mohammedan,
semi-civilized Moros would indeed be "like granting self-government
to an Apache reservation under some local chief," as Mr. Roosevelt,
in the campaign of 1900, ignorantly declared it would be to grant
self-government to Luzon under Aguinaldo. [248] Furthermore, the Moros,
so far as they can think, would prefer to owe allegiance to, and be
entitled to recognition as subjects of, some great nation. [249]
Again, because, the Filipinos have no moral right to control
the Moros, and could not if they would, the latter being fierce
fighters and bitterly opposed to the thought of possible ultimate
domination by the Filipinos, the most uncompromising advocate of
the consent-of-the-governed principle has not a leg to stand on
with regard to Mohammedan Mindanao. Hence I affirm that as to it,
we have a distinct and separate problem, which cannot be solved
in the lifetime of anybody now living. But it is a problem which
need not in the least delay the advent of independence for the
other fourteen-fifteenths of the inhabitants of the archipelago
[250]--all Christians living on islands north of Mindanao. It is
true that there are some Christian Filipinos on Mindanao, but in
policing the Moros, our government would of course protect them from
the Moros. If they did not like our government, they could move to
such parts of the island as we might permit to be incorporated in an
ultimate Philippine republic. Inasmuch as the 300,000 or so Moros of
the Mohammedan island of Mindanao and the adjacent islets called Jolo
(the "Sulu Archipelago," so called, "reigned over" by the Sultan of
comic opera fame) originally presented, as they will always present,
a distinct and separate problem, and never did have anything more
to do with the Philippine insurrection against us than their cousins
and co-religionists over in nearby Borneo, the task which confronted
Mr. Root in the fall of 1899, to wit, the suppression of the Philippine
insurrection, meant, practically, the subjugation of one big island,
Luzon, containing half the population and one-third the total area of
the archipelago, and six neighboring smaller ones, the Visayan Islands.

And now let us concentrate our attention upon Luzon as Mr. Root
no doubt did, with infinite pains, in the fall of 1899. Of the
7,600,000 people of the Philippines [251] almost exactly one-half,
i.e., 3,800,000, [252] live on Luzon, and these are practically all
civilized. [253] It so happens that the State of our Union which is
nearer the size of Luzon than any other is the one which furnished
the first American Civil Governor for the Philippine Islands, Governor
Taft. President Taft's native State of Ohio is 41,061 square miles in
area, and Luzon is 40,969. [254] Roughly speaking, Luzon may also be
said to be about the size of Cuba, [255] though it is about twice as
thickly populated as the latter, Cuba, having something over 2,000,000
people to Luzon's nearly 4,000,000. [256]

By all Americans in the Philippines since our occupation, the island
of Luzon is always contemplated as consisting of two parts, to wit,
northern Luzon, or that part north of Manila, and southern Luzon,
the part south of Manila. The great central plain of Luzon, lying
just north of Manila, is nearly as large as the republic of Salvador,
or the State of New Jersey, i.e., in the neighborhood of 7000 square
miles area [257]--and, like Salvador, it contains a population of
something over 1,000,000 inhabitants. The area and population of the
five provinces of this plain are, according to the Philippine Census
of 1903, as follows:


    Province              Area [258] (sq. m.)    Population [259]

    Pangasinan            1,193                      397,902
    Pampanga                868                      223,754
    Bulacan               1,173                      223,742
    Tarlac                1,205                      135,107
    Nueva Ecija           1,950                      134,147
                          -----                    ---------
                          6,389                    1,114,652


Roughly speaking, the central plain comprising the above five provinces
is bounded as follows: On the north by mountains and Lingayen Gulf, on
the east by a coast range of mountains separating it from the Pacific
Ocean, on the west by a similar range separating it from the China
Sea, and on the south by Manila Bay and mountains. The Rio Grande de
Pampanga flows obliquely across it in a southwesterly direction into
Manila Bay, and near its western edge runs the railroad from Manila
to Dagupan on Lingayen gulf. Dagupan is 120 miles from Manila. This
plain, held by a well-equipped insurgent army backed by the moral
support of the whole population, became the theatre of war as soon
as the volunteers of 1899 began to arrive at Manila, the insurgent
capital being then at Tarlac, a place about two-thirds of the way up
the railroad from Manila to Dagupan.

Of course the first essential thing to do was to break the backbone
of the insurgent army, and scatter it, and the next thing to do was
to capture Aguinaldo, the head and front of the whole business, the
incarnation of the aspirations of the Filipino people. The operations
to this end commenced in October, and involved three movements of
three separate forces:

(1) A column under General Lawton, proceeding up the Rio Grande
and along the northeastern borders of the plain, and bending around
westward along its northern boundary toward the gulf of Lingayen,
garrisoning the towns en route, and occupying the mountain passes
on the northeast which give exit over the divide into the great
valleys beyond.

(2) An expedition under General Wheaton, some 2500 in all, proceeding
by transports to the gulf of Lingayen, the chief port of which,
Dagupan, was the northern terminus of the railroad; the objective
being to land on the shore of that gulf at the northwest corner of
the plain, occupy the great coast road which runs from that point to
the northern extremity of the island, and also to proceed eastward
and effect a junction with the Lawton column.

(3) A third column under General MacArthur, proceeding up the railroad
to the capture of Tarlac, the third insurgent capital, and thence
still up the railroad to its end at Dagupan, driving the enemy's
forces before it toward the line held by the first two columns.

On October 12th, General Lawton moved up the Rio Grande from a place
called Aryat, a few miles up stream from where the railroad crosses the
river at Calumpit, driving the insurgents before him to the northward
and westward. His command was made up mainly from the 3d Cavalry and
the 22d Infantry, together with several hundred scouts, American and
Maccabebee. On the 20th San Isidro was again captured. That was the
place Lawton had evacuated in May previous. Arriving in the Islands
with Colonel E. E. Hardin's regiment, the 29th U. S. Volunteer
Infantry, on November 3, 1899, the writer was immediately detailed
to the Maccabebee scouts, to take the place of Lieutenant Boutelle,
of the regular artillery, a young West Pointer from Oregon, who had
been killed a day or two previous, and reported to Major C. G. Starr,
General Lawton's Adjutant-General in the field (whom he had known at
Santiago de Cuba the previous year) at San Isidro on or about November
8th. Major Starr said: "We took this town last spring," stating how
much our loss had been in so doing, "but, partly as a result of the
Schurman Commission parleying with the insurgents General Otis had
us fall back. We have just had to take it again." General Lawton
garrisoned San Isidro this time once for all, and pressed on north,
capturing the successive towns en route. Meantime, General Young's
cavalry, and the Maccabebee scouts under Major Batson, a lieutenant
of the regular army, and a medal-of-honor graduate of the Santiago
campaign, were operating to the west of the general line of advance,
striking insurgent detachments wherever found and driving them toward
the line of the railroad. By November 13th, Lawton's advance had
turned to the westward, according to the concerted plan of campaign
above described, garrisoning, as fast as they were taken, such of the
towns of the country over which he swept as there were troops to spare
for. We knew that Aguinaldo had been at Tarlac when the advance began,
and every officer and enlisted man of the command was on the qui vive
to catch him. By November 18th, General Lawton's forces held a line of
posts extending up the eastern side of the plain, and curving around
across the northern end to within a few miles of the gulf of Lingayen.

On November 6th, General Wheaton set sail from Manila for Lingayen
Gulf, with 2500 men of the 13th Regular and 33d Volunteer Infantry,
and a platoon of the 6th Artillery, convoyed by the ships of the
navy, and next day the expedition was successfully landed at San
Fabian, "with effective assistance from the naval convoy against
spirited resistance," says Secretary of War Root, in his annual
report for 1899. The navy's assistance on that occasion was indeed
"effective," but such passing mention hardly covers the case. In
the first place, they selected the landing point, their patrols
being already familiar with the coasts. As soon as the transports
were sighted, about eleven o'clock on the morning of November
7th, Commander Knox, the senior officer present, who commanded the
Princeton, and Commander Moore, of the Helena, went out to meet and
confer with General Wheaton. This done, the landing was effected
under protection of the navy's guns. Besides the naval vessels
above named, there were also present the Bennington under Commander
Arnold, the Manila under Lieutenant-Commander Nazro, and two captured
Spanish gun-boats small enough to get close in shore, the Callao,
and the Samar. The troops were disembarked in two columns of small
boats towed by launches. Lieutenant-Commander Tappan in charge of
the Callao, and Ensign Mustin, commanding the Samar, were especially
commended in the despatches of Admiral Watson, commander-in-chief
of the Asiatic squadron. Both bombarded the insurgent trenches
at close range during the landing, and Mustin actually steamed in
between the insurgents and the head of the column of troop-boats,
so as to intercept and receive the brunt of their fire himself, and,
selecting a point about seventy-five yards from the enemy's trenches
whence he could effectually pepper them, ran his ship aground so she
would stick, and commenced rapid firing at point blank range, driving
the enemy from his trenches, and enabling Colonel Hare of the 33d,
and those who followed, to land without being subjected to further
fire while on the water. [260]

On the 11th of November, Colonel Hare with the 33d Volunteer Infantry
and one Gatling gun under Captain Charles R. Howland of the 28th
Volunteer Infantry, a lieutenant of the regular army, and a member of
General Wheaton's staff, proceeded southeastward to San Jacinto, and
attacked and routed some 1200 to 1600 intrenched insurgents, Major John
A. Logan being among our killed. The enemy left eighty-one dead in the
trenches, and suffered a total loss estimated at three hundred. While
space does not permit dwelling on the details of engagements, it may be
remarked here, once for all, that the 33d Volunteer Infantry, Colonel
Luther R. Hare commanding, made more reputation than any other of the
twenty-five regiments of the volunteer army of 1899, except, possibly,
Colonel J. Franklin Bell's regiment, the 36th. This is no reflection on
the rest. These two were lucky enough to have more opportunities. In
meeting his opportunities, however, Colonel Hare, like Colonel Bell,
proved himself a superb soldier; his field-officers, especially Major
March, [261] were particularly indefatigable; and his men were mostly
Texans, accustomed to handling a rifle with effect. Space also forbids
following Captain Howland and his Gatling gun into the engagement of
November 11th, but from the uniformity with which General Wheaton's
official reports commend his young aide's bravery and efficiency
on numerous occasions in 1899-1900, it may be safely assumed that
those qualities were behind that Gatling gun at San Jacinto. There
was a vicious rumor started after the San Jacinto fight and given wide
circulation in the United States, that Major Logan was shot in the back
by his own men. I saw a major surgeon a few days later who had been
an eye-witness to his death. He said an insurgent sharpshooter shot
Major Logan from a tree, and that the said sharpshooter was promptly
thereafter dropped from his perch full of 33d Infantry bullets. Says
General Wheaton's despatch of November 12th: "Major Logan fell while
gallantly leading his battalion." [262]

On November 5th, General MacArthur, with a strong column, composed
mainly of the 9th, 17th, and 36th Regiments of Infantry, two troops of
the 4th Cavalry, two platoons of the 1st Artillery, and a detachment
of scouts, advanced up the railroad from Angeles, in execution of his
part of the programme. [263] Angeles is some distance up the railroad
from Calumpit, where the railroad crosses the Rio Grande. [264]
General MacArthur's column encountered and overwhelmed the enemy
at every point, entering Tarlac on November 12th, and effecting a
junction with General Wheaton at Dagupan, the northern terminus of
the Manila-Dagupan Railroad, 120 miles from Manila, on November 20th.

After General Lawton had finished his part of the round-up, he had
a final conference with General Young on November 18th at Pozorubio,
which is near the northeastern border of the plain, bade him good-bye,
and soon afterward went south to dispose of a body of insurgents who
were giving trouble near Manila. It was in this last expedition that
he lost his life at San Mateo about twelve miles out of Manila on
December 19, 1899.

The first of the two purposes of the great Wheaton-Lawton-MacArthur
northern advance, viz., the dispersion of the insurgent army of
northern Luzon had been duly accomplished. The other purpose had
failed of realization. Aguinaldo had not been captured. He escaped
through our lines.

Such is in brief the story of the destruction of the Aguinaldo
government in 1899 by General Otis, or rather by Mr. Root. But the
trouble about it was that it would not stay destroyed. It "played
possum" for a while, the honorable President retiring to permanent
headquarters in the mountains "with his government concealed about
his person," as Senator Lodge put it later in a summary of the case
for the Administration, before the Senate, in the spring of 1900. If
the distinguished and accomplished senator from Massachusetts, in
adding at that time to the gaiety of nations, had had access to a
certain diary kept by one of Aguinaldo's personal staff throughout
that period, subsequently submitted, in 1902, to the Senate Committee
of that year, he could have swelled the innocuous merriment with such
cheery entries as "Here we tightened our belts and went to bed on
the ground"--the time alluded to being midnight after a hard day's
march without food, the place, some chilly mountain top up which the
"Honorable Presidente" and party had that day been guided by the
ever-present and ever-willing paisano (fellow countryman) of the
immediate neighborhood--whatever the neighborhood--to facilitate them
in eluding General Young's hard riding cavalry and scouts. The writer
has no quarrel with Senator Lodge's witticism above quoted, having
derived on reading it, in full measure, the suggestive amusement it
was intended to afford. It is true that about all then left of the
"Honorable Presidente's" government, for the nonce, was in fact
concealed about his person. It was of a nature easily portable. It
needed neither bull trains, pack ponies, nor coolies to carry it. It
consisted solely of the loyal support of the whole people, who looked
to him as the incarnation of their aspirations. Said General MacArthur
to the Senate Committee in 1902 concerning Aguinaldo: "He was the
incarnation of the feelings of the Filipinos." "Senator Culberson:
'And represented the Filipino people?' General MacArthur: 'I think so;
yes'." [265] We of the 8th Army Corps did not know what a complete
structure the Philippine republic of 1898-9 was until, having shot
it to pieces, we had abundant leisure to examine the ruins. To admit,
in the same breath, participation in that war and profound regret that
it ever had occurred, is not an incriminating admission. In this case
as in any other where you have done another a wrong, by thrashing him
or otherwise, under a mistake of fact, the first step toward righting
the wrong is to frankly acknowledge it. As soon as Aguinaldo's flight
and wanderings terminated in the finding of permanent headquarters,
he began sending messages to his various generals all over Luzon and
the other islands, and wherever those orders were not intercepted they
were delivered and loyally obeyed. This kept up until General Funston
captured him in 1901. One traitor among all those teeming millions
might have betrayed his whereabouts, but none appeared. The obstinate
character and long continuance of the warfare in northern Luzon after
the great round-up which terminated with the final junction of the
Lawton, Wheaton, and MacArthur columns near Dagupan, as elsewhere
later throughout the archipelago, was at first very surprising to our
generals. It had been supposed that to disperse the insurgent army
would end the insurrection. As events turned out, it only made the
resistance more effective. So long as the insurgents kept together
in large bodies they could not hide. And as they were poor marksmen,
while the men behind our guns, like most other young Americans,
knew something about shooting, the ratio of their casualties to ours
was about 16 to 1. [266] When General MacArthur began his advance
on Tarlac, General Lawton his great march up the valley of the Rio
Grande, and General Wheaton his closing in from Dagupan, Aguinaldo
with his cabinet, generals, and headquarters troops abandoned Tarlac,
their capital, and went up the railroad to Bayambang. Here they held
a council of war, which General MacArthur describes in his report
for 1900 (from information obtained later on) as follows:


    At a council of war held at Bayambang, Pangasinan, about November
    12, 1899, which was attended by General Aguinaldo and many of the
    Filipino military leaders, a resolution was adopted to the effect
    that the insurgent forces were incapable of further resistance
    in the field, and as a consequence it was decided to disband the
    army, the generals and the men to return to their own provinces,
    with a view to organizing the people for general resistance by
    means of guerrilla warfare. [267]


This had been the plan from the beginning, the council of war
simply determining that the time to put the plan into effect had
arrived. Accordingly, the uniformed insurgent battalions and regiments
broke up into small bands which maintained a most persistent guerrilla
warfare for years thereafter. During those years they seldom wore
uniforms, disappearing and hiding their guns when hotly pursued,
and reappearing as non-combatant peasants interrupted in agricultural
pursuits, with invariable protestations of friendship. Hence all such
came to be known as amigos (friends), and the word amigo, or friend,
became a bitter by-word, meaning to all American soldiers throughout
the archipelago an enemy falsely claiming to be a friend. And every
Filipino was an "amigo."

Still, the volunteers had arrived in time to enable Mr. Root to make
a very nice showing to Congress, and through it to the people, in his
annual report to the President for 1899, dated November 29th. This
report is full of cheerful chirps from General Otis to the effect
that the resistance was practically ended, and the substance of the
information it conveyed duly found its way into the President's message
of December of that year and through it to the general public. One
of the Otis despatches said: "Claim to government by insurgents can
be made no longer." [268] This message went on to state that nothing
was now left but "banditti," and that the people are all friendly
to our troops. Thus misled, Mr. Root repeated to the President and
through him to Congress and the country the following nonsense:


    It is gratifying to know that as our troops got away from the
    immediate vicinity of Manila they found the natives of the country
    exceedingly friendly * * *. This was doubtless due in some measure
    to the fact that the Pampangos, who inhabit the provinces of
    Pampanga and Tarlac, and the Pangasinanes, who inhabit Pangasinan,
    as well as the other more northerly tribes, are unfriendly to the
    Tagalogs, and had simply submitted to the military domination of
    that tribe, from which they were glad to be relieved.


In characterizing this as nonsense no disrespect is intended to
Mr. Root. He did not know any better. He was relying on General
Otis. But it is sorely difficult to convey in written words what
utter nonsense those expressions about "the Pampangos" and "the
Pangasinanes" are to any one who was in that northern advance in the
fall of 1899. Imagine a British cabinet minister making a report to
Parliament in 1776 couched in the following words, to wit:


    The Massachusetts-ites, who inhabit Massachusetts, and the
    Virginia-ites who inhabit Virginia, as well as most of the other
    inhabitants are unfriendly to the New York-ites, and have simply
    submitted to the military domination of the last named,


and you have a faint idea of the accuracy of Mr. Root's report. It is
quite true that the Tagalos were the prime movers in the insurrection
against us, as they had been in all previous insurrections against
Spain. But the "Tagalo tribe" was no more alone among the Filipino
people in their wishes and views than the "unterrified" Tammany tribe
who inhabit the wilds of Manhattan Island, at the mouth of the Hudson
River, are alone in their views among our people.

On page 70 of this report, Secretary Root reproduces a telegram from
General Otis dated November 18, 1899, stating that on the road from
San Nicolas to San Manuel, a day or so previous, General Lawton was
"cordially received by the inhabitants." He announces in the same
telegram the drowning of Captain Luna, a volunteer officer from New
Mexico, who was one of General Lawton's aides, and had been a captain
in Colonel Roosevelt's regiment of Rough Riders before Santiago. The
writer happens to have been on that ride with General Lawton from San
Nicolas to San Manuel, and was within a dozen feet of Captain Luna
when the angry current of the Agno River caught him and his pony
in its grip and swept both out of sight forever, along with divers
troopers of the 4th Cavalry, horses and riders writhing to their
death in one awful, tangled, struggling mass. He can never forget
the magnificent dash back into the wide, ugly, swollen stream made
by Captain Edward L. King of General Lawton's staff, as he spurred
his horse in, followed by several troopers who had responded to his
call for mounted volunteers to accompany him in an effort to save the
lives of the men who went down. Their generous work proved futile. But
it was inspired partly by common dread of what they knew would happen
to any half-drowned soldier who might be washed ashore far away from
the column and captured. If an army was ever "in enemy's country" it
was then and there. When we reached San Manuel that night, Captains
King and Sewall, the two surviving personal aides of General Lawton's
staff, and the writer, stopped, along with the general, in a little
nipa shack on the roadside. General Lawton, was in an upper room busy
with couriers and the like, but downstairs King, Sewall, and myself
set to work to buscar [269] something to eat. I got hold of an hombre
(literally, a man; colloquially a native peasant man), who went to work
with apparent alacrity, and managed to provide three ravenously hungry
young men with a good meal of chicken, eggs, and rice. After supper,
being new in the country, the writer remarked to the general on the
alacrity of the hombre. I had brought out from the United States the
notions there current about the nature of the resistance. General
Lawton said, with a humorous twinkle in those fine eyes of his:
"Humph! If you expected to be killed the next minute if you didn't
find a chicken, you'd probably find one too." It is true that in the
course of the campaign General Young sent a telegram to General Otis
at Manila characterizing his reception at the hands of the natives as
friendly. This was prompted by our column being met as it would come
into a town by the town band. It did not take long to see through
this, and other like hypocrisy entirely justifiable in war, though
such tactics deceived us for a little while at first into thinking
the people were genuine amigos (friends). General Otis, not being near
the scene, remained under our original brief illusion. Let us return,
however, from Mr. Root's "patient and unconsenting millions dominated
by the Tagalo tribe," of 1899, to the facts, and follow the course
of events succeeding Lawton's junction with Wheaton and MacArthur
and his farewell to Young.

General Young, with his cavalry, and the Maccabebee scouts, continued
in pursuit of Aguinaldo through the passes of the mountains, the
latter having managed to run the gauntlet of our lines successfully
by a very close shave. How narrowly he escaped is illustrated by
the fact that after a fight we had at the Aringay River on November
19th, in which Major Batson was wounded while gallantly directing
the crossing of the river, we remained that night in the town of
Aringay, and at the very time we were "hustling for chow" in Aringay,
Aguinaldo was in the village of Naguilian an hour or so distant,
as was authoritatively ascertained long afterward from a captured
diary of one of his staff officers. [270]

General Young proceeded up the coast road, in hot haste, taking
one town, San Fernando de Union, after a brief engagement led by
the general in person--imagine a brigadier-general leading a charge
at the head of thirty-seven men!--but Aguinaldo had turned off to
the right and taken to the mountains. General Lawton wired General
Otis about that time, in effect, in announcing Aguinaldo's escape
through our lines and his own tireless brigade-commander's bold dash
in pursuit of him with an inadequate force of cavalry hampered by
lack of horseshoes and nails for the same, "If Young does not catch
Aguinaldo, he will at least make him very unhappy." The Young column
garrisoned the towns along the route over which it went, occupying
all the western part of Northern Luzon, hereafter described, and also
later on rescued Lieutenant Gilmore of the navy, Mr. Albert Sonnichsen,
previously an enlisted man and since a writer of some note, and other
American prisoners who had been in the hands of the insurgents for
many months. General Young finally made his headquarters at Vigan,
in the province of Ilocos Sur, a fine town in a fine country. The
Ilocanos are called "the Yankees of the Philippines," on account of
their energy and industry. Vigan is on the China sea coast of Luzon
(the west coast), about one hundred miles up the old Spanish coast
road, or "King's Highway" (Camino Real), from Lingayen Gulf (where
the hundred-and-twenty mile railroad from Manila to Dagupan ends)
and about eighty miles from the extreme northern end of the island
of Luzon. [271]

As subsequent policies and their effect on one's attitude toward
a great historic panorama do not interfere in the least with a
proper appreciation of the bravery and efficiency of the army of
one's country, it is with much regret that this narrative cannot
properly chronicle in detail what the War Department reports record
of the stirring deeds of General Young, and the officers and men
of his command, Colonels Hare and Howze, Captains Chase and Dodd,
and the rest, [272] performed during the long course of the work now
under consideration. One incident, however, is appropriate in this
connection, not only to a collection of genre pictures of the war
itself, but also to a place among the lights and shadows of the general
picture of the American occupation. On December 2, 1899, Major March
of the 33d Infantry had his famous fight at Tila pass, in which young
Gregorio del Pilar, one of the ablest and bravest of the insurgent
generals, was killed. The locality mentioned is a wild pass in the
mountains of the west coast of Luzon, that overlook the China Sea, some
4500 feet above sea level. It was strongly fortified, and was believed
by the insurgents to be impregnable. The trail winds up the mountains
in a sharp zigzag, and was commanded by stone barricades loop-holed
for infantry fire. The advance of our people was checked at first by
a heavy fire from these barricades. The approach being precipitous,
it looked for a while as if the position would indeed be impregnable,
and the idea of taking it by a frontal attack was abandoned. But a
hill to the left front of the barricade was seized by some of our
sharpshooters--those Texans of the 33d were indeed sharpshooters--and
after that, under cover of their fire, our troops managed to get in
a fire simultaneously both on the flank and rear of the occupants of
the barricades, climbing the precipitous slope up the mountain side
by means of twigs and the like, and finally killing some fifty-two of
the enemy, General Pilar among the number. After the fight was over,
Lieutenant Quinlan, heretofore mentioned, moved by certain indignities
in the nature of looting perpetrated upon the remains of General Pilar,
buried them with such military honors as could be hastily provided,
after first taking from a pocket of the dead general's uniform a
souvenir in the shape of an unfinished poem written in Spanish by
him the night before, addressed to his sweetheart; and, the burial
finished, the American officer placed on the rude headstone left to
mark the spot this generous inscription:


    General Gregorio Pilar, killed at the battle of Tila Pass, December
    2d, 1899, commanding Aguinaldo's rear-guard. An officer and a
    gentleman. (Signed) D. P. Quinlan, 2d Lieutenant, 11th Cavalry.


The brief incident over, Quinlan hurried on, rejoined the column,
and resumed the work of Benevolent Assimilation and the war
against Home Rule with all the dauntless ardor of his impetuous
Irish nature. Whatever the ultimate analysis of the ethics of this
scene--Quinlan at the grave of Pilar--clearly the Second Lieutenant
Quinlan of 1899 would hardly have agreed with the vice-presidential
candidate of 1900, Colonel Roosevelt, that granting self-government
to the Filipinos would be like granting self-government to an Apache
reservation under some local chief.

The territory occupied and finally "pacified" by General Young,
with the effective assistance of the officers heretofore mentioned,
and many other good men and true, was ultimately organized into
a military district, which was called the First District of the
Department of Northern Luzon. As territory was fought over, occupied,
and finally reduced to submission, that territory would be organized
into a military district by the commanding general or colonel of the
invading column, under the direction of the division commander. The
military "Division of the Philippines," which was succeeded by the
Civil Government of the Philippines under Governor Taft in 1901,
of course covered all the territory ceded by the Treaty of Paris. It
was divided into four "Departments," the Department of Northern Luzon,
the Department of Southern Luzon, the Department of the Visayas, [273]
and the Department of Mindanao and Jolo. General Young commanded the
First District of the Department of Northern Luzon--which included
the three west coast provinces north of Lingayen Gulf, and the three
adjacent mountain provinces--from the time he led his brigade into
that region in pursuit of Aguinaldo until shortly before Governor
Taft's inauguration in the summer of 1901. Many were the combats,
great and small, of General Young's brigade, in compassing the task
of crushing the resistance in that part of Luzon into which he led
the first American troops in the winter of 1899-1900. The resistance
was obstinate, desperate, and long drawn out, but when he finally
reported the territory under his command "pacified," it was pacified.
A soldier's task had been performed in a soldierly manner. The work
had been done thoroughly. General Young gave the Ilocano country a
lesson it never forgot, before politics had time to interfere. We
have never had any trouble in that region from that day to this.

Before the army of occupation had had time to do in southern Luzon what
General Young did in northern Luzon and thereby secure like permanent
results in that region, a "peace-at-any-price" policy was inaugurated
to meet the exigencies of Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency
in 1900. Our last martyred President clung all through that campaign
to his original assumption that Benevolent Assimilation would work,
and that the single burning need of the hour was to make clear to
the Filipinos what our intentions were--as if powder and lead did
not spell denial of independence plain enough, as if that were
not the sole issue, and as if that issue had not been submitted,
with deadly finality, to the stern arbitrament of war. However,
neither Lord Roberts in India, nor Lord Kitchener in Egypt ever more
effectively convinced the people of those countries that his flag
must be respected as an emblem of sovereignty, than General Young did
the Ilocanos. Take the month of April, 1900 for instance. Several
days after the expiration of said month (on May 5th) General Otis
was relieved and went home. During the month of April, General Young
killed five hundred insurgents in his district. [274] But this did
not prevent General Otis, arriving as he did in the United States
in the month of June, when the national political conventions meet,
from "repeating the same old story about the insurrection going to
pieces" [275]--only, not "going" now, but "gone." Nor did it, and like
sputterings of insurrection all over the place, prevent Judge Taft--the
"Mark Tapley of this Philippine business" as he humorously told the
Senate Committee of 1902 he had been called--from cabling home, during
the presidential campaign of 1900, a series of superlatively optimistic
bulletins, [276] based on the testimony of Filipinos who had abandoned
the cause of their country as soon as patriotism meant personal peril,
all such testimony being eagerly accepted, as testimony of the kind one
wants and needs badly usually is, in total disregard of information
directly to the contrary furnished by General MacArthur and other
distinguished soldiers who had been then on the ground for two years.

The area and population of the territory occupied by General Young,
the "First District of the Department of Northern Luzon," was,
according to the Census of 1903, as follows:


    Province              Area (sq. m.) [277]      Population [278]

    Ilocos Norte          1,330                       178,995
    Ilocos Sur              471                       187,411
    Union                   634                       137,839
    Abra                  1,171                        51,860
    Lepanto-Bontoc [279]  2,005                        72,750
    Benguet                 822                        22,745
                          -----                       -------
                          6,433                       651,600


As this narrative purposes so to present the geography of the
Philippine Islands as to facilitate an easy remembrance of the
essentials only of the governmental problem there presented,
we will hereafter speak of the First District as containing,
roughly, 6500 square miles, and 650,000 people. Whenever, if ever,
a Philippine republic is set up, these six provinces are very likely,
for geographical and other reasons, to become one of the original
states comprising that republic, just as the states of Mexico are
made up of groups of provinces. [280]

The rest of the story of the northern campaign of 1899-1900 immediately
following Aguinaldo's escape into the mountains through General Young's
and General Lawton's lines, being a necessary part of the American
occupation of the Philippines, may also serve as a text for further
acquainting the reader with the geography of Luzon. War is the best
possible teacher of geography, and it may be well to communicate
in broken doses, as we received them, the lessons on the subject
which the 8th Army Corps learned in 1899 and the subsequent years
so thoroughly that we could all pronounce with astonishing glibness,
the most unpronounceable names imaginable.

When the great Wheaton-Lawton-MacArthur "Round-up" reached the
mountains on the northeast of the great central plain, in the
latter part of November 1899, Captain Joseph B. Batchelor, with
one battalion of the 24th (negro) Infantry, and some scouts under
Lieutenant Castner, a very intrepid and tireless officer, boldly cut
loose from the column of which he was a part, and, pressing on over the
Caranglan pass, overran the province of Nueva Vizcaya, which is part
of the watershed of north central Luzon, proceeding from Bayombong,
the capital of Nueva Vizcaya, down the valley of the Magat River,
by the same route Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent of the navy had made
their pleasant junket in the fall of 1898 as described in Chapter VI
(ante). Following this route Captain Batchelor finally came into
Isabela province, where the Magat empties into the Cagayan River,
reaching Iligan, the capital of Isabela, ninety miles northeast of
Bayombong, about December 8th. From Iligan Batchelor went on, promptly
overcoming all resistance offered, down the great Cagayan valley, some
110 miles due north, to the sea at Aparri, the northernmost town of
Luzon and of the archipelago, where he met two vessels of our navy,
the Newark and the Helena, under Captain McCalla, and found, to his
inexpressible (but partially and rather fervently expressed) chagrin,
that the insurgents who had fled before him, and also the garrison
at Aparri, had already surrendered to the navy. The territory thus
covered by Batchelor's bold, brilliant, and memorable march over two
hundred miles of hostile country from the mountains of central Luzon
down the Cagayan valley to the northern end of the island, at Aparri,
[281] consisted of the three provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, and Nueva
Vizcaya. The area and population of these three, according to the
census tables of 1903, are as follows:


    Province             Area (sq. m.) [282]   Population [283]

    Cagayan               5,052                156,239
    Isabela               5,018                 76,431
    Nueva Vizcaya         1,950                 62,541
                         ------                -------
    Total                12,020                295,211


The troops of Captain Batchelor's command were later on relieved by
the 16th Infantry, commanded by Colonel Hood, under whom the above
group of three provinces finally became the "Second District of the
Department of Northern Luzon." As part of the plan to provide the
reader with a fair general idea of Luzon conveniently portable in
memory, he is requested to note, at this point, that hereinafter the
Cagayan valley, with its three provinces, [284] will be alluded to as
a district containing 12,000 square miles and 300,000 people. As was
remarked concerning the original military district commanded by General
Young, to wit, the First District, so of Colonel Hood's district,
the Second--that is to say, as the Ilocano country may some day become
the state of Ilocos, so, for like geographical and other governmental
reasons, the three provinces of the Cagayan valley may some day become
the state of Cagayan in the possible Philippine republic of the future.

Having now followed the "far-flung battle line" of the volunteers of
'99 and their comrades in arms, the regulars, from Manila northward
across the rice paddies of central Luzon and over the mountains to the
northern extremity of the island, let us return to the central plain,
for reasons which will be stated in so doing. Between the China Sea
and the coast range which forms the western boundary of the central
plain of Luzon, there is a long strip of territory--a west wing of
the plain, as it were--about 125 miles long, with an average width
of not more than twenty miles, stretching from Manila Bay to Lingayen
Gulf. This is divided, for governmental purposes into two provinces,
Bataan on the south, whose southern extremity lay on Admiral Dewey's
port side as he entered Manila Bay the night before the naval battle
of May 1, 1898, and Zambales on the north. The area and population
of this territory are as follows:


    Province             Area (sq. m.)           Population

    Bataan                 537                    46,787
    Zambales             2,125                   104,549
                         -----                   -------
                         2,662                   151,336


Also, between the Pacific Ocean and the coast range which forms the
eastern boundary of the plain is a longer, narrower, and very sparsely
populated strip, or east wing, divided also into two provinces,
Principe on the north and Infanta on the south, each supposed to
contain about fifteen thousand people. Principe and Infanta are wholly
unimportant, except that, to avoid confusion, we must account for
all the provinces visible on the maps of Luzon. These two provinces
never gave any trouble and no one ever bothered about them. [285]
In the mountains of Zambales and Bataan, however, as in most of the
other provinces of the archipelago, the struggle was long kept up,
just as the Boers kept up their war for independence against Great
Britain about the same time, by guerrilla warfare.

The central plain with five provinces has already been fully
described. If to this plain you add its two wings, above mentioned,
you have the nine provinces of central Luzon you see on the map. And
if to them you add the six provinces of the Ilocos country and the
three of the Cagayan valley, you have clearly before you the political
make-up of northern Luzon--eighteen provinces in all. When central
Luzon was arranged by districts under the military occupation,
it was divided into three parts, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth
districts of the Department of Northern Luzon, the Third District
being under General Jacob H. Smith of Samar fame, [286] the Fourth
under General Funston, and the Fifth under General Grant. The Sixth
and last district of northern Luzon was made up of the city of Manila
and adjacent territory.

General Smith's district, the Third, comprised the provinces of


    Province           Area (sq. m.)           Population

    Zambales           2,125                    104,549
    Pangasinan         1,193                    397,902
    Tarlac             1,205                    135,107
                       -----                    -------
                       4,523                    637,558


Pangasinan with its near 400,000 people is the largest, in point
of population, of the twenty-five provinces of Luzon, and the third
largest of the archipelago.

General Funston's district, the Fourth, comprised the provinces of


    Province           Area (sq. m.)           Population

    Nueva Ecija        2,169                    134,147
    Principe [287]       331                     15,853
                       -----                    -------
                       2,500                    150,000


General Grant's district, the Fifth, comprised the provinces of


    Province           Area (sq. m.)           Population

    Bataan               537                     46,787
    Pampanga             868                    223,754
    Bulacan            1,173                    223,742
                       -----                    -------
                       2,578                    494,283

                       2,500                    150,000
                       =====                    =======
    Totals, 4th and
    5th Districts:     5,078                    644,283


It will be seen from the foregoing that the Third District was nearly
equal in area to the Fourth and Fifth added together, and that the
same was true as to its population figure.

Just as the six provinces of the Ilocano country, first occupied by
General Young and organized as "The First District of the Department of
Northern Luzon," should some day evolve into a State of Ilocos, and the
three provinces of the Cagayan valley, occupied by Colonel Hood as the
Second District, into an ultimate State of Cagayan, so the provinces
of General Smith's old district, the Third, should finally become a
State of Pangasinan. [288] This Third District may be conveniently
recollected as accounting for, roughly speaking, 4500 square miles
of territory and 625,000 people. The total combined area of General
Funston's old district, the Fourth, [289] and the adjacent one,
the Fifth, General Grant's district, is--roughly--5000 square miles,
and its total population 650,000. No reason is apparent why these two
districts, the Fourth and Fifth, should not ultimately evolve into a
State of Pampanga. The five original military districts, [290] which
in 1900 constituted all of the Department of Northern Luzon except
the city of Manila and vicinity, might make four ultimate states,
with names, areas, and populations as follows:


    State            Area (sq. m.)         Population

    Ilocos            6,500                   650,000
    Cagayan          12,000                   300,000
    Pangasinan        4,500                   625,000
    Pampanga          5,000                   650,000
                     ------                 ---------
                     28,000                 2,225,000


It may surprise the reader after all the blood and thunder to which
his attention has hereinabove been subjected, apropos of northern
Luzon and the winter of 1899-1900, to know that the insurgents were
still bearding the lion in his den, i. e., General Otis in Manila,
by operating in very considerable force in the village-dotted country
within cannon-shot of the road from Manila to Cavite in January,
1900. Nevertheless such was the case.

On the 4th of January, 1900, General J. C. Bates was assigned to
the command of the First Division of the Eighth Army Corps, General
Lawton's old division, and an active campaign was commenced in southern
Luzon. The plan adopted was that General Wheaton with a strong force
should engage and hold the enemy in the neighborhood of Cavite, while
General Schwan, starting at the western horn of the half moon to which
the great lake called Laguna de Bay has already been likened, should
move rapidly down the west shore of the lake, and around its south
shore to Santa Cruz near its eastern end, or horn, garrisoning the
towns en route, as taken, instead of leaving them to be re-occupied by
the insurgents. Santa Cruz is the same place where General Lawton had
"touched second base," as it were, with a flying column in April, 1899.

This plan was duly carried out. The Schwan column started from San
Pedro Macati, the initial rendezvous, a few miles out of Manila,
on January 4, 1900, now garrisoning the towns en route, instead of
leaving them to be fought over and captured again as heretofore. The
first stiff fight we had in that campaign was at Biñan, on January 6,
1900, one of the places General Lawton's expedition had taken when
he fought his way over the same country the year before. O. K. Davis
and John T. McCutcheon, who were in that fight and campaign--in fact
one of them had the ice-cold nerve to photograph the Biñan fight while
it was going on, as I learned when we all went down to the creek near
the town, after we took it, to freshen up--can testify that we did not
then hear any nonsense about a "Tagal" insurrection, such as Secretary
of War Root's Report for 1899, published shortly before, is full of,
and that on the contrary the whole country was as much a unit against
us and as loyal to the Aguinaldo government as northern Luzon had
been. And inasmuch as I am doing some "testifying" along here myself,
and assuming to brush aside without the slightest hesitation, as wholly
erroneous, information conveyed to the American public at the time
in the state papers of President McKinley and Secretary of War Root,
it is only due the reader, whose attention is being seriously asked,
that "the witness" should "qualify" as to the opportunities he may
have had, if any, to know whereof he speaks, concerning the character
of the opposition. To that end, the following document, which General
Schwan was kind enough to send me afterwards, is submitted as sent:


    EXTRACT COPY.

    Headquarters Detachment Macabebe Scouts.
    The Adjutant General, Schwan's Expeditionary Brigade:


    Sir: I have the honor to submit the following report of the
    operations of the Detachment of Macabebe Scouts, under my command,
    while forming a part of your Brigade.

    The Detachment, consisting of five (5) officers and one hundred
    and forty (140) men, was divided into two companies, commanded
    by 1st Lt. J. Lee Hall, 33rd Inf., and 1st Lt. Blount, 29th Inf.,
    left San Pedro Macati the afternoon of Jan. 4th, 1900 * * *.

                * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I wish to invite your attention, especially, to the good work
    done in the fight at Biñan by Lieut. Blount, 29th Inf., who led
    the line by at least twenty-five yards * * *.


        Very Respectfully,
        Wm. C. Geiger, 1st Lt. 14th Inf., Com'd'g Det.


    I hereby certify that the above is a true copy of extracts from
    the report of the operations of the Detachment of Macabebe Scouts
    forming part of an Expeditionary Brigade under my command, in
    the months of January and February, 1900.


        Theo. Schwan,
        Brig. General, U. S. Vols.
        Aug. 16, 1900.


The activities of Generals Bates and Wheaton, and the Schwan Expedition
of January-February, 1900, extended the American occupation, so far
as there were troops enough immediately available to go around, over
the lake-shore portions and the principal towns of the two great
provinces of southern Luzon bordering on the Laguna de Bay, viz.,
Cavite and Laguna; and over parts of the two adjacent provinces of
Batangas and Tayabas.

Batangas bounds Cavite on the south, and is itself bounded on the
south by the sea, where a fairly good port offered a fine gateway
for smuggling arms into the interior from abroad. Tayabas province
adjoins Laguna on the southeast. Cavite province has always been,
since the opening of the Suez Canal, about 1869, and the agitations
for political reform in Spain which culminated in the Spanish republic
of 1873, quickened the thought of Spain's East Indies, the home of
insurrection, the breeding place of political agitation. Aguinaldo
himself was born within its limits in 1869. Laguna province comprehends
most of the country lying between the southern and eastern lake-shore
of the Laguna de Bay and the mountains which skirt that body of water
in the blue distance, all parts of it being thus in easy and safe
touch by water transportation by night with Cavite, the home and
headquarters of insurgency.

Just as northern Luzon had been gradually organized into military
districts as conquered, so was southern Luzon. The territory, over-run,
as above described, by Generals Bates, Wheaton, and Schwan, was divided
into two districts. [291] Colonel Hare commanded the First District,
Cavite province and vicinity. General Hall commanded the Second
District, Batangas, Laguna, and Tayabas. The area and population of
these four provinces, according to the Census of 1903, were as follows:


    Province            Area (sq. m.)             Population

    Cavite                619                      134,779
    Batangas            1,201                      257,715
    Laguna                629                      148,606
    Tayabas             5,993                      153,065
                        -----                      -------
                        8,442                      694,165


For convenience of subsequent allusion, this group of provinces may
be treated as representing roughly 8500 square miles of territory
and 700,000 people. These four provinces group themselves together
naturally from a military standpoint. As physical force is the
final basis of all government, these four provinces constitute a
logical administrative governmental unit, as shown by the action
of our military authorities in their extension of the American
occupation. It would seem therefore that if there should ever be
a Philippine republic, they would probably constitute one of its
states--the State, let us say, of Cavite.

The rest of southern Luzon below that part above described consists of
a peninsula which, owing to its odd formation, is easy to remember. The
mainland of Luzon, that is to-say, that part of the island which our
narrative has already covered, remotely suggests, in shape, the State
of Illinois. At least it resembles Illinois more than it does any other
State of our Union, in that its length runs north and south, and its
average length and width are nearer that of Illinois than any other. At
the southeast corner of this mainland, the observer of the map will
see, jutting off to the southeast from the mainland, the peninsula in
question. It is about a hundred and fifty miles long, with an average
width of possibly thirty miles--a minimum width of, say, ten miles, and
a maximum of fifty,--and is separated from Samar by the narrow, swift,
and treacherous San Bernardino Strait, which connects the Pacific
Ocean with the China Sea. This peninsula is frequently called "the
Hemp Peninsula." The importance of controlling the hemp ports prompted
General Otis to send General Bates with an expedition to those ports on
February 15, 1900. [292] This expedition did little more than occupy
those ports. The great interior continued under insurgent control
some time afterward. The report of the Secretary of War, Mr. Root,
for 1900, goes on to describe an engagement, or two, sustained by
the Bates Expedition shortly after it landed, and concludes, with
a complacency almost Otis-like, by stating that shortly thereafter
"the normal conditions of industry and trade relations with Manila
were resumed by the inhabitants." Of course Mr. Root believed this,
and so did Mr. McKinley. More the pity, as we shall later see. General
Otis was now getting anxious to go home, and hastened to "occupy"
and organize the rest of the archipelago, on paper, at least, the
hemp peninsula becoming, on March 20, 1900, the Third District of
the Department of Southern Luzon, Brigadier-General James M. Bell
commanding. The provinces comprised in this district, with their
areas and populations as given by the Census of 1903, were as follows:


    Province              Area (sq. m.)         Population

    Camarines [293]       3,279                  239,405
    Albay                 1,783                  240,326
    Sorsogon                755                  120,495
                          -----                  -------
                          5,817                  600,226


For convenience of subsequent allusion, these three provinces of
the hemp peninsula which constituted the Third Military District of
the Military Department of Southern Luzon in 1900, may be regarded
as comprising, roughly, 6000 square miles of territory and 600,000
people. If the Philippine republic of the future which is the dream
of the Filipino people, prove other than an idle dream, the hemp
peninsula will probably some day constitute a state of that republic,
an appropriate and probable name for which would be the State of
Camarines.

The Fourth District of southern Luzon--there were but four--was
occupied by the 29th U. S. Volunteer Infantry, commanded by Colonel
E. E. Hardin, one of the best executive officers General Otis had in
his whole command. The Fourth District comprised a lot of islands
unnecessary to be considered at length in this bird's-eye view of
the panorama, but necessary to be mentioned in outlining the military
occupation. The 29th, like the other twenty-four volunteer regiments,
settled down with equanimity to the business of policing a hostile
country, sang with zest, like the rest of the twenty-five volunteer
regiments, that old familiar song, "Damn, Damn, Damn the Filipino,"
etc., and waited with the uniquely admirable stoicism of the American
soldier for the season of their home-going to roll round, which, under
the Act of Congress, [294] would be the spring of the following year.

In volume i., part 5, War Department Report, 1899, at pages 5 et seq.,
may be found a journal illustrating the nature of the "police" work
done by the volunteers of 1899, in 1900, and at pages 5 et seq. of
the same report for 1900 (volume i., part 4) may be found a similar
diary carried up to June 30, 1901. Throughout the period covered by
those reports, scarcely a day passed without what the military folk
coolly call "contacts" with the enemy.

The Visayan Islands were in course of time duly organized, as Luzon had
previously been, departmentally and by military districts. The Visayan
Islands became the Department of Visayas, divided into districts
commanded either by regimental commanders having a regiment or more
with them, or by general officers. For a long time no attempt to make
military occupation effective in these various islands, save in the
coast towns, was attempted. However, the indicated disposition of
troops completed, technically at least, the American occupation of
the Visayan Islands.

Pursuant to the plan followed, as we have hitherto followed the
army in our narrative, first throughout northern Luzon and later
through southern Luzon, some data are now in order concerning the
Visayan Islands.

As already made clear, there are but six of the Visayan Islands with
which any one interested in the Philippines merely as a student of
world politics or of history need bother. The area and population of
these are as follows: [295]


    Island                Area (sq. m.)       Population

    Panay                 4,611                743,646
    Negros                4,881                460,776
    Cebu                  1,762                592,247
    Leyte                 2,722                356,641
    Samar                 5,031                222,090
    Bohol                 1,441                243,148


Whenever, if ever, an independent republic is established in
the Philippines, the six islands above mentioned could and should
constitute self-governing commonwealths similar to the several States
of the American Union. The rest of the islands lying between Luzon
and Mindanao could easily be disposed of governmentally by being
attached to the jurisdiction of one of the said six islands.

Mindanao and the adjacent islets called Jolo were organized as
the Department of Mindanao and Jolo, under General Kobbe, with
the 31st Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Pettit's regiment, the 40th
Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Godwin's regiment, and the 23rd Regular
Infantry. Thus the archipelago was completely accounted for, for
the time being, just as all the territory of the United States was
long accounted for by our military authorities at home, with the
Department of the East, headquarters Governor's Island, New York; the
Department of the Lakes, headquarters Chicago; the Department of the
Gulf, headquarters Atlanta, etc. In this state of the case, General
Otis re-embraced his early pet delusion--if it was a delusion, which
charity and the probabilities suggest it should be called--about the
insurrection having gone to pieces; and decided to come home. Possibly,
also, he was homesick. General Otis was a very positive character,
a strong man. But even strong men get homesick after long exile. When
you hear the call of the homeland after long residence "east of Suez,"
you must answer the call, duty not forbidding. General Otis had stood
by his ink wells and the Administration with unswerving devotion
for twenty months, and was entitled to come back home and tell the
public all about the fighting in the Philippines, and how entirely
over it was, and how wholly right Mr. McKinley was in his theory
that the visible opposition to our rule and the seeming desire to
be free and independent did not represent the wishes of the Filipino
people at all, but only the "sinister ambitions of a few unscrupulous
Tagalo leaders." Accordingly on May 5, 1900, he was relieved at his
own request, and departed for the United States. He was succeeded
in command by a very different type of man, Major-General Arthur
MacArthur, upon whom now devolved the problem of holding down the
situation and of actually getting it stably "well in hand" by June
30, 1901, the date of expiration of the term of enlistment of the
twenty-five volunteer regiments organized under the Act of March
2, 1899.






CHAPTER XIII

MACARTHUR AND THE WAR

                        Damn, damn, damn the Filipino,
                        Pock-marked khakiac ladrone; [296]
                        Underneath the starry flag
                        Civilize him with a Krag,
                        And return us to our own beloved home.

                     Army Song of the Philippines under MacArthur. [297]


Some one has said, "Let me write the songs of a people and I care
not who makes their laws." Give me the campaign songs of a war, and
I will so write the history of that war that he who runs may read,
and, reading, know the truth. The volunteers of 1899 had, most of
them, been in the Spanish War of '98. That struggle had been so
brief that, to borrow a phrase of the principal beneficiary of it,
Colonel Roosevelt, there had not been "war enough to go 'round." The
Philippine insurrection had already broken out when the Spanish War
volunteers returned from Cuba in the first half of 1899. Few of them
knew exactly where the Philippines were on the map. They simply knew
that we had bought the islands, that disturbances of public order
were in progress there, and that the Government desired to suppress
them. The President had called for volunteers. That was enough. When
they reached the islands, instead of finding a lot of outlaws,
brigands, etc., such as that pestiferous, ill-conditioned outfit of
horse-thieves and cane-field burning patriots we volunteers of '98
had to comb out of the eastern end of Cuba under General Wood in the
winter of 1898-9, they found Manila, on their arrival, practically
almost a besieged city. They knew that the erroneous impression
they had brought with them was the result of misrepresentation. Who
was responsible for that misrepresentation they did not attempt to
analyze. They simply set to work with American energy to put down the
insurrection. Nobody questioned the unanimity of the opposition. There
it was, a fact--denied at home, but a fact. In the course of the fight
against the organized insurgent army they lost a great many of their
comrades, and in that way the unanimity of the resistance was quite
forcibly impressed upon them. By kindred psychologic processes equally
free from mystery, their determination to overcome the resistance
early became very set--a state of mind which boded no good to the
Filipinos. The army song given at the beginning of Chapter XI (ante),
in which General Otis is made to sing, after the fashion of some of
the characters in Pinafore, that pensive query to himself


    Am I the boss, or am I a tool?


the first stanza of which closes


    Now I'd like to know who's the boss of the show,
    Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?


was a point of departure, in the matter of information, which
served to acquaint them with all that had gone before. They resented
the loss of prestige to American arms and desired to restore that
prestige. While engaged in so doing, they became aware, during the
Presidential year 1900, that the campaign of that year in the United
States was based largely upon the pretence that the majority of the
Filipinos welcomed our rule. Naturally, their experience led them to
a very general and very cordial detestation of this pretence. For one
thing, it was an unfair belittling of the actual military service
they were rendering. People hate a lie whether they are able to
trace its devious windings to its source or sources, or to analyze
all its causes, or calculate all its possible effects, or not. The
real rock-bottom falsehood, not as fully understood then as it became
later, consisted in the impression sought to be produced at home, in
order to get votes, that the great body of the Filipino people were
not really in sympathy with their country's struggle for freedom,
and would be really glad tamely to accept the alien domination so
benevolently offered by a superior people, but were being coerced into
fighting through intimidation by a few selfish leaders acting for their
own selfish ends. While our fighting generals in the field,--General
MacArthur, for instance, whose interview with a newspaper man just
after the fall of Malolos, in March, 1899, subsequently verified by
him before the Senate Committee of 1902, has already been noticed--at
first believed that it was only a faction that we had to contend with,
they soon discovered that the whole people were loyal to Aguinaldo and
the cause he represented. But, while the point as to how unanimous
the resistance was remained a disputed matter for some little time
among those of our people who did not have to "go up against it,"
the most curious fact of that whole historic situation, to my mind,
is the absolute identity of the disputed suggestion with that which
had previously been used in like cases in all ages by the powerful
against people struggling to be free, and the cotemporaneous absence
of any notation of the coincidence by any conspicuous spectator of
the drama, to say nothing of us smaller fry who bore the brunt of
the war or any portion of it.

Those men of '99 in the Philippines realized in 1900, vaguely
it may be, but actually, that they were waging a war of conquest
after the manner of the British as sung by Kipling, but under the
hypocritical pretence that they were doing missionary work to improve
the Filipino. They did not know whether the Filipinos could or could
not run a decent government if permitted. It was too early to form
any judgment. And even then there was no unanimous feeling that they
could not. Brigadier-General Charles King, the famous novelist,
who was in the fighting out there during the first half of 1899,
was quoted in the Catholic Citizen, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June,
1899, as having said in an interview given at Milwaukee:


    There is no reason in the world why the people should not have
    the self-government which they so passionately desire, so far as
    their ability to carry it on goes.


The real reason why the war was being waged was stated with the honesty
which heated public discussion always brings forth, by Hon. Charles
Denby, a member of the Schurman Commission of 1899, in an article
which appeared in the Forum for February, 1899, entitled "Why the
Treaty Should be Ratified:" [298]


    The cold, hard, practical question alone remains: "Will the
    possession of the islands benefit us as a nation?" If it will not,
    set them free to-morrow.


But in the same magazine, the Forum, for June, 1900, in other words
to the very same audience, in an article whose title is a protest,
"Do we Owe the Filipinos Independence?" we find this same distinguished
diplomat sagaciously deferring to that not inconsiderable element of
the American public which is opposed to wars for conquest, with the
rank hypocrisy which must ever characterize a republic warring for
gain against the ideals that made it great, thus:


    A little time ought to be conceded to the Administration to
    ascertain what the wish of the people [meaning the people of the
    Philippine Islands] really is; [299]


adding some of the stale but ever-welcome salve originally invented
by General Otis for use by Mr. McKinley on the public conscience
of America, about the war having been "fomented by professional
politicians," and not having the moral support of the whole people. "A
majority of the Filipinos are friendly to us," he says. Even as early
as January 4, 1900, in the New York Independent, we find Mr. Denby
abandoning all his previous honesty of 1899 about "the cold, hard,
practical question," and rubbing his hands with invisible soap to
the tune of the following hypocrisy:


    Let us find out how many of the people want independence, and
    how many are willing to remain loyal to our government. It is
    believed a large majority [etc.]. [300]


The same article even assumed an air of injured innocence and urged
that as soon as the insurgent army laid down its arms [301] "the
intentions of our government will be made known by Congress." That
was just thirteen years ago, and "the intentions of our government"
have never yet been "made known by Congress," despite the fact
that the omission has all these years been like a buzzing insect,
lighting intermittently on the sores of race prejudice and political
difference in the Philippines, to say nothing of the circumstance
that such omission leaves everybody guessing, including ourselves. The
omission has been due to the fact that both the McKinley Administration
which committed the original blunder of taking the islands, and
the succeeding Administrations which have been the legatees of that
blunder, have always needed in their Philippine business the support
both of those whose votes are caught by the Denby honesty of 1899
and those whose votes are caught by the Denby hypocrisy of 1900.

War is a great silencer of hypocrisy. In the presence of real sorrow
and genuine anger, it slinks away and is seen no more until more
piping times. The lists of casualties had been duly bulletined to
the United States from time to time between February, 1899, and June,
1900, so that by the date last named it had become "good politics" to
throw off the mask. Hence, at the Republican National Convention held
in Philadelphia June 19-21, 1900, we find that astute past-master of
the science of government by parties, Senator Lodge, boldly throwing
off the mask thus:


    We make no hypocritical pretense of being interested in the
    Philippines solely on account of others. We believe in trade
    expansion.


Now the words of a United States Senator are much listened to by an
army in the field. When a war breaks out, it is usually your Senator
who gets your commission for you originally, and has you promoted
and made captain, colonel, or general, as the case may be, if you do
anything to deserve it, or lifted from the ranks to a commission, if
you do anything to deserve it, or sees that something fitting is done
if you die in any specially decent way. An army in the field thinks
a United States Senator is about one of the biggest institutions
going--which, seriously, is not far from the truth, with all due
respect to the blasé pessimists of the press gallery. Consider then how
wholly uninspiring, as a sentiment to die by and kill by, the above
senatorial utterance was to the men in the field in the Philippines,
who did not even then believe the islands would pay. The "cold, hard,
practical" fact was, if the Senator was to be believed, that we were
fighting for what is generically called "Wall Street;" that it was
primarily a Wall Street war: an expedition fitted out to kill enough
Filipinos to make the survivors good future customers--"Ultimate
Consumers"--and only incidentally a war to make people follow your
way of being happy in lieu of their own. Yet we had most of us, but
shortly previously to that, gone trooping headlong to Cuba, in the wake
of the most inspiring single personality of this age--Senator Lodge's
friend, Colonel Roosevelt--some of our American thoraxes inflated with
sentiments thus nobly expressed by the same distinguished Senator in
his speech on the resolution which declared war against Spain:

"We are there" (meaning in the then Cuban situation), Senator Lodge
had said in the Senate, in the matchless outburst of eloquence with
which he set the keynote to the war with Spain--


    We are there because we represent the spirit of liberty and the
    new time. * * * We have grasped no man's territory, we have taken
    no man's property, we have invaded no man's rights. We do not
    ask their lands. [302]


What difference, however, did it make to men under military orders,
and that far away from home, where American public opinion could not
and never can affect any given situation in time to help it, whether
they were serving God or the devil? Everything disappeared but the
primal fighting instinct. So the slaughter proceeded right merrily,
at a ratio of about sixteen to one, and many a Filipino died with the
word "Independence" on his lips, [303] while many an obscure American
life went out, fighting under the Denby-Lodge dollar-mark flag of
pseudo-trade expansion. Can you imagine a more thankless job? Do
you wonder at the song that heads the chapter? Still, war is war,
once you are in it. All through 1900 the volunteers of 1899 kept on,
cheerfully doing their country's work, not in the least hampered by
whys or wherefores, so far as the quality of their work went. They knew
that the Filipinos were not heathen, and they were not perfectly clear
that they themselves were doing the Lord's work, unless "putting the
fear of God into the heart of the insurrecto"--one of their campaign
expressions--was the Lord's work. However, if any of them gave any
special thought to the ethics of the situation, this did not in the
least affect their efficiency in action, nor their determination to
lick the Filipino into submission. When the brief organized resistance
of the insurgent armies in the field (February to November, 1899)
underwent its transition to the far more formidable guerrilla tactics,
they realized that they were "up against" a long and tedious task,
in which would be no special glamour, as there had been in Cuba,
because the war was not much more popular at home than it was with
them. The rank net hypocrisy of the whole situation, as they viewed
it, is expressed in the song which heads this chapter. It is an
answer to the Taft nonsense of 1900 about "the people long for peace
and are willing to accept government under United States." [304]
That is why the Caribao Society do not sing it to Mr. Taft when he
attends their annual banquet, notwithstanding that it is the star
song of their repertoire. [305] This statement of Judge Taft's, as
well as other like statements of his which followed it during the
presidential campaign of 1900, would have been perfectly harmless in
home politics. It was made in the same spirit of optimism in which
a Taft man will tell you to-day, "The people are willing to see the
Taft Administration endorsed." But at that time in the Philippines
there was no possible way to prove or disprove the statement to the
satisfaction of anybody at home--or elsewhere, for that matter. And,
under the circumstances, it was at once a libel on Filipino patriotism
and an ungracious belittling of the work of the American army. It was
a libel on Filipino patriotism because it denied the loyal (even if
ill-advised) unanimity of the Filipino people in their struggle for
independence, and was a statement made recklessly, without knowledge,
in aid of a presidential candidate in the United States. That it was
highly inaccurate was well known to some 70,000 American soldiers then
in the field, who were daily getting insurrecto lead pumped into them,
and also well known to their gallant commander, General MacArthur, who
told Judge Taft just that thing. That it was an ungracious belittling
of the work of the army is certainly obvious enough, and it was
so considered by the army, and its commanding general aforesaid,
who practically told Judge Taft just that thing. But Mr. Root,
then Secretary of War, was as much interested in Mr. McKinley's
re-election as Judge Taft was. So he spread the Taft cablegrams
broadcast throughout the United States during the presidential
campaign, and pigeonholed the MacArthur messages and reports on the
situation in the dusty and innocuous desuetude of the War Department
archives. Four years later at the Republican National Convention of
1904, Mr. Root told the naked truth, thus:


    When the last national convention met, over 70,000 soldiers from
    more than 500 stations held a still vigorous enemy in check. [306]


The foregoing is all a record made and unalterable. It is a fair sample
of the initial stages of one more of the experiments in colonization
by a republic which are scattered through history and teach but
one lesson. All the gentlemen concerned were personally men of high
type. But look at the net result of their work. The impression it
produced in the United States, at a tremendously critical period in the
country's history, when the men at the helm of state were bending every
energy to railroad the republic into a career of overseas conquest,
and using the army for that purpose, can be called by a short and ugly
word. The splendor of Mr. Root's intellect is positively alluring,
but he is a dangerous man to republican institutions. Mr. Taft's part
in that conspiracy for the suppression of the facts of the Philippine
situation in 1900 was really due to kindliness of heart, regret
at the war, and earnest hope that it would soon end. Mr. Denby's
part was that of the out-and-out imperialist who has frank doubts
in his own mind as to whether it is axiomatic, after all, that the
form of government bequeathed us by our fathers is the best form of
government yet devised. But the conspiracy was really a sin against
the progress of the world, because it deceived the American people as
to the genuineness and unanimity of the desire of the Filipino people
to imitate the example set by us in 1776, which has since served as
a beacon-light of hope to so many people in so many lands in their
several struggles to be free.

By the spring of 1900, when General MacArthur relieved General Otis,
the volunteers of 1899 had gotten thoroughly warmed up to the work
of showing the Filipinos who was in fact "the boss of the show,"
and by June, 1900, when Judge Taft arrived, they had gotten still
warmer [307]; and in General Otis's successor they had a commander
who understood his men thoroughly, and was determined to carry out
honestly, with firmness, and without playing, as his predecessor had
done, the rôle of political henchman, the purpose for which the army
he commanded had been sent to the Islands to accomplish. In this
state of the case, the Taft Commission came out.

This would seem rather an odd point at which to terminate a chapter on
"MacArthur and the War," seeing that General MacArthur continued to
command the American forces in the Philippines and to direct their
strenuous field operations until July, 1901, more than a year later,
when he was relieved by General Chaffee, on whom thereafter devolved
the subsequent conduct of the war. But we must follow the inexorable
thread of chronological order, and so yield the centre of the stage
from June, 1900, on, to Mr. Taft, else the resultant net confusion of
ideas about the American occupation of the Philippines might remain
as great as that which this narrative is an attempt in some degree
to correct.

All through the official correspondence of 1899 and 1900 between the
Adjutant-General of the Army, General Corbin, and General Otis at
Manila, one sees Mr. McKinley's sensitiveness to public opinion. "In
view of the impatience of the people" you will do thus and so,
is a typical sample of this feature of that correspondence. [308]
Troubled, possibly, with misgivings, as to whether, after all, in view
of the vigorous and undeniably obstinate struggle for independence
the Filipinos were putting up, it would not have been wiser to have
done with them as we had done in the case of Cuba, and troubled,
beyond the peradventure of a doubt, about the effect of the possible
Philippine situation on the fortunes of his party and himself in the
approaching campaign for the presidency, Mr. McKinley sent Mr. Taft
out, in the spring preceding the election of 1900, to help General
MacArthur run the war. We must now, therefore, turn our attention to
Mr. Taft, not forgetting General MacArthur in so doing.






CHAPTER XIV

THE TAFT COMMISSION

                                    The papers 'id it 'andsome,
                                    But you bet the army knows.

                                        Kipling, Ballad of the Boer War.


The essentials of the situation which confronted the Taft Commission
on its arrival in the islands in June, 1900, and the mental attitude
in which they approached that situation, may now be briefly summarized,
with entire confidence that such summary will commend itself as fairly
accurate to the impartial judgment both of the historian of the future
and of any candid contemporary mind.

It is not necessary to "vex the dull ear" of a mighty people much
engrossed with their own affairs, by repetition of any further
details concerning the original de facto alliance between Admiral
Dewey and Aguinaldo. Suffice it to remind a people whose saving
grace is a love of fair play, that, after the battle of Manila Bay,
when Admiral Dewey brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Cavite,
both the Admiral and his Filipino allies were keenly cognizant of the
national purpose set forth in the declaration of war against Spain,
and that the Filipinos could not have been expected to make any
substantial distinction between the casual remarks of a victorious
admiral on the quarter-deck of his flagship in May, remarks concurrent
and consistent with actual treatment of the Filipinos as allies, and
the imperious commands of a general ashore in December thereafter,
acting under specific orders pursuant to the Treaty of Paris. The
one great fact of the situation, "as huge as high Olympus," they did
grasp, viz., that both were representatives of America on the ground
at the time of their respective utterances, and that one in December
in effect repudiated without a word of explanation what the other
had done from May to August. They had helped us to take the city of
Manila in August, and, to use the current phrase of the passing hour,
coined in this period of awakening of the national conscience to
a proper attitude toward double-dealing in general, they felt that
they had been "given the double cross." In other words they believed
that the American Government had been guilty of a duplicity rankly
Machiavellian. And that was the cause of the war.

We have seen in the chapters on "The Benevolent Assimilation
Proclamation" and "The Iloilo Fiasco" that, in the Philippines at
any rate, no matter how mellifluously pacific it may have sounded at
home--no matter how soothing to the troubled doubts of the national
conscience--the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation of December 21,
1898, was recognized both by the Eighth Army Corps and by Aguinaldo's
people as a call to arms--a signal to the former to get ready for the
work of "civilizing with a Krag"; a signal to the latter to gird up
their loins for the fight to the death for government of their people,
by their people, for their people; and that the yearning benevolence
of said proclamation was calculated strikingly to remind the Filipinos
of Spain's previous traditional yearnings for the welfare of Cuba,
indignantly cut short by us--yearnings "to spare the great island
from the danger of premature independence" [309] which that decadent
monarchy could not even help repeating in the swan-song wherein
she sued to President McKinley for peace. We did not realize the
absoluteness of the analogy then. It is all clear enough now. We can
now understand how and why Mr. McKinley's programme of Annexation and
Benevolent Assimilation of 1898-9, blindly earnest as was his belief
that it would make the Filipino people at once cheerfully forego the
"legitimate aspirations" to which we ourselves had originally given
a momentum so generous that nothing but bullets could then possibly
have stopped it, was in fact received by them in a manner compared
with which Canada's response in 1911 to Speaker Champ Clark's equally
benevolent suggestion of United States willingness to accord to Canada
also, gradual Benevolent Assimilation and Ultimate Annexation, was
one great sisterly sob of sheer joy as at the finding of a long lost
brother. From the arrival of the American troops on June 30, 1898,
until the outbreak of February 4, 1899, there had been two armies
camped not far from each other, one born of the idea of independence
and bent upon it, the other at first groping in the dark without
instructions, and finally instructed to deny independence. There
was never any faltering or evasion on the part of Aguinaldo and his
people. They knew what they wanted and said so on all occasions. At
all times and in all places they made it clear, by proclamation, by
letter, by conversation, and otherwise, that independence was the one
thing to which, whether they were fit for it or not, they had pledged
"their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor."

We have seen how easily the war itself could have been averted by the
Bacon Resolution of January, 1899, or some similar resolution frankly
declaring the purpose of our government; how here was Senator Bacon
at this end of the line pleading with his colleagues to be frank,
and to make a declaration in keeping with "the high purpose" for
which we had gone to war with Spain, instead of holding on to the
Philippines on the idea that they might prove a second Klondike,
while justifying such retention by arbitrarily assuming, without any
knowledge whatever on the subject, that the Filipinos were incapable
of self-government; how, there, at the other end of the line, at
Manila, Aguinaldo's Commissioners, familiar with our Constitution
and the history and traditions of our government, were making,
substantially, though in more diplomatic language, precisely the
same plea, and imploring General Otis's Commissioners to give them
some assurance which would quiet the apprehensions of their people,
and calm the fear that the original assurance, "We are going to lick
the Spaniards and set you free," was now about to be ignored because
the islands might be profitable to the United States.

We have seen the war itself, as far as it had progressed by June,
1900, one of the bitterest wars in history, punctuated by frequent
barbarities avenged in kind, and how, if the Taft Commission had
not come out with McKinley spectacles on, they would have seen the
picture of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile people, still
bent on fighting to the last ditch, not only animated by a feeling
against annexation by us similar to that the Canadians would have
to-day if we should also try the Benevolent Assimilation game on
them--first with proclamations breathing benevolence and then with
cannon belching grape-shot--but further animated by the instinctive
as well as inherited knowledge common to all colored peoples,
whether red, yellow brown, or black, that wheresoever white men
and colored live in the same country together, there the white man
will rule. Understand, this was before Judge Taft had had a chance to
assure them, with the kindly Taft smile and the hearty Taft hand-shake,
that their benevolent new masters were going to reverse the verdict
of the ages, and treat them with a fraternal love wholly free from
race prejudice. If Judge Taft could only have arrived in January,
1899, and told them that the Bacon Resolution really represented the
spirit of the attitude of the American people toward them, then the
finely commanding bearing of Mr. Taft, and the noble genuineness of
his desire to see peace on earth and goodwill toward men, might even
have prevented the war. But this is merely what might have been. What
actually was, when he did arrive, in June, 1900, was that the milk of
human kindness had long since been spilled, and his task was to gather
it up and put it back in the pail. When I, a Southern man who have
taken part in the only two wars this nation has had in my lifetime,
reflect that in this year of grace, 1912, Mr. Underwood's otherwise
matchless availability as the candidate of his party for President is
questioned on the idea that it might be a tactical blunder, because of
"the late war," which broke out before either Mr. Underwood or myself
were born, I cannot share the Taft optimism as to the rapidity with
which the scars of "the late war" in the Philippines will heal, and
as to the affectionate gratitude toward the United States with which
the McKinley-Taft programme of Benevolent Assimilation will presently
be regarded by the people of the Philippine Islands.

We have seen the futile efforts of the Schurman Commission of 1899,
sent out that spring, in deference to American public opinion,
with definite instructions to try and patch up a peace, by talking
to the leading spirits of a war for independence, now in full swing,
about the desirability of benevolent leading-strings. "They [meaning
the Schurman Commission] had come," says Mr. McKinley, in his annual
message to Congress of December 5, 1899, [310] "with the hope of
co-operating with Admiral Dewey and General Otis in establishing
peace and order." They came, they saw, they went, recognizing the
futility of the errand on which they had been sent. And now came the
Taft Commission a year later, on precisely the same errand, after the
Filipinos had sunk all their original petty differences and jealousies
in a very reasonable instinctive common fear of economic exploitation,
and a very unreasonable but, to them, very real common fear of race
elimination, amounting to terror, and been welded into absolute
oneness--if that were somewhat lacking before--in the fierce crucible
of sixteen months of bloody fighting against a foreign foe for the
independence of their common country. President McKinley's message to
Congress of December, 1899, is full of the old insufferable drivel,
so grossly, though unwittingly, ungenerous to our army then in the
field in the Philippines, about the triviality of the resistance
we were "up against." The message in one place blandly speaks of
"the peaceable and loyal majority who ask nothing better than to
accept our authority," in another of "the sinister ambitions of a
few selfish Filipinos." Thus was outlined, in the message announcing
the purpose to send out the Taft Commission, the view that no real
fundamental resistance existed in the islands. Basing contemplated
action on this sort of stuff, the presidential message outlines the
presidential purpose as follows--this in December, 1899, mind you:


    There is no reason why steps should not be taken from time to
    time to inaugurate governments essentially popular in their form
    as fast as territory is held and controlled by our troops.


Then follows the genesis of the idea which resulted in the Taft
Commission:


    To this end I am considering the advisability of the return
    [to the islands] of the commission [the Schurman Commission]
    or such of the members thereof as can be secured.


In Cuba, General Wood began the work of reconstruction at Havana with
a central government and the best men he could get hold of, and acted
through them, letting his plans and purposes percolate downward to
the masses of the people. Not so in the Philippines. Reconstruction
there was to begin by establishing municipal governments, to be
later followed by provincial governments, and finally by a central
one; in other words, by placing the waters of self-government at
the bottom of the social fabric among the most ignorant people,
and letting them percolate up, according to some mysterious law of
gravitation apparently deemed applicable to political physics. Of
course, these poor people simply always took their cue from their
leaders, knowing nothing themselves that could affect the success of
this project except that we were their enemies and that they might get
knocked in the head if they did not play the game. "I have believed,"
says Mr. McKinley, in his message to Congress of December, 1899,
"that reconstruction should not begin by the establishment of one
central civil government for all the islands, with its seat at Manila,
but rather that the work should be commenced by building up from the
bottom." Whereat, the young giant America bowed, in puzzled hope,
and worldly-wise old Europe smiled, in silent but amused contempt.

If at the time he formulated this scheme for their government
Mr. McKinley had known anything about the Philippines, or the
Filipinos, he would have known that what he so suavely called "building
from the bottom" was like trying to make water run up hill, i.e.,
like starting out to have ideas percolate upward, so that through "the
masses" the more intelligent people might be redeemed. The "nigger
in the woodpile" lay in the words "essentially popular in form." Of
course no government by us "essentially popular" was possible at the
time. But a government "popular in form" would sound well to the
American people, and, if they could be kept quiet until after the
presidential election of 1900, maybe the supposed misunderstanding
on the part of the Filipinos of the benevolence of our intentions
might be corrected by kindness. Accordingly, the following spring,
cotemporaneously with General Otis's final departure from Manila to
the United States, in which free country he might say the war was over
as much as he pleased without being molested with round-robins by Bob
Collins, O. K. Davis, John McCutcheon, and the rest of those banes of
his insular career, who so pestiferously insisted that the American
public ought to know the facts, the Taft Commission was sent out,
to "aid" General MacArthur, as the Schurman Commission had "aided"
General Otis. [311]

It would seem fairly beyond any reasonable doubt that the official
information the Taft Commission were given by President McKinley
concerning the state of public order they would find in the islands
on arrival was in keeping with the information solemnly imparted
to Congress by him in December thereafter, which was as follows:
"By the spring of this year (1900) the effective opposition of the
dissatisfied Tagals"--always the same minimization of the task of the
army as a sop to the American conscience--"was virtually ended." Then
follows a glowing picture of how the Filipinos are going to love us
after we rescue them from the hated Tagal, but with this circumspect
reservation: "He would be rash who, with the teachings of contemporary
history, would fix a limit" as to how long it will take to produce
such a state of affairs. Looking at that mighty panorama of events
from the dispassionate standpoint now possible, it seems to me that
Mr. McKinley's whole Philippine policy of 1899-1900 was animated by
the belief that the more the Philippine situation should resemble the
really identical Cuban one in the estimation of the American people,
the more likely his Philippine policy was to be repudiated at the
polls in the fall of 1900. The Taft Commission left Washington for
Manila in the spring of 1900, after their final conference with the
President who had appointed them and was a candidate for re-election in
the coming fall, as completely committed as circumstances can commit
any man or set of men to the programme of occupation which was to
follow the subjugation of the inhabitants, and to the proposition
of present incapacity for self-government, its corner-stone;
to say nothing of the embarrassment felt at Washington by reason
of having stumbled into a bloody war with people whom we honestly
wanted to help, had never seen, and had nothing but the kindliest
feelings for. While the serene and capacious intellect of William
H. Taft was still pursuing the even tenor of its way in the halls of
justice (as United States Circuit Judge for the 8th Circuit), the
Philippine programme was formulated at Washington. Judge Taft went
to Manila to make the best of a situation which he had not created,
to write the lines of the Deus ex machina for a Tragedy of Errors
up to that point composed wholly by others. It has been frequently
stated and generally believed that when Mr. McKinley sent for him and
proposed the Philippine mission, Judge Taft replied, substantially:
"Mr. President, I am not the man for the place. I don't want the
Philippines." To which Mr. McKinley is supposed to have replied:
"You are the man for the place, Judge. I had rather have a man out
there who doesn't want them." The point of the original story lay in
what Mr. McKinley said. The point of the repetition of it here lies
in what Mr. Taft said, the inference therefrom being that he did not
think the true interests of his country "wanted" them, and that had
he been called into President McKinley's council sooner he would have
so advised; an inference warranted by his subsequent admission that
"we blundered into colonization." [312]

It is utterly fatal to clear thinking on this great subject, which
concerns the liberties of a whole people, to treat Judge Taft's reports
as Commissioner to, and later Governor of, the Philippines as in the
nature of a judicial decision on the capacity of the Filipinos for
self-government. When he consented to go out there, he went, not to
review the findings of the Paris Peace Commission, but at the urgent
solicitation of an Administration whose fortunes were irrevocably
committed to those findings, including the express finding that they
were unfit for self-government, and the implied one that we must remain
to improve the condition of the inhabitants. He was thus not a judge
come out to decide on the fitness of the people for self-government,
but an advocate to make the best possible case for their unfitness, and
its corollary, the necessity to remain indefinitely, just as England
has remained in Egypt. The war itself convinced the whole army of the
United States that Aguinaldo would have been the "Boss of the Show"
had Dewey sailed away from Manila after sinking the Spanish fleet. The
war satisfied us all that Aguinaldo would have been a small edition
of Porfirio Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have-been
would have been, very decidedly, "a going concern," although Aguinaldo
probably would have been able to say with a degree of accuracy, as
Diaz might have said in Mexico for so many years, "The Republic? I
am the Republic." The war demonstrated to the army, to a Q. E. D.,
that the Filipinos are "capable of self-government," unless the kind
which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only
kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea
for all the ills of government among men without regard to their
temperament or historical antecedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos
can control the masses of the people in their several districts as
completely as a captain ever controlled a company. [313] While the
municipal officials of the McKinley-Taft municipal kindergarten were
stumbling along with the strange new town government system imported
from America, and atoning to their benignant masters for mistakes by
writing them letters about how benignant they--the teachers--were,
they--the pupils,--according to the contemporaneous description by the
commanding general of the United States forces in the islands, were
running a superbly efficient municipal system throughout the whole
archipelago, "simultaneously and in the same sphere as the American
governments, and in many instances through the same personnel,"
[314] in aid of the insurrection. General MacArthur humorously adds
that the town officials "acted openly in behalf of the Americans
and secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, with considerable
apparent solicitude for the interest of both." In short, the war
at once demonstrated their "capacity for self-government" and made
granting it to them for the time being unthinkable. For the war was
fought not on the issue of the capacity, but on the issue of the
granting. The Treaty of Paris settled the "capacity" part. The army
in 1898, 1899, and 1900 can hardly be said to have had any much more
decided opinion on the capacity branch of the subject, than Perry did
about the Japanese in 1854. The Paris Peace Commission having solemnly
decided the "capacity part" adversely to the Filipinos and the war
having followed, thereafter Mr. Taft went out to make out the best case
possible in support of the action of the Peace Commission and, ex vi
termini, in support of everything made necessary by the fact of the
purchase. Unless some one goes out to present to the American people
the other side of the case, they will never arrive at a just verdict.

Committed, a priori, to the task of squaring the McKinley
Administration with its course as to Cuba, the only course possible
for the Taft Commission was to set up a benevolent government based
upon the incompetency of the governed, which, being a standing affront
to the intelligence of the people, earns their hatred, however it may
crave their love. By the very bitterness of the opposition it permits
yet disregards, it binds itself ever more irrevocably to remain a
benevolent engenderer of malevolence. Government and governed thus get
wider apart as the years go by, and, the raison d'être of the former
being the mental deficiencies of the latter, it must, in self-defence,
assert those deficiencies the more offensively, the more vehemently
they are denied. What hope therefore can there be that the light
that shone upon Saul on the road to Damascus will ever break upon
the President? What hope that he will ever re-attune his ears to the
voice of the Declaration of Independence, calling down from where
the Signers (we hope without untoward exception) have gone, crying:
"William, William, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to
kick against the right of a people to pursue happiness in their own
way"? The difference between the President and the writer is that
both went out to scoff and the latter remained--much longer--to pray.

The Taft Commission arrived at Manila on June 3, 1900, loaded to the
guards with kindly belief in the stale falsehood wherewith General
Otis, ably assisted by his press censor, had been systematically
soothing Mr. McKinley's and the general American conscience during
the whole twenty months he had commanded the Eighth Army Corps, [315]
viz., that the insurrection was due solely to "the sinister ambitions
of a few selfish leaders," and did not represent the wishes of the
whole people. It is true that the insurrection originally started
under Admiral Dewey's auspices and under the initial protection of
his puissant guns was headed by a group of men most of whom, including
Aguinaldo, were Tagalos. But all Filipinos look alike, the whole seven
or eight millions of them. They differ from one another not one whit
more than one Japanese differs from another. And they all feel alike on
most things, [316] because they all have the same customs, tastes, and
habits of thought. Said Governor Taft to the Senate Committee in 1902:


    While it is true that there are a number of Christian "tribes,"
    so-called,--I do not know the number, possibly eight or ten, or
    twelve,--that speak different languages, there is a homogeneity
    in the people in appearance, in habits, and in many avenues of
    thought. To begin with, they are Catholics." [317]


Certainly this should forever crucify the stale slander, still
ignorantly repeated in the United States at intervals, which seeks
to make the American people think the great body of the Filipino
people are still in a tribal state, ethnologically. [318] A Tagalo
leader is about as much a "tribal" leader as is a Tammany "brave"
of Irish antecedents. In fact there is much in common between the
two. Both are clannish. Both have a genius for organization that
is simply superb. Both are irrepressible about Home Rule. Countless
generations ago the Filipinos were lifted by the Spanish priests out
of the tribal state, and the educated people all speak Spanish. But
the original tribal dialects, which the Spanish priests patiently
mastered and finally reduced for them to a written language, still
survive in the several localities of their origin. So that every
Filipino of a well-to-do family is brought up speaking two languages,
Spanish, and the local dialect of his native place, which is the only
language known to the poorer natives of the same neighborhood. Surely
even the valor of ignorance can see that we are presumptuously
seeking to reverse the order of God and nature in assuming that
an alien race can lead a people out of the wilderness better than
could a government by the leading men of their own race to whom the
less favored look with an ardent pride that would be a guarantee of
loyal and inspiring co-operation. You can beat a balking horse to
death but you cannot make him wag his tail, or otherwise indicate
contentment or a disposition to cordial co-operation which will
make for progress. Mr. Bryan has visited the Philippines, and his
evidence is simply cumulative of mine, as mine, based on six years'
acquaintance with the Filipinos, is simply cumulative of Admiral
Dewey's testimony of 1898, so often cited hereinbefore, and of the
opinion of Hon. George Curry, a Republican member of Congress from
New Mexico who served eight years in the Philippines, and believes
they can safely be given their independence by 1921. Mr. Bryan says:


    So far as their own internal affairs are concerned, they do not
    need to be subject to any alien government.


He further says:


    There is a wide difference, it is true, between the general
    intelligence of the educated Filipino and the laborer on
    the street and in the field, but this is not a barrier to
    self-government. Intelligence controls in every government,
    except where it is suppressed by military force. Nine tenths of
    the Japanese have no part in the law-making. In Mexico, the gap
    between the educated classes and the peons is fully as great as,
    if not greater than, the gap between the extremes of Filipino
    society. Those who question the capacity of the Filipinos for
    self-government forget that patriotism raises up persons fitted
    for the work that needs to be done." [319]


It is because I believe that in the Philippines we are doing ourselves
an injustice and keeping back the progress of the world by depreciating
and scoffing at the value of patriotism as a factor in self-government
and in the maintenance of free institutions, that I have written this
book. There is no more patriotic people in the world than the Filipino
people. I base this opinion upon an intimate knowledge of them, and
in the light of considerable observation throughout most of Europe,
and in Asia from the Golden Horn to the mouth of the Yang-tse. Woe
to the nonsense, sometimes ignorant, sometimes vicious, wherewith
we are regaled from time to time by Americans who go to Manila,
smoke a cigar or two in some American club there, and then come back
home and depreciate the Filipino people without at least correcting
Col. Roosevelt's wholly uninformed and cruel random assertions of
1900 about the Filipinos being a "jumble of savage tribes," and about
Aguinaldo being "the Osceola of the Filipinos," or their "Sitting
Bull!" It is wonderfully inspiring to turn from such stale slander to
Mr. Bryan's above statement of the case for our Oriental subjects,
a statement framed in his own infinitely sympathetic and inimitable
way, which says for me just what I had long wanted to express, but
could not, so well. And in the midst of the recurring slander that the
Filipino people are "a heterogeneous lot," it is refreshing to find in
a preface to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903, by the
Director thereof, a passage where, in comparing the tables of that
census with those of the Twelfth Census of the United States, he says:


   "Those of the Philippine Census are somewhat simpler, the
    differences being due mainly to the more homogeneous character
    of the population of the Philippine Islands." [320]


When we consider the above in the light of the past and present
operation of our own immigration laws, it is not flattering, but it
may and should tend to awaken some realization of the manifold nature
and blinding effects of current misapprehensions in the United States
concerning the inhabitants of the Philippines. One Filipino does not
differ from another any more than one American does from another
American--in fact they differ less, considering immigration. The
Filipino people are not rendered a heterogeneous lot by having three
different languages, Ilocano, Tagalo, and Visayan, [321] which are
respectively the languages spoken in the northern, the central,
and the southern part of their country, any more than the people
of Switzerland are rendered heterogeneous by the circumstance that
in northern Switzerland you find German spoken for the most part,
while farther south you find French, and near the southernmost
extremities some Italian. At this late date no credible person
acquainted with the facts will be so poor in spirit as to deny that
the motives of the men who originally started the insurrection were
patriotic. Nor will any one who served under General Otis's command
in the Philippines deny that that eminent desk soldier continued to
cling to his early theory that it was a purely Tagalo insurrection
long after the deadly unanimity of the opposition had seeped, with
all-pervading thoroughness, into the general mind of the army of
occupation. The white flag or rag of truce, alias treachery, used
to be hoisted to put us off our guard in pretence of welcome to our
columns approaching their towns and barrios. Such use of such a flag,
followed by treachery, the ultimate weapon of the weak, had been in
turn followed, with relentless impartiality in countless instances,
by due unloosening of the vials of American wrath, until every nipa
shack [322] in the Philippine Islands that remained unburned had
had its lesson, written in the blood of its occupants or their kin,
to the tune of the Krag-Jorgensen or the Gatling. Yet General Otis's
reports are always bland, and always convey the idea of an insurrection
exclusively Tagalo.

In the summer of 1900, the newly arrived civilians, the Taft
Commission, had no special interest in the soldiers who, for better,
for worse, were "doing their country's work," as Kipling calls his
own country's countless wars against its refractory subjects in the
far East; and no especial sympathy with that work. Two years later we
find President Roosevelt, in connection with the general amnesty of
July 4, 1902, congratulating his "bowld lads," as Mr. Dooley would
call them--meaning General Chaffee and the Eighth Army Corps--on a
total of "two thousand combats, great and small" up to that time,
but you never find in any of Governor Taft's Philippine state
papers any more affirmative recognition of continued resistance to
American rule than some mild allusion to "small but hard knocks"
being administered here and there by the army. From the beginning
there was a systematic belittling, on the part of the Taft Commission,
of the work of the army, incidentally to belittling the reality and
unanimity of the opposition which was daily calling it forth. [323]
This was not vicious. It was essentially benevolent. It was part of
the initial fermentation of their preconceived theory. But the trouble
about their theory was that it was only a theory. It would not square
with the facts. They were trying to square the subjugation of the
Philippines with the freeing of Cuba, a task quite as soluble as the
squaring of a circle. They hoped, with all the kindly benevolence
of Mr. McKinley himself, that the opposition to our rule was not
as great as some people seemed to think. They had come out to the
islands earnestly wishing to find conditions not as bad as they
had been asserted to be. And the wish became father to the thought
and the thought soon found expression in words--cablegrams to the
United States presenting an optimistic view as to the prospects of
necessity for further shedding of blood in the interest of Benevolent
Assimilation, alias Trade Expansion. Some flippant person will say,
"That is a polite way of charging insincerity." This book is not
addressed to flippant persons. It is a serious attempt to deal with
a problem involving the liberties of a whole people, and will be,
as far as the writer can make it, straightforward, dignified, and
candid. Judge Taft's fearful mistake of 1900-1901 in the matter of his
premature planting of the civil government--a mistake because based
on the idea that "the great majority of the people" welcomed American
rule, and a fearful mistake because fraught with so much subsequent
sacrifice of life due to too early withdrawal of the police protection
of the army--was not the first instance in American history where an
ordinarily level-headed public man has, with egregious folly, mistaken
the mood and temper of a whole people. The key to his mistake lay in
the fact that, coming into a strange country in the midst of a war,
he ignored the advice of the commanding general of the army of his
country concerning the military situation, and took the advice of a
few native Tories, or Copperheads, of wealth, who had never really
been in sympathy with the insurrection and who, flocking about him
as soon as he arrived, told him what he so longed to be told, viz.,
that the war did not represent the wishes of the people but was kept
up by "a conspiracy of assassination" of all who did not contribute
to it either in service or money. He thereupon decided that the men
who told him this really represented the voice of the people, and
that the men in the field who had then been keeping up the struggle
for independence for sixteen months, in season and out of season,
were simply "a Mafia on a very large scale." Consequently the Taft
Commission had been in the islands less than three months when
Secretary of War Root at Washington was giving the widest possible
publicity to cablegrams from them, such as that dated August 21,
1900, mentioned in the preceding chapter, conveying the glad tidings
that "large number of people long for peace and are willing to accept
government under United States" [324]; and by November next thereafter,
the "large number" had grown to "a great majority," and the "willing"
to "entirely willing." The November statement was:


    A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely
    willing to accept the establishment of a government under the
    supremacy of the United States. [325]


Yet, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the real situation in the
Philippines at this very time was described four years later at the
Republican National Convention of 1904 by Mr. Root thus:


    When the last national convention met, over 70,000 American
    soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still vigorous enemy
    in check.


Between the date of their arrival in the Islands on June 3d, and the
date of this August 21st telegram, the Taft Commission did little
junketing, but remained in Manila imbibing the welcome views of the
"Tories" or "Copperheads," and seeking very little information from
the army. But it so happens that the Adjutant-General at Manila used
to keep a record of the daily engagements during that period, which
record was later published in the annual War Department Report, [326]
and it shows a total of about five hundred killings (of Filipinos)
between June 3d, and August 21st, to say nothing of probably many times
that number hit but not killed, and therefore able to get away. (You
could not include any Filipino in your returns of your killings except
dead you had actually counted.) It also happens that on June 4th,
the day after Judge Taft's arrival, General MacArthur, in response to
an order from Washington sent some time previous at the instance of
Congress, had all the Filipino casualties our military records showed
up to that time (i. e., during the sixteen months from the day of the
outbreak, February 4, 1899, to June 3, 1900), tabulated and totalled,
and the total Filipino killed accordingly reported by cablegram to
the War Department on June 4, 1900, was 10,780. [327]

Ten thousand in sixteen months is 625 per month. So that by the
time Judge Taft arrived, the Filipinos had been sufficiently
beaten into submission to decrease the death-rate due to the
Independence Bug from something over six hundred per month to about
two hundred per month. Judge Taft called this enthusiasm. I call it
exhaustion. Whereupon, exclaims a Boston Anti-Imperialist, "Why don't
you issue Mr. Taft a certificate as a member of the Ananias Club at
once, and be done with it?" My answer is that I do not believe the
Taft Commission in 1900 either knew these figures or wanted to know
them. They came out preaching a Gospel of Hope to the exclusion of
all else, a species of mental healing. They said, soothingly to Dame
Filipina, "Be not afraid; you are well; you are well"--of the desire
for independence she had conceived, when what that lady needed was the
surgical operation indispensable for the removal of a still-born child.

The will of the American people is ascertainable, and quadrennially
announced, through certain prescribed methods. And (nearly)
everybody takes the result good-humoredly, God bless our country,
whatever the result. But just how Mr. Taft and his colleagues could
assume to speak for the "great majority" of the Filipino people at
the tremendous juncture in their destinies now under consideration
during the Presidential election of 1900, does not clearly appear,
except that in their first report they say:


    Many witnesses were examined as to the form of government best
    adapted to these islands and satisfactory to the people, [328]


a statement which obviously takes for granted the only point
involved in the war, viz., whether any kind of alien government
would be "satisfactory to the people." And in their various other
communications to Washington they describe themselves, with no small
degree of benevolent satisfaction, as enthusiastically received by
natives not under arms at the moment of such reception. As a matter of
fact, a carpet-bag governor of Georgia might just as well have reported
to Andrew Johnson an enthusiastic reception at the hands of the people
whose homes had lately been put to the torch, and their kith and kin to
the sword, while the whole fair face of nature from Atlanta to the sea
lay bruised and bleeding under the iron heel of Sherman's army. Let no
advocate of Indefinite Tutelage whet his scalping-knife for me because
of the use of that word "carpet-bag." It was as free from ill-will
as the explosion incident to flash-light photography. We are trying
to develop a picture of those times. Two at least of the Commission,
Messrs. Taft and Wright, were the kind of men who in all the personal
relations of life, meet the ultimate test of human confidence and
friendship--you would make either, if he would consent to act,
executor of your will, or testamentary guardian of your child. But
they came out with the preconceived notion that kindness would win
the people over, whereas what those people wanted was not foreign
kindness but home rule, not silken political swaddling clothes,
but freedom. And as the acquisition of the Philippines has placed
us under the necessity of getting up a new definition of freedom,
one consistent with tariff taxation without representation--through
legislation by a Congress on the other side of the world in which
"our new possessions" have no vote--it should be added that one of
the things Freedom meant with us before 1898, was freedom to frame
the laws--tariff and other--which largely determine the selling
price of crops and the purchase price of the necessities of life,
freedom to see the intelligent and educated men of your own race in
charge of your common destiny, freedom to have a flag as an emblem
of your common interests, in a word, just Freedom. And that was what
the war was about. They wanted to be free and independent. Whether
they were fit for such freedom is wholly foreign to the reality and
unanimity of their desire for it. General Otis used to be very fond
of taking the wind out of the sails of their commissioners and other
officials before the outbreak by saying that their people had not
the slightest notion of what the word independence meant. It is true
that they knew nothing about it by experience, but equally true that
whatever it was, they wanted it. Of the ten thousand men we had already
killed when Judge Taft arrived, there can be no question, as already
heretofore suggested, that many of them may have been hit just as
they were hurrahing for independence, in other words, died with the
word "Independence" on their lips. When men have been thus fighting
against overwhelming odds for some sixteen months for government of
their people by their people for their people--however inarticulate
the emotions of the rank and file on going into battle--it is idle
to claim that they do not know what they want, whether the great
majority of the rank and file can read and write or not. But pursuant
to the idea that kindness would cure the desire for independence,
Judge Taft ignored, in the outset, all advice from the military
department, because that was not the kindness department, accepting
as truly representative of the temper of the whole people the views
of a few ultra-conservatives of large means who had always been part
and parcel of the Spanish Administration.

On the other hand, General MacArthur and the whole Eighth Army Corps
had seen a great insurrection drag on from month to month and from one
year to another, under General Otis, when short shrift would have been
made of it in the outset, and far less life sacrificed, if Mr. McKinley
had not needed, in aid of his Philippine policy, the support of both
of those who believed it was right and of those who believed it would
pay. The one central thought which had seemed to animate General
Otis from the beginning, a thought which we have already traced
through all its humiliating manifestations, was that he must neither
do or permit anything that might hurt the Administration. When the
"impatience of the people" at home, which figures so prominently in
the correspondence already cited between the Adjutant General of the
army, General Corbin, and General Otis at Manila, had begun to cast its
shadows on the presidential year, 1900, the master mind of Mr. Root had
interrupted the fatal Otis treatment of the insurrection, indicated by
General Otis's long failure to call for volunteers, his stupid stream
of "situation well in hand" and "insurrection about to collapse"
telegrams, and his utterly unpardonable persistence in calling it a
purely "Tagalo insurrection," by sending him a competent force, and
a plan of campaign, and directing him to carry out the plan. General
Otis did this, because he was told to, and then began again to sing
the same old song. MacArthur, Wheaton, Lawton, Bates, Young, Funston,
and the rest of the fighting generals, had submitted to all the Otis
follies without a murmur, because insubordination degrades an army
into a rabble. But they [329] believed the army was there to put down
that insurrection, not to have a symposium with its leaders on the
rights of man. They had taken up "The White Man's Burden," after the
manner of Lords Kitchener and Roberts, and they had no qualms. Above
all, they wanted peace, no matter how much fighting it took to get
it. Mindful of the attempts of the Schurman Commission of the year
before to mix peace with war, and of the immense encouragement thus
given the insurgents, they had not looked forward with enthusiasm to
the coming of the Taft Commission, and to the highly probable renewal
of negotiations with the insurgent leaders in the field, pursuant to
a presidential policy of patching up a peace at any price, suggested
by the exigencies of political expediency, to give the government a
semblance of having more or less of the consent of the governed. That
the anticipations of the military authorities in this regard did not
receive a pleasant disappointment, has already been suggested by the
nature of the views adopted by the commission soon after its arrival.

The military view of the situation, as it stood when Judge Taft and his
colleagues arrived at Manila in June, 1900, is set forth in the annual
report of the commanding general, General MacArthur, rendered shortly
thereafter; rendered, not in aid of any political candidate at home,
nor of a sudden, but at the usual and customary annual season for the
making of such reports; and rendered by a soldier of no mean experience
and ability, who was a man of great kindliness of heart as well, to
the war department of his government, to acquaint it with the facts
of a military situation he had been dealing with for two years prior
to the arrival of the Taft Commission. General MacArthur's views,
as expressed in his report, must now be contrasted with the Taft
view, not to show that MacArthur is a bigger man than Taft, nor for
any other idle or petty purpose, but because, if, in 1900, General
MacArthur was right, and Judge Taft was wrong, about the unanimity
of the whole Filipino people against us, then the institution of the
Civil Government of the Philippines on July 4, 1901, was premature;
and, therefore, by reason of the withdrawal of the strong arm of the
military at a critical period of public order, it was not calculated
to give adequate protection to the lives and property of those who
were willing to abandon the struggle for independence and submit
to our rule. And if, as we shall see later, it did in fact grossly
fail to afford such adequate protection for life and property, it was
derelict in the most sacred duty enjoined upon it by Mr. McKinley's
instructions to the Taft Commission. But first let me introduce you
to General MacArthur.

General MacArthur is not only a soldier of a high order of
ability, but a statesman as well. Moreover, he was a thoroughgoing
"expansionist." He believed in keeping the Philippines permanently,
just as England does her colonies. But he was perfectly honest about
it. He recognized the fact that they were against our rule. But
he did not attach any more weight to that circumstance than Lord
Kitchener would have done. Also, he had come out to the islands with
the first expedition, in 1898, had been in the field continuously
for fifteen months prior to assuming supreme military command, and
knew the Filipinos thoroughly. As soon as he took command, on May 5,
1900, of the 70,000 troops then in the Islands, he set himself with
patience and firmness to the great task of ending the insurrection,
which at that time promised to continue indefinitely, the far more
formidable guerrilla warfare that had followed the brief period of
serried resistance having now settled down to a chronic stage, aided
and abetted by the whole population. I have said General MacArthur was
a "thoroughgoing" expansionist. This needs a slight qualification. At
first he appears to have had a few qualms. Shortly after the outbreak
of the war with the Filipinos, when he took the first insurgent capital
Malolos, in March, 1899, he had said at Malolos, as we have seen,
to a newspaper man who accompanied the expedition:


    When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that
    Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not believe
    that the whole population of Luzon was opposed to us; but I have
    been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipinos are
    loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he represents. [330]


General MacArthur's reports concerning the war in the Philippines
during the period of his command are succinct and luminous. He
makes it perfectly clear that the original resistance offered by the
insurgent armies in the field after the arrival of the overwhelmingly
ample reinforcements sent out from this country in the fall of 1899,
was little more than a mere flash in the pan, compared with the
well-planned scheme of resistance which followed the dispersion of
those armies to the several provinces which had furnished them to
the cause, and Aguinaldo's simultaneous flight into the mountains
"with his government concealed about his person," as Senator Lodge
exultantly described that incident in his speech of April, 1900,
in defence of the Administration's Philippine policy. Speaking of
this period, General MacArthur says:


    It has since been ascertained that the expediency of adopting
    guerrilla warfare from the inception of hostilities was seriously
    discussed by the native leaders, and advocated with much emphasis
    as the system best adapted to the peculiar conditions of the
    struggle. It was finally determined, however, that a concentrated
    field army, conducting regular operations, would, in the event
    of success, attract the favorable attention of the world, and be
    accepted as a practical demonstration of capacity for organization
    and self-government. The disbandment of the field army, therefore,
    having been a subject of contemplation from the start, the actual
    event, in pursuance of the deliberate action of the council of
    war in Bayambang about November 12, 1899 (already hereinbefore
    noticed), was not regarded by Filipinos in the light of a calamity,
    but simply as a transition from one form of action to another;
    a change which by many was regarded as a positive advantage,
    and was relied upon to accomplish more effectively the end in
    view. The Filipino idea behind the dissolution of their field
    army was not at the time of the occurrence well understood in
    the American camp. As a consequence, misleading conclusions
    were reached to the effect that the insurrection itself had been
    destroyed, and that it only remained to sweep up the fag ends of
    the rebel army by a system of police administration not likely
    to be either onerous or dangerous. [331]


In his report covering the period from May 5th, to October 1, 1900,
General MacArthur says of the policy of resistance above outlined:


    The country affords great advantages for the practical
    development of such a policy. The practice of discarding the
    uniform enables the insurgents to appear and disappear almost at
    their convenience. At one time they are in the ranks as soldiers,
    and immediately thereafter are within the American lines in
    the attitude of peaceful natives, absorbed in a dense mass of
    sympathetic people. [332]


In this same connection the report includes a copy of the original
order of the insurgent government which was the corner stone of the
guerrilla policy, and states that "systemized regulations" for its
effective prosecution throughout the archipelago had been compiled
and published by the Filipino junta, or revolutionary committee at
Madrid, and distributed among the insurgent forces. The report also
appends a copy of the "Army Regulations" under which the insurgent
forces were to conduct the guerrilla warfare. It also describes in
detail the system of warfare prescribed under these regulations, and
states that as a result of the measures which he, General MacArthur,
took to combat that warfare "the 53 stations of American troops
occupied in the archipelago on November 1, 1899, had on September 1,
1900, expanded to 413," and that during this period, the casualties
to our troops were 268 killed, 750 wounded, 55 captured, and to the
insurgents, so far as our records showed, 3227 killed, 694 wounded,
and 2864 captured. Says he:


    The extensive distribution of troops has strained the soldiers
    of the army to the full limit of endurance. Each little command
    has had to provide its own service of security and information
    by never ceasing patrols, explorations, escorts, outposts, and
    regular guards. An idea seems to have been established in the
    public mind [he meant the public mind at home, of course] that the
    field work of the army is in the nature of police, in regulating a
    few bands of guerrillas, and involving none of the vicissitudes of
    war. [Here he is meeting the Otis theory, then being industriously
    circulated in the United States.] Such a narrow statement of the
    case is unfair to the service. In all things requiring endurance,
    fortitude, and patient diligence, the guerrilla period has been
    pre-eminent. It is difficult for the non-professional observer
    [he means Judge Taft] to understand that apparently desultory
    work, such as has prevailed in the Philippines during the past
    ten months, [333] has demanded more of discipline and as much
    of valor as was required during the period of regular operations
    against the concentrated field forces of the insurrection. It is,
    therefore, a great privilege to speak warmly in respect of the
    importance of the service rendered day by day, with unremitting
    vigilance, by the splendid men who," etc. [334]


It was not until July 4, 1902, that President Roosevelt officially
declared, by his amnesty proclamation of that date that the
insurrection in the Philippines was at last ended. It was by no
means beaten to a frazzle, as we shall later see. But of course,
knowing the impatience of a large portion of the American people with a
situation about which there was a wide-spread notion that much remained
undisclosed, Mr. Roosevelt would have issued such a proclamation
earlier, had the facts seemed to him to so authorize. General
MacArthur's relentless "never ceasing patrols, explorations," etc.,
continued straight on through the presidential campaign of 1900 side
by side in point of time with the roseate Taft cablegrams of the same
period, and long thereafter--how long will be later indicated. Says
General MacArthur, in his report for 1901:


    It had been suggested that some of the Filipino leaders were
    willing to submit the issue to the judgment of the American people,
    which was soon to be expressed at the polls, and to abide by
    the result of the presidential election of November, 1900. [335]
    But subsequent events demonstrated that the hope of ending the
    war without further effusion of blood was not well founded,
    and that as a matter of fact the Filipinos were organizing for
    further desperate resistance by means of a general banding of
    the people in support of the guerrillas in the field. [336]


General MacArthur then goes on to tell how, as part of this programme,
the insurgent authorities,


    announced a primal and inflexible principle, to the effect that
    every native, without any exception, residing within the limits
    of the archipelago, owed active allegiance to the insurgent
    cause. This jurisdiction was enjoined under severe penalties,
    which were systematically enforced.


This is what Judge Taft afterwards described as "a conspiracy of
murder, a Mafia on a very large scale", [337] the characterization
being made in support of his theory that "the great majority of the
people" with whom we were then at war would welcome our rule if allowed
to follow their real preferences, and that they were being cruelly
coerced to fight for the independence of their country. General
MacArthur's view, however, did not support this theory. His report
deals with this branch of the subject thus:


    The cohesion of Filipino society in behalf of insurgent
    interests is most emphatically illustrated by the fact that
    assassination, which was extensively employed, was generally
    accepted as a legitimate expression of insurgent governmental
    authority. The individuals marked for death would not appeal to
    American protection, although condemned exclusively on account
    of supposed pro-Americanism.


Later on, when we came to understand the Filipinos better, this
summary method of dealing with the faint-hearted lost much of its
initial horrifying force, and the failure of such to appeal to us for
protection lost much of its strangeness. In the first place, nobody
loves a traitor. Even those to whom he claims to have betrayed his
countrymen do not trust him implicitly. Again, Latin countries never
assume that before a man is punished for alleged crime he has been
confronted with the witnesses against him. Such testimony is, under
their jurisprudence, frequently received in his absence. The legal
department of General MacArthur's office once got hold of a captured
insurgent paper subscribed with the autograph of Juan Cailles, one
of their best generals. It directed that a named Filipino residing
in a certain town garrisoned by American troops be executed--we
of course, would call it "assassinated"--at a certain hour on a
certain day in a public street of the town, and that the soldier or
soldiers performing the "execution" should declare to the bystanders,
if any, in so doing, that it was done because the man was a traitor,
a friend of the Americans. We kept this paper, intending to hang Juan
whenever he should be captured. He held out a long time, and finally
surrendered unconditionally--but he proved such an elegant fellow,
game as a pebble, courteous as Chesterfield, and immensely popular
with his people, that it was decided he could be of more service
as a live governor of a province than he could as a dead general,
[338] so he was appointed a provincial governor by Governor Taft,
and made a splendid official.

Another reason why Filipinos suspected, during the insurrection, by
the more obstinate and stout-hearted of their compatriots who held
out longer in the struggle for independence, of weakening toward the
cause of their country, in other words, suspected of what might be
called "Copperhead" or "Tory" tendencies, would not appeal to us for
protection, is strikingly presented in General MacArthur's report for
1901. He says they naturally had "grave doubt as to the wisdom" of
siding with us, "as the United States had made no formal announcement
of an inflexible purpose to hold the archipelago and afford protection
to pro-Americans." [339]

The one great thing that has crippled progress in the Philippines
from the beginning of the American occupation down to date is the
uncertainty as to what our policy for the future is to be, the lack of
some, "formal announcement of an inflexible purpose." And of course
I mean, as General MacArthur meant, by "formal" announcement, an
authoritative declaration by the law-making power of the government. If
Congress should formally declare that it is the purpose of this
government to hold the Philippines permanently, American and other
capital would at once go there in abundance and the place would
"blossom like a rose." If, on the other hand, Congress should formally
declare that it is the purpose of this government to give the Filipinos
their independence as soon as a stable native government can be set up,
thus holding out to the present generation the prospect of living to
see the independence of their country, the place would also quickly
blossom as aforesaid, through the generous ardor of native love of
country. In either event, everybody out there would know where he is
"at." At present all is uncertainty, both with the resident members
of the dominant alien race, and with those over whom we are ruling.

It took over 120,000 American troops, first and last, to put down
the struggle of the Filipinos for independence. [340] The war began
February 4, 1899, and the last public official announcement that it
was ended was on July 4, 1902. [341] Of course this does not imply
that every province was at all times during that period a theatre
of actual war. Putting down the insurrection was something like
putting out a fire in a field of dry grass. At first the trouble was
general. Gradually it diminished toward the end. But for a while,
no sooner was it quenched in one province than it would break out
in another. How the Filipinos were able to prolong the struggle
as long as they did against such apparently overwhelming odds is
most interestingly explained by General MacArthur in his report
for 1900. After describing the method he followed of establishing
native municipal governments in territory as conquered, he says,
with a patient stateliness that is almost humorous:


    The institution of municipal government under American auspices,
    of course, carried the idea of exclusive fidelity to the sovereign
    power of the United States. All the necessary moral obligations
    to that end were readily assumed by municipal bodies, and all
    outward forms of loyalty and decorum carefully preserved. But
    precisely at this point the psychologic conditions referred to
    above [meaning the unity against us], [342] began to work with
    great energy, in assistance of insurgent field operations. For this
    purpose most of the towns secretly organized complete insurgent
    municipal governments, to proceed simultaneously and in the
    same sphere as the American governments and in many instances
    through the same personnel--that is to say, the presidentes
    and town officials acted openly in behalf of the Americans and
    secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, paradoxical as it may
    seem, with considerable apparent solicitude for the interests
    of both. In all matters touching the peace of the town, the
    regulation of markets, the primitive work possible on roads,
    streets, and bridges, and the institution of schools, their open
    activity was commendable; at the same time they were exacting and
    collecting contributions and supplies and recruiting men for the
    Filipino forces, and sending all obtainable military information
    to the Filipino leaders. Wherever, throughout the archipelago,
    there is a group of the insurgent army, it is a fact beyond
    dispute, that all contiguous towns contribute to the maintenance
    thereof. In other words, the towns, regardless of the fact of
    American occupation and town organization, are the actual bases
    for all insurgent military activities; and not only so in the
    sense of furnishing supplies for the so-called flying columns of
    guerrillas, but as affording secure places of refuge. Indeed, it
    is now the most important maxim of Filipino tactics to disband
    when closely pressed and seek safety in the nearest barrio;
    a manoeuvre quickly accomplished by reason of the assistance
    of the people and the ease with which the Filipino soldier is
    transformed into the appearance of a peaceful native. [343]


To contrast a cold, hard military fact involving the lives of American
soldiers with a lot of political nonsense intended for consumption in
the United States during a presidential election, the next paragraph is
particularly interesting in the light of the cotemporaneous Taft view:
[344]


    The success of this unique system of war depends upon almost
    complete unity of action of the entire native population. That such
    unity is a fact is too obvious to admit of discussion. Intimidation
    has undoubtedly accomplished much to this end, but fear as the
    only motive is hardly sufficient to account for the united and
    apparently spontaneous action of several millions of people. [345]
    One traitor in each town would effectually destroy such a complex
    organization.


Then follows this bit of grim humor:


    It is more probable that the adhesive principle comes from
    ethnological homogeneity which induces men to respond for a time
    to the appeals of consanguineous leadership--


in other words, to stick to their own kith and kin. He had in a
previous paragraph used that very expression thus: "The people seem to
be actuated by the idea that in politics or war men are never nearer
right then when going with their own kith and kin."

In all the foregoing, General MacArthur was not simply trying to score
a point against Judge Taft, though his resentment of the effort of the
Taft Commission of 1900 to mix politics with war in the presidential
year was quite as decided, and quite as well known in the islands at
the time, as was General Otis's similar attitude toward the Schurman
Commission of the previous year. [346] He is simply laying before
the War Department, as a soldier, the familiar facts of a situation
which he had been dealing with for two years past, as well known to
the 70,000 officers and men under his command as to himself. And as
the details into which he goes are simply prefatory to an account of
the remedy he applied to the situation, that remedy must now claim
our attention. The remedy General MacArthur finally applied was
a proclamation, explaining to the Filipino people--"to all classes
throughout the archipelago," it read, and especially to the leaders in
the field, many of whose captured comrades-in-arms he had now become
thoroughly acquainted with--the severities sanctioned by the laws of
civilized nations under such circumstances, and the reasons therefor;
and, further, serving them with notice that thenceforward he proposed
to enforce those laws with full rigor. [347]

The eminent lawyers of the Taft Commission were too busy about that
time acquainting themselves with the situation through natives not in
arms, to attach much importance to General MacArthur's proclamation,
but the Eighth Army Corps always believed that that proclamation,
and the army's work under it, was the main factor in making the
civil government at all possible by the date it was set up, July 4,
1901. The issuance of this document was not only a wise military move,
but a subtle stroke of statesmanship as well. It assumed that the
Filipino people were a civilized people, an assumption never indulged
by Spain during the whole of her rule, but always freely admitted by
General MacArthur in all his dealings with their leading men to be a
fact. It therefore appealed to their amour propre, and to the noblesse
oblige of many of the most obstinate and trusted fighting leaders. The
writer was, at the date of the proclamation under consideration,
on duty at General MacArthur's headquarters, as assistant to Colonel
Crowder, his judge advocate, now Judge Advocate General of the United
States Army, and prepared the first rough, tentative suggestions
for the final draft of it, accompanying such suggestions with a
memorandum showing the course taken by Wellington in France in 1815,
and by Bismarck's generals at the close of the Franco-Prussian War,
as well as that followed under General Order No. 100, 1863, for the
government of the armies of the United States in the field. Having then
entertained the opinion that that proclamation, though drastic, was
wise and right under the facts of the situation which confronted us,
and having nowise changed that opinion since, it may be well for the
writer of this book to explain his reasons for that opinion. This must
be done wholly without reference to "the authorities," for neither at
the bar of public opinion, nor at the bar of final judgment, do "the
authorities" count for much. In so doing, however, we must start with
the assumption that it was a case of American military occupation of
hostile territory, notwithstanding that Judge Taft began soon after
his arrival in the islands in the June previous to the December now
referred to, to cable home impressions which, if correct, amounted
to a denial that the great body of the people were hostile. Military
occupation is a fact which admits of no debate, and the necessity
of making your country's flag respected is always fully and keenly
recognized as the one supreme consideration by every good American
except one who, obsessed with the idea that kindness will cure the
desire of a people for independence, proceeds to act on that idea in
the midst of a war for independence.

Under the laws of war the commanding general of the occupying force
owes protection, both of life and property, to all persons residing
within the territory occupied. The object of General MacArthur's
proclamation was to put a stop to such "executions," or assassinations,
as that perpetrated by Juan Cailles, mentioned above, and to separate
the insurgents in the field from their main reliance, the towns. The
latter end of a bloody war is no time for a discussion of the causes
of the war between victor and vanquished. Nor is it any time to
believe the representative of the enemy who tells you that most of
him is really in sympathy with you and merely coerced. Your duty is to
stop the war. You and your enemy having had a difference, and having
referred it to the arbitrament of war, which is, unfortunately, at
present the only human jurisdiction having power to enforce decisions
concerning such differences, if you win, and your enemy refuses to
abide the decision, he is simply, as it were in contempt of court, and,
in the scheme of things, as at present ordered, deserves punishment
as an enemy to the general peace. To state the ethics of the matter
juridically, "there should be an end of litigation"--somewhere.

I do not believe in the doctrine that might makes right, and I cherish
the high hope that this human family of ours will survive to see war
superseded, as the ultimate arbiter, by something more like heaven and
less like hell. But in the Philippines in 1900 it was a situation,
not a theory, that confronted us, and, as far as my consciously
fallible thinking apparatus lights the way which then lay before us,
that way led to a shrine whereon was written "A life for a life." This
is no mere academic discussion. With me it is a tremendously practical
one. In the gravest possible acceptation of the term it is awe-fully
so. If I am wrong, every execution I approved by memorandum review
furnished Colonel Crowder and General MacArthur, of military commission
findings out there was wrong, and so were a number of the executions I
ordered as a judge appointed by Governor Taft under a government which,
though nominally a civil government, was no more "civil" in so far as
that term implies absence of necessity for the presence of military
force, than other governments immediately following conquest usually
are. The propriety of the imposition of capital punishment by the
constituted authorities of a nation as part of a set policy to make its
sovereignty respected, is wholly independent of whether you call your
colonial government a civil or a military one. So that in justifying
General MacArthur I am also justifying Governor Taft, and as it was
on the recommendation of the former that the latter appointed me to
the Bench, we are certainly all three in the same boat in the matter
of the capital punishments under consideration. And while the company
you were in on earth in a given transaction, however distinguished
that company, is not going to help you with the Recording Angel,
[348] still, it is some comfort to know that wiser and abler men than
yourself approved a course of imposing capital punishments to which
you were a party, such punishments having been inflicted as part of a
policy whose subsequent evolution revealed it to you as fundamentally
wrong. And this reflection is quite relevant in the present connection
to the question whether the government of Benevolent Assimilation we
have maintained over the Filipinos for the last fourteen years is one
which was originally imposed by force against their will, or whether
it was ever welcomed by them or any considerable fraction of them.

That the MacArthur proclamation of December 20, 1900, concerning the
laws of war, was at the time a military necessity, is as perfectly
clear to me now as it was then. And yet it may well give the thoughtful
and patriotic American pause. It is sometimes difficult to understand
why men are so often entirely willing to go on fighting and dying in
a cause they must know to be hopeless. The famous passage of Edmund
Burke's speech on "Conciliation with America,"


    If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, so long as foreign
    troops remained on my native soil, I never would lay down my arms,
    no, never, never, never!


sounds well to us, but from the standpoint of a conqueror, there is
a good deal of wind-jamming to it, after all. It was the language of
a man who knew nothing of the horrors of war by actual experience,
or of what hell it slowly becomes to everybody concerned after most
of the high officials of the vanquished government have been captured
and are sleeping on dry, warm beds, eating good wholesome food, and
smoking good cigars, in comfortable custody, while the vanquished
army, no longer strong enough to come out in the open and fight, is
relegated to ambuscades and other tactics equally akin to the methods
of the assassin. The law of nations in this regard is an expression
of the views of successive generations of civilized and enlightened
men of all nations whose profession was war--men familiar with the
horrors inevitably incident to it and anxious to mitigate them as far
as possible. That law represents the common consensus of Christendom
resulting from that experience. It recognizes that after resistance
becomes utterly hopeless, it becomes a crime against society and
the general peace, and this is wholly independent of the merits
or demerits of the questions involved in the war. In other words,
the greatest good of the greatest number cries aloud that the war
must stop. The cold, hard fact is that the great majority of the men
who hold out longest are, usually, either single men having no one
dependent on them, or nothing to lose, or both, or else they are men
more or less indifferent to the ties of family affection, and callous
to the suffering fruitlessly entailed upon innocent noncombatants
by the various and sundry horrors of war, such as decimation of
the plough animals of the country due to their running at large
without caretakers or forage; resultant untilled fields and scant
food; pestilence and famine consequent upon insufficient nourishment;
arson, robbery, rape, and murder inevitably committed in such times
by sorry scamps and ruffians claiming to be patriots but yielding no
allegiance to any responsible head; and so on, ad infinitum.

General MacArthur's proclamation of December 20, 1900, served
notice on the leaders of a hopeless cause that assassinations, such
as that ordered by Juan Cailles, above mentioned, must stop; that
the universal practice of the townfolk, of sending money, supplies,
and information concerning our movements to the enemy in the field,
must stop; that participating in hostilities intermittently, in
citizen garb, followed by return to home and avocation when too
hard pressed, must stop; in short that the war must stop. Yet the
proclamation explained in so firm and kindly a way why the penalties
it promised were only reasonable under the circumstances, that "as an
educational document the effect was immediate and far-reaching," [349]
to quote from an opinion expressed by its author in the body of it,
an opinion entirely consistent with modesty and fully justified by
the facts. General MacArthur also goes on to say of his unrelenting
and rigid enforcement of the terms of this proclamation that the
results "preclude all possibility of doubt * * * that the effective
pacification of the archipelago commenced December 20, 1900"--its
date. It is a part of the history of those times, familiar to all who
are familiar with them, that the Taft Civil Commission thought its
assurances of the benevolent intentions of our government were what
made the civil government possible by midsummer, 1901. But whatever
the Filipinos may think of us at present, now that they understand us
better, certainly in 1900-01, in view of the events of the preceding
two or three years, which formed the basis of the only acquaintance
they then had with us, and in view of the fact that their experience
for the preceding two or three hundred years had made force the only
effective governmental argument with them, and governmental promises a
mere mockery, and in view of the fact that the "never-ceasing patrols,
explorations, escorts, outposts," etc., of General MacArthur's 70,000
men were relentlessly kept up during the six months immediately
following the proclamation and in aid of it, it at once becomes
obvious how infinitesimal a fraction of the final partial pacification
which made the civil government possible, the Taft assurances to the
Filipinos as to our intentions must have been. These matters are of
prime importance to any honest effort toward a clear understanding of
present conditions, because far and away the greatest wrong which we,
in our genuinely benevolent misinformation, have done the Filipinos,
not even excepting the tariff legislation perpetrated upon them by
Congress, lies in the insufferably hypocritical pretence that they
ever consented to our rule, or that they consent to it now--a pretence
conceived in 1898 by Trade Expansion, to beguile a nation the breath of
whose own life is political liberty based on consent of the governed,
into a career of conquest, but not even countenanced since by those
who believe the Government should go into the politico-missionary
business, after the manner of Spain in the sixteenth century.

Having now exhaustively examined the differences of opinion between
Judge Taft and General MacArthur, when the former set to work,
in the summer of 1900, to get a civil government started by the
date of expiration of the term of enlistment of the volunteer army
(June 30, 1901), let us follow the facts of the situation up to the
date last named, or, which is practically the same thing, up to the
inauguration of Judge Taft as Civil Governor of the islands on July 4,
1901, pausing, in passing, for such reflections as may force themselves
upon us as pertinent to the Philippine problem of to-day.

On September 19, 1900, General MacArthur wired Secretary of War
Root--General Corbin, the Adjutant-General of the Army, to be exact,
but it is the same thing--describing what he calls "considerable
activity" throughout Luzon, ominously stating that General Young (up
in the Ilocano country, into which we followed him and his cavalry
in Chapter XII, ante) "has called so emphatically for more force,"
that he, MacArthur, feels grave concern; adding that Luzon north of
the Pasig is "very much disturbed," and that south of the Pasig the
same conditions prevail. [350]

October 26th, General MacArthur cables outlining a plan for a great
campaign on comprehensive lines, stating that "Full development of this
scheme requires about four months and all troops now in the islands,"
and deprecating any move on Mr. Root's part to reduce his force of
70,000 men by starting any of the volunteers homeward before it should
be absolutely necessary. [351] October 28th, General MacArthur wires,
"Shall push everything with great vigor," adding "Expect to have
everything in full operation November 15th." [352] November 5th, as
if to reassure General MacArthur that he and the General understand
each other and that the Taft cotemporaneous nonsense is not going to
be allowed to interfere with more serious business, Secretary Root,
through the Adjutant-General, sends this cable message:


    Secretary of War directs no instructions from here be allowed
    interfere or impede progress your military operations which he
    expects you force to successful conclusion. [353]


So that while the American people were being pacified with the Taft
cablegrams to Secretary Root that the Filipino people wanted peace,
General MacArthur, under Mr. Root's direction, was simultaneously
proceeding to make them want it with the customary argument used
to settle irreconcilable differences between nations--powder and
lead. Mr. Root was all the time in constant communication with both,
but he gave out only the Taft optimism to the public, and withheld the
actual facts within his knowledge. December 25th, General MacArthur
wires Secretary Root, "Expectations based on result of election have
not been realized." "Progress," he says, is "very slow." [354]

And now I come to one of the most important things that all my
researches into the official records of our government concerning
the Philippine Islands have developed. On December 28, 1900, General
MacArthur reports by cable the contents of some important insurgent
papers captured in Cavite Province about that time. The Filipinos have
a great way of reducing to writing, or making minutes of, whatever
occurs at any important conference. This habit they did not abandon
in the field. The papers in question belonged to General Trias, the
Lieutenant-General commanding all the insurgent armies in the field,
and, next to Aguinaldo, the highest official connected with the
revolutionary government. One of these papers, according to General
MacArthur's despatch of December 28th, purported to be the minutes of
a certain meeting had October 11th previous, between General Trias
and the Japanese Consul at Manila. As to whether or not the paper
was really authentic, General MacArthur says: "I accept it as such
without hesitation." Communicating the contents of the paper he says:


    Consul advised that Trias visit Japan. Filipinos represented that
    concessions which they might be forced to make to Washington would
    be more agreeable if made to Japan, which as a nation of kindred
    blood would not be likely to assert superiority. Consul said Japan
    desired coaling station, freedom to trade and build railways. [355]


I consider these negotiations of the Japanese Government with the
Philippine insurgents important to be related here because they have
never been generally known, for the good reason, of course, that
the President of the United States cannot take the public into his
confidence about such grave and delicate matters when they occur. The
incident is not "ancient history" relatively to present-day problems,
for the following reasons:

(1) Because it is credibly reported and currently believed in the
United States that in Japan, during the cruise of our battleship
fleet around the world in 1907, one of the reception committee of
Japanese officers who welcomed our officers was recognized by one of
the latter as having been, not a great while before that, a servant
aboard an American battleship.

(2) Because of the following incident, related to me, in 1911,
without the slightest injunction of secrecy, by the Director of
Public Health of the Philippine Islands, then on a visit to the United
States. Shortly before the Director's said visit home, while he was out
in one of the provinces, there was brought to his attention a Filipino
with a broken arm. There was a Japanese doctor in the town, at least
a Japanese who had a sign out as a doctor. The Director carried the
sufferer to the "doctor," not being a surgeon himself. The "doctor"
turned out to be a civil engineer, who had been making maps and plans
of fortifications. The plans were found in his possession.

(3) Because from one of the islands through which the northern line of
the Treaty of Paris runs, situated only a pleasant morning's journey
in a launch due north of Aparri, the northernmost town of Luzon, you
can see, on a clear day, with a good field-glass, the southern end of
Formosa, some 60 or 70 miles away. Japan can land an army on American
soil at Aparri any time she wants to, overnight--an army several
times that of the total American force now in the Philippines, [356]
or likely ever to be there. From Aparri it is 70 miles up the river to
Tueguegarao, 40 more to Iligan, and 90 more, all fairly good marching,
to Bayombong, in Nueva Viscaya (total distance, Aparri to Bayombong,
200 miles) the province which lies in the heart of the watershed of
Central Luzon. I know what I am talking about, because that region
was the first judicial district I presided over, and many a hard
journey I have had over it, circuit riding, on a scrubby pony. Part
of it I have been through in the company of President Taft. It thus
appears that from Aparri to Bayombong there would be but a week or
ten days of unresisted marching to reach the watershed region, Nueva
Viscaya. The Japanese soldier's ration is mainly rice, so that he can
carry more days' travel rations than almost any other soldier in the
world. Never fear about their making the journey inside of a week or
ten days, once they start. To descend from the watershed aforesaid,
over the Caranglan Pass, and down the valley of the Rio Grande de
Pampanga to Manila, another three or four days would be all that would
be needed. It would be a Japanese picnic. Fortifying Corregidor Island,
at the entrance to Manila Bay, which is about all the serious scheme
of defence against a foreign foe we have out there, is quite like
the reliance of the Spaniards on Morro Castle, at the mouth of the
harbor of Santiago de Cuba, against our landing at Guantanamo. Our
garrison in the Philippines, all told, is but a handful. Aparri is an
absolutely unfortified seaport, at which the Japanese could land an
army overnight from the southern end of Formosa. There are no military
fortifications whatsoever to stay the advance of an invading army
from Aparri down the Cagayan Valley, and thence over the watershed
of Nueva Viscaya Province, through the Caranglan Pass, and down the
valley of the Pampanga River to Manila. So that to-day Japan can
take Manila inside of two weeks any time she wants to. That is why
I object to the President's "jollying" the situation along as best
he can, without taking the American people into his confidence. Any
army officer at our War College will inform any member of the House
or Senate on inquiry, that Japan can take the Philippines any time
she wants to. President Taft and the Mikado may keep on exchanging the
most cordial cablegrams imaginable, but the map-making goes on just the
same. And, earnest and sincere as both the President and the Emperor
undoubtedly are in their desire to preserve the general peace, who
is going to restrain Hobson and Hearst, and several of Japan's public
men equally distinguished and equally inflammatory? Heads of nations
cannot restrain gusts of popular passion. The Pacific Coast is not so
friendly to Japan as the rest of our country, and as between Japan and
the Pacific Coast, we are pretty apt to stand by the latter without
inquiring with meticulous nicety into any differences that may arise.

The reason I said in the chapter before this one that Mr. Root is
a dangerous man to Republican institutions was because he is of the
type who are constantly finding situations which they consider it best
for the people not to know about. After the McKinley election of 1900
was safely "put over," Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, let Judge Taft
go ahead and ride his dove-of-peace hobby-horse in the Philippines,
duly repeating to the American people all the cheery Taft cluckings
to said horse, at a time when the real situation is indicated by such
grim correspondence as the following cablegram dated January 29, 1901:


    Wood, Havana: Secretary of War is desirous to know if you can
    give your consent to the immediate withdrawal Tenth Infantry
    from Cuba. Imperative that we have immediate use of every
    available company we can lay our hands on for service in the
    Philippines. (Signed) Corbin. [357]


But let us turn from this sorry spectacle of Mr. Root pulling the wool
over the eyes of his countrymen to make them believe the Filipinos
were not quite so unconsenting as they seemed to be, and again look
at the sheer splendor of American military ability to get anything
done the Government wants done. I refer to the capture of Aguinaldo.

One of the most eminent lawyers in this country once said to me, "I
would not let that man Funston enter my house." I tried to enlighten
him, but as I happened to be a guest in his house at the time,
which entitled him to exemption from light if he insisted--which he
did--General Funston and he have continued to miss what might have been
a real pleasure to them both. The following is, as briefly as I can
dispose of it, the story of the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901.

Ever since Aguinaldo had escaped through our lines in November,
1899, his capture had been the one great consummation most devoutly
wished. It has already been shown how busy with the war the army
was all the time Judge Taft was gayly jogging away astride of his
peace hobby about the insurrection being really quite regretted
and over. However, in the favorite remark with which he used to
wave the insurrection into thin air, to the effect that it was
now merely "a Mafia on a large scale," there was one element
of truth. The general feeling of the people, both educated and
uneducated, was such as to countenance the attitude of the leaders
that pro-American tendencies were treason. Any leader who surrendered
of course was thereafter an object of at least some suspicion to his
fellow-countrymen, however assiduous his subsequent double-dealing. As
long as Aguinaldo remained out, this state of affairs was sure to
continue indefinitely, possibly for years to come. If captured, he
would probably himself give up the struggle, and use his influence
with the rest to do likewise. Therefore, in the spring of 1901,
each and every one of General MacArthur's 70,000 men was, and had
been since 1899, on the qui vive to make his own personal fortunes
secure for life, and gain lasting military distinction, by taking
any sort of chances to capture Aguinaldo. On February 8, 1901, an
officer of General Funston's district, the Fourth, in central Luzon,
intercepted a messenger bearing despatches from Aguinaldo to one of
his generals of that region, directing the general (Lacuna) to send
some reinforcements to him, Aguinaldo. General Funston's headquarters
were then at San Fernando, in the province of Pampanga--organized as a
"civil" government province by act of the Taft Commission just five
days later. [358] Through these despatches and their bearer, General
Funston ascertained the hiding-place of the insurgent chieftain to
be at a place called Palanan, in the mountains of Isabela Province,
in northeastern Luzon, near the Pacific Coast. Early in the war we had
availed ourselves of a certain tribe, or clan, known as the Maccabebes,
who look nowise different from all other Filipinos, but who had, under
the Spanish government, by reason of long-standing feuds with their
more rebellious neighbors, come to be absolutely loyal to the Spanish
authorities. When we came they had transferred that loyalty to us, and
had now become a recognized and valuable part of our military force. So
it occurred to General Funston; "Why not personate the reinforcements
called for, the American officers to command the expedition assuming
the rôle of captured American prisoners?" The plan was submitted to
General MacArthur and adopted. A picked company of Maccabebes was
selected, consisting of about eighty men, and General Funston decided
to go himself, taking with him on the perilous expedition four young
officers of proven mettle: Captain Harry W. Newton, 34th Infantry,
U. S. Volunteers, now a captain of the Coast Artillery; Captain
R. T. Hazzard, 11th Volunteer Cavalry; Lieutenant O. P. M. Hazzard,
his brother, of the same regiment, the latter now an officer of
the regular army, and Lieutenant Mitchell, "my efficient aid." [359]
March 6, 1901, the U.S.S. Vicksburg slipped quietly out of Manila Bay,
bearing the participants in the desperate enterprise--as desperate
an undertaking as the heart and brain of a soldier ever carried to a
successful conclusion. General Thomas H. Barry wrote Secretary of War
Root, after they left, telling of their departure, and stating that
he did not much expect ever to see them again. The chances were ten
to one that the eighty men would meet five or ten times their number,
and, as they were to masquerade as troops of the enemy, they could
not complain, under the recognized laws of war as to spies, at being
summarily shot if captured alive. And the whole Filipino people were a
secret service ready to warn Aguinaldo, should the carefully concocted
ruse be discovered anywhere along the journey. They went down to the
southern end of Luzon, and through the San Bernardino Straits into
the Pacific Ocean, and thence up the east coast of Luzon to Casiguran
Bay, about 100 miles south of Palanan, landing at Casiguran Bay, March
14th. The "little Macks," as General Funston calls the Maccabebes, were
made to discard their dapper American uniforms after they got aboard
the ship, and don instead a lot of nondescript clothing gathered by
the military authorities at Manila before the Vicksburg sailed, so
as to resemble the average insurgent command. Not a man of them had
been told of the nature of the expedition before sailing. This was
not for fear of treachery, but lest some one of the faithful "Macks"
should get his tongue loosed by hospitality before departing. Also,
their Krag-Jorgensen regulation rifles were taken from them, and a
miscellaneous assortment of old Springfields, Mausers, etc., given them
instead, to complete the deception. An ex-insurgent officer, well known
to Aguinaldo, but now in General Funston's employ, was to play the
rôle of commanding officer of the "reinforcements." To read General
Funston's account of this expedition is a more convincing rebuttal
of the contemporaneous Taft denials of Filipino hostility and of the
unanimity of the feeling of the people against us, than a thousand
quotations from official documents could ever be. It was necessary
to land more than 100 miles south of Aguinaldo's hiding-place, lest
the smoke of the approaching vessel should be sighted from a distance,
and some peasant or lookout give the alarm. Accordingly, they landed at
Casiguran Bay by night, with the ship's lights screened, the Vicksburg
at once departing out of sight of land, and agreeing to meet them off
Palanan, their destination, on March 25th, eleven days later. From the
beginning they vigilantly and consummately played the rôle planned,
the "Macks" having been drilled on the way up, each and all, in the
story they were to tell at the first village near Casiguran Bay, and
everywhere thereafter, to the effect that they had come across country,
and en route had met ten American soldiers out map-making, and had
killed two, wounded three, and captured five. They were to point to
General Funston and the four other Americans in corroboration of their
story. Speaking of himself and his four fellow "prisoners," General
Funston says, "We were a pretty scrubby looking lot of privates." The
villagers received the patriot forces, thus flushed with triumph,
in an appropriate manner, and supplied them with rations and guides
for the rest of their 100-mile journey to the headquarters of the
"dictator." General Funston is even at pains to say for the village
officials that they were very humane and courteous to himself and
the other four American "prisoners." They reached Palanan Bay,
eight miles from Palanan, on March 22d. Here Hilario Tal Placido,
the ex-insurgent officer whose rôle in the present thrilling drama
was that of "commanding officer" of the expedition, sent a note to
Aguinaldo, stating that he had halted his command for a rest at the
beach preparatory to marching inland and reporting to the Honorable
Presidente, that they were very much exhausted, and much in need of
food, and please to send him some. Of course that was the natural card
to play to put Aguinaldo off his guard. The food came, and the bearers
returned and casually reported to the Honorable Presidente that his
honorable reinforcements would soon be along, much to the honorable
joy--to make the thing a little Japanesque--of the president of the
honorable republic. This incident has been since made the occasion of
some criticism--that it was contrary to decency to accept Aguinaldo's
food and then attack him afterwards. General Funston very properly
replies in effect that the case would have been very different had he
thrown himself on Aguinaldo's mercy, taken his food, and used treachery
afterwards, but that his conduct was entirely correct, under the code
of war, for the reason that should he and his command be captured
while personating enemy's forces, Aguinaldo would have had a perfect
right, under the rules of the game, to shoot them all as spies. He
adds rather savagely, concerning "certain ladylike persons in the
United States" who have censured his course in the matter, that he
"would be very much interested in seeing the results of a surgical
operation performed on the skull of a man who cannot readily see the
radical difference between the two propositions," and that he doubts
if a good quality of calf brains would be revealed by the operation.

At all events, the expedition was very much refreshed by the food
and highly delighted at the proof, contained in the sending of it,
that Aguinaldo did not suspect a ruse. But now came one of the many
emergencies which had to be met by quick wit in the course of that
memorable adventure. Aguinaldo sent word to leave the "prisoners"
under a guard in one of the huts by the sea-shore, where there was one
of the Aguinaldo retainers in charge, an old Tagalo. After a hurried,
whispered conversation, "prisoner" Funston instructed "Commanding
Officer" Placido to go ahead with his main column and then a little
later send back a forged written order purporting to be from Aguinaldo,
for the "prisoners" to come on also. This was shown to the old Tagalo,
thus disarming suspicion on his part. But now came the "closest shave"
they had. The column met a detachment from Aguinaldo's headquarters
sent down with instructions to relieve the necessarily worn-out
guard of the newly arrived "re-inforcements" that were supposed to
be guarding the five prisoners at the beach, and let said guard come
on up to headquarters with the rest of the "re-inforcements," the
idea being to still leave the prisoners at the beach so they would
not learn definitely as to the Aguinaldo whereabouts. Detaining the
officer commanding this detachment for a moment or so on some pretext,
the "Commanding Officer" of the "re-inforcements" whispered to a
Maccabebe corporal to run back and tell General Funston and the rest
of the "prisoners" to jump in the bushes and hide. This they did,
lying within thirty feet of the detachment, as it passed them en
route for the beach. Of course a fight would have meant considerable
firing, and the quarry might hear it, take fright, and escape. Finally
they reached Palanan, the "prisoners" quite far in the rear. Placido
got safely into Aguinaldo's presence, followed at a short distance
by the main body of his Maccabebes. Aguinaldo's life-guard of some
fifty men, neatly uniformed, presented arms as Placido entered the
insurgent headquarters building, and thereafter waited at attention
outside. Then the worthy Placido entertained the honorable Presidente
with a few cock-and-bull stories about the march across country,
etc., made obediently to the President's order, keeping a weather
eye out of the window all the time. As soon as the Maccabebes had
come up and formed facing the Aguinaldo life-guard, Placido went to
the window and ordered them to open fire. This they did, killing
two of the insurgents and wounding their commanding officer. The
rest fled, panic-stricken, by reason of the surprise. Then Placido,
a very stout individual, grabbed Aguinaldo, who only weighs about
115 pounds, threw him down, and sat on him, until General Funston,
the Hazzards, Mitchell, and Newton arrived. The orders were iron-clad
that under no circumstances, if it could be avoided, was Aguinaldo
to be killed. His signature to proclamations telling the people to
quit the war was going to be needed too much. The party rested two
days and then set out for the coast again, on March 25th, the day the
Vicksburg had agreed to meet them. "At noon" says General Funston,
"we again saw the Pacific, and far out on it a wisp of smoke--the
Vicksburg coming in!" In due course they reached Manila Bay. The
old palace of the Spanish captains-general, then occupied by our
commanding general, is up the Pasig River, accessible from the bay
by launch. By that method General Funston took his precious prisoner
to the palace without the knowledge of a soul in the great city of
Manila. He arrived before General MacArthur had gotten up. In a few
minutes the General came out. "Where is Aguinaldo?" said he, dryly. He
supposed General Funston simply had some details to tell, like the
commanding officers of hundreds of other expeditions that had gone out
before that on false scents in search of the illustrious but elusive
Presidente. "Right here in this house," said General Funston. General
MacArthur could hardly believe his ears. A few days later, General
Funston walked into General MacArthur's office. The latter said;
"Well, Funston, they do not seem to have thought much in Washington
of your performance. I am afraid you have got into trouble." "At the
same time he handed me," says General Funston in the Scribner Magazine
article above mentioned, "a cablegram announcing my appointment as
a brigadier-general in the regular army."

In his annual report for 1901, [360] General MacArthur describes
the capture of Aguinaldo as "the most momentous single event of
the year," stating also that "Aguinaldo was the incarnation of the
insurrection." This last statement explains why he was so anxious to
capture him alive. If dead, he would be sure to get re-incarnated in
the person of some able assistant of his entourage, thus insuring
undisturbed continuance of the war. He was most graciously treated
by General MacArthur during his stay as that distinguished soldier's
"guest" at the Malacañan palace, from March 28th until April 20th. The
word "guest" is placed in quotations because the host thought so
much of him that he considered him worth many hundred times his
weight in gold, and had him watched night and day by a commissioned
officer. Everything that had been done by the Americans since November,
1899, was explained to him, and he was made to see that our purposes
with regard to his people were not only benevolent but also inflexible;
in other words that there was no altering our determination to make
his people happy whether they were willing or not. Seeing this,
Aguinaldo bowed to the inevitable. The programme explained to
Aguinaldo is wittily described by a very bright Englishwoman as a
plan "to have lots of American school teachers at once set to work
to teach the Filipino English and at the same time keep plenty of
American soldiers around to knock him on the head should he get a
notion that he is ready for self-government before the Americans
think he is"--a quaint scheme, she adds, "and one characteristic of
the dauntlessness of American energy." To be brief, on April 19th,
Aguinaldo took the oath of allegiance to the American Government,
which all agree he has faithfully observed ever since, and issued
a proclamation recommending abandonment of further resistance. This
proclamation was at once published by General MacArthur and signalized
by the immediate liberation of one thousand prisoners of war, on
their likewise taking the oath of allegiance.  In his proclamation
Aguinaldo said, among other things:


    The time has come, however, when they [the Filipino people] find
    their advance along this path [the path of their aspirations]
    impeded by an irresistible force. * * * Enough of blood, enough
    of tears and desolation.


He concludes by announcing his final unconditional submission to
American sovereignty and advises others to do likewise. [361]

Soon after this General Tiño surrendered in General Young's district,
and in another part of northern Luzon, General Mascardo, commanding
the insurgent forces in the provinces of Bataan and Zambales,
heretofore described as "the west wing of the great central plain,"
also surrendered. In the latter part of June, General Cailles, with
whom we have already had occasion to become acquainted, in connection
with Judge Taft's "Mafia on a large scale," also surrendered in
Laguna Province. After that, there was never any more trouble in
northern Luzon. But during the spring of 1901, the Commission had
been very busy organizing the provinces of southern Luzon under
civil government, thus cutting short the process of licking it into
submission and substituting a process of loving it into that state
through good salaries and otherwise--a policy which postponed the
final permanent pacification of that ill-fated region for several
years, as hereinafter more fully set forth.

The unconditional absoluteness with which Judge Taft acted from the
beginning on the assumption that the Filipinos would make a distinction
between civil and military rule, and that their objection to us was
because we had first sent soldiers to rule them and not civilians,
and that these objections would vanish before the benignant sunlight
of a government by civilians, is one of the great tragedies of all
history, considering the countless lives it eventually cost. As a
matter of fact, the Filipino objection had little or no relation
to the kind of clothes we wore, whether they were white duck or
khaki. Their objection was to us, i.e., to an alien yoke. However,
to heal the bleeding wounds of war, the Filipinos were benevolently
told to forget it, and a civil government was set up on July 4, 1901,
pursuant to the amiable delusion indicated. That it has never yet
proved a panacea, and why, will be developed in the next and subsequent
chapters, but only in-so-far as such development throws light on the
present situation--which it is the whole object of this book to do.

And now a few words by way of concluding the present chapter, as
preliminary to the inauguration of a civil government, cannot be
misconstrued, though they come from one who held office under it. I
have certainly made clear that Judge Taft and his colleagues were as
honest in their delusion about how popular they were with the Filipinos
as many other public men who have been known to have hobbies, and my
remarks must be understood as based on the comprehensive bird's-eye
view which we have had of the whole situation from the outbreak of
the war with Spain in 1898 to the end of June, 1901, as a summation
of that situation. It is quite true that all contemporary history is
as much affected by its environment as the writer of it is by his
own limitations. But it certainly seems clear now that, in regard
to the Philippine problem presented in 1898 by the decision to keep
the islands, the American people were played upon by the politicians
for the next few years thereafter, sometimes on the idea that the
Filipino people were not a people but only a jumble of semi-civilized
tribes incapable of any intelligent notion of what independence meant,
and sometimes on the idea that while there was no denying that they
were indeed a civilized, homogeneous, Christian people, yet the great
majority of them did not want independence, and would prefer to be
under a strong alien government. But the key-note to the McKinley
policy from the beginning, his answer to the eager question of his
own people, was that there was no real absence of the consent of the
governed. In Senator Lodge's history of the war with Spain, written in
1899, there is a description of the long struggle for independence in
Cuba, whose existence Spain denied year after year until we decided
that patience had ceased to be a virtue, which description is so
strikingly applicable to the situation in the Philippines during
the first years of American rule that I cannot refrain from quoting
it here:


    And we were to go on pretending that the war was not there,
    and that we had answered the unsettled question, when we really
    had simply turned our heads aside and refused to look. And then
    when the troublesome matter had been so nicely laid to sleep,
    the result followed which is usual when Congressmen and Presidents
    and nations are trying to make shams pass for realities." [362]


By the same high token the Philippine question will always remain
"the unsettled question" until it is settled right. In other words,
the American occupation of the Philippines, having been originally
predicated on the idea that the Filipino people did not really
want independence, a fiction which political expediency incident
to government by parties inexorably compelled it to try to live up
to thereafter, took the form, in 1901, of a civil government founded
upon a benevolent lie, which expressed a hope, not a fact, a hopeless
hope that can never be a fact. And that is what has been the matter
with it ever since.


                    The papers 'id it 'andsome,
                    But you bet the army knows.






CHAPTER XV

GOVERNOR TAFT--1901-2

                For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of
                my people slightly, saying--Peace, peace; when there
                is no peace. Jeremiah viii., 11.


On February 22, 1898, the American Consul at Manila, Mr. Williams,
after he had been at that post for about a month, wrote the State
Department, describing the Spanish methods of keeping from the world
the outward and visible manifestations of the desire of the Filipino
people to be free from their yoke thus:


    Peace was proclaimed and, since my coming, festivities therefor
    were held; but there is no peace, and has been none for two years.


He adds:


    Conditions here and in Cuba are practically alike. War exists,
    battles are of almost daily occurrence, etc. [363]


As will hereinafter appear, this is not far from a correct description
of the conditions which prevailed successively in various provinces
of the Philippines in gradually lessening degree for the six years
next ensuing after the report of the Taft Commission of November 30,
1900, wherein they said:


    A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely
    willing to accept the establishment of a government under the
    supremacy of the United States. [364]


We have seen how from the date of the outbreak, February 4, 1899, to
the date of his final departure from the islands for the United States
on May 5, 1900, General Otis had diligently supplied the eager ear of
Mr. McKinley with his "situation well in hand" and "insurrection about
to collapse" telegrams, Secretary of War Alger having meantime been
forced out of the cabinet--in part, at least--by a public opinion which
indignantly believed that the real situation was being withheld. We
have seen how, from soon after the arrival of the Taft Commission at
Manila on June 3, 1900, until after the November elections of that
year, the same eager presidential ear aforesaid was supplied with
like material through the presumably innocent but opportunely deluded
optimism of the Commission, as manifested in the above sample message;
how the actual military situation as described by General MacArthur,
the military commander at the time, was one of "desperate resistance by
means of a general banding of the people in support of the guerrillas
in the field," [365] he having wired the War Department on January 4,
1901, "Troops throughout the archipelago more active than at any time
since November, 1899"; [366] and how this had been followed on July
4, 1901, by a civil government, the inauguration of which could by
no possibility be construed as affirming to the people of the United
States anything other than the existence of a state of peace.

We are to trace in this and subsequent chapters how, a short time after
the civil government was instituted, the insurrection got its second
wind; how a year later came another public declaration of peace, on
July 4, 1902; and how this was followed by a long series of public
disorders, combated by prosecutions for sedition and brigandage,
until toward the end of 1906. The drama is quite an allegory--Uncle
Sam wrestling with his guardian angel Consent-of-the-governed. He
finally gets both the angel's shoulders on the mat, however, and so
the two have lived at loggerheads in the Philippines ever since.

As soon as we had once blundered into the colonial business, the
rock-bottom frankness with which we so dearly love to deal with one
another, let carping Europe deny it as she will, was superseded
by a systematic effort on the part of the statesmen responsible
for the blunder to conceal it. It soon became clear to those on the
inside that the sovereign American people had "bought a gold brick,"
that is to say, had made a grievous mistake and had done wrong. But
as it is not expedient for courtiers to tell the sovereign he has
done wrong, because "The king can do no wrong," thereafter all the
courtiers,--i. e. persons desiring to control the "sovereign" while
seeming to obey him--instead of risking loss of the "royal" favor
by boldly telling the people they had done wrong and ought to mend
the error of their ways, began to fill their ears and salve their
conscience with mediæval doctrines about salvation of the heathen
through governmental missions maintained by the joint agencies of Cross
and Sword. For the foregoing and cognate reasons, Senator Lodge's
description of Spain's last thirty years in Cuba fits our first six
or seven in the Philippines, beginning in 1899 with the original
Otis press censorship policy of "not letting anything go that will
hurt the Administration," and coming on down to a certificate made
in 1907 by the Philippine Commission for consumption in the United
States, to the effect that a state of general and complete peace had
prevailed throughout the islands for a stated period preceding the
certificate, when, as a matter of fact, during the period covered by
the certificate, an executive proclamation formally declaring a state
of insurrection had issued, and the Supreme Court of the islands had
upheld certain drastic executive action as legal because of the state
of insurrection recognized by the proclamation.

The Taft civil government of the Philippines set up in 1901 was an
attempt to answer the question which, during the crucial period of
our country's history following the Spanish War, rang so persistently
through the public utterances of both Grover Cleveland and Benjamin
Harrison: "Mr. President, how are you going to square the subjugation
of the Philippines with the freeing of Cuba?" Mr. McKinley's
answer had been, in effect: "Never mind about that, Grover; you and
Benjamin are back numbers. I will show you 'the latest thing' in the
consent-of-the-governed line, a government not 'essentially popular,'
it is true, nor indeed at all 'popular,' in fact very unpopular,
but 'essentially popular in form.' You lads are not experts on the
political trapeze." Accordingly, as Senator Lodge said concerning
the dreary years of continuous public disorders in Cuba under Spain,
which we finally put a stop to in 1898:


    We were to go on pretending that the war was not there, etc.


Lack of frankness is usually due to weakness of one sort or
another. The weakness of the Spanish colonial system lay in the
impotent poverty of the home government and the graft tendencies
of the colonial officials. The weakness of the American colonial
system has always lain in the fundamental unfitness of republican
governmental machinery for boldly advocating and honestly enforcing
doctrines which deny frankly and as a matter of course that governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. There
are so many people in a republic like ours who will always stand by
this last proposition as righteous, and as being the chief bulwark
of their own liberties, and so many who will always regard denial
of that proposition as an insidious practice calculated ultimately
to react on their own institutions, that no colonial government of
conquered subject provinces eager for independence can ever have the
sympathy and backing of all our people. Thus it is that to get home
support for the policy, the supreme need of the colonial government
is constant apology for its own existence, and constant effort to
show that the subject people do not really want freedom to pursue
happiness in their own way as badly as their orators say they do;
that the oratory is mere "hot air"; and that the people really like
alien domination better than they seem to.

Always in a mental attitude of self-defence against home criticism,
in its official reports there is ever present with the Philippine
insular government the tendency and temptation not to volunteer to
the American people evidence within its possession calculated to
awaken discussion as to the wisdom of its continuance. It thus usurps
a legitimate function never intended to be delegated to the Executive,
but reserved to the people. It thus makes itself the judge of how much
the people at home shall know. The law of self-preservation prompts
it not to take the American people into its confidence, at least
not that portion of them who are opposed on principle to holding
remote colonies impossible to defend in the event of war without a
large standing army maintained for the purpose. There is always the
apprehension that the value of apparently unfavorable evidence will
not be wisely weighed by the people at home, because of unfamiliarity
with insular conditions. This is by no means altogether vicious. It
is a perfectly natural attitude and a good deal can be said in favor
of it. But the real vice of it lies in the fact that your colonial
government thus becomes not unlike the president of a certain naval
board before which a case involving the commission of an officer of
the navy was once tried. They had no competent official stenographer to
take down all that transpired. The Navy Department was asked for one,
but they referred it to the board. The president of the board knew very
well that "the defence" wanted to show bias on his part. He exuded
conscious rectitude and plainly resented any suggestion of bias. So
a stenographer was refused and the case proceeded, the proceedings
being recorded in long hand by a regular permanent employee of the
board. Under such circumstances, there is so much which transpires that
is absolutely irrelevant and immaterial, that the proceedings would
be interminable if every little thing were recorded. Consequently,
much that was material, including casual remarks of the president of
the board clearly indicative of bias sufficient to disqualify any
judge or juror on earth, failed of entry in the record. However,
enough was gotten into the record to satisfy the President of the
United States that the president of the board was not only not
impartial, but very much prejudiced, and he reversed the action of
the board. The case of that board is very much like the case of the
Philippine Government. The case of the latter is, as it were, a case
involving a question as to how long a guardianship ought to continue,
and they simply fail and omit to have recorded in a form where it may
be available to the reviewing authority, the American people, much that
is material (on the idea of saving the reviewing authority labor and
trouble), which they think the record ought not to be cumbered with,
or the reviewing authority bothered with. This practice is due to a
confident belief that the American people, being so far away, and being
necessarily so wholly unacquainted with all the ins and outs of the
situation in the Philippines, are not fitted to pass intelligently on
the questions which continually confront the colonial government. This
is not a mental attitude of insult to the intelligence of the people
of the United States. It is simply a belief that they, the colonial
officials, know much better than the American people can ever know,
what is wisest, in each case, to be done in the premises. And there
is much to be said in favor of this view, so far as details go. The
fundamental error of it, however, lies in the assumption that the
American people are forever committed to permanent retention of the
Philippines, i. e., permanent so far as any living human being is
concerned--an assumption wholly unauthorized by any declaration of
the law-making power of this government, and countenanced only by
the oft-expressed hope of President Taft that that will be the policy
some day declared, if any definite policy is ever declared. Thus it
is that throughout the last twelve years those particular facts and
events which (to me) seem most vitally relevant to the fundamental
question in the case, viz., whether or not we should continue to
persist in the original blunder of inaugurating and maintaining a--to
all intents and purposes--permanent over-seas colonial government,
have been withheld from the knowledge of the American public. The
present policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention
is a mere makeshift to avoid a frank avowal of intention to retain
the islands for all future time with which anybody living has any
practical concern. Until it is substituted by a definite declaration
by Congress similar to the one we made in the case of Cuba, and the
present American Governor-General and his associates are substituted
by men sent out to report back how soon they think the Filipinos
may safely be trusted to attend to their own domestic concerns, all
crucial facts and situations that might jeopardize the continuance
of the present American régime in the Philippines will continue,
as heretofore, to remain unmentioned in the official reports of the
American authorities now out there. Until that is done, you will never
hear the Filipino side of the case from anybody whose opinion you are
willing to make the basis of governmental action. These remarks will,
obviously from the nature of the case, be quite as true long after
President Taft, the reader, and I are dead as they are now.

Mr. Taft would be very glad to have Congress declare frankly that it
is the purpose of this Government to hold the Philippines permanently,
i. e., permanently so far as the word means continuance of the "uplift"
treatment long after everybody now on the earth is beneath it. But
because public opinion in the United States is so much divided as
to the wisdom of a policy of frankly avowed intention permanently
to retain the islands, he prefers to leave the whole matter open
and undetermined, so as to get the support both of those who think
a definite programme of permanent retention righteous and those who
think such a programme vicious. He wishes to please both sides of
a moral issue, on the idea that, as the present policy is in his
individual judgment best for all concerned, the end justifies the
means. Yet, as the issue is a moral one, which concerns the cause of
representative government throughout the world, and a strategic one
which concerns the national defence, it should, in my judgment, no
longer be dodged, but squarely met. You constantly hear President Taft
talking quite out loud here at home, in his public utterances, about
the great politico-missionary work we are doing in the Philippines
by furnishing them with the most approved up-to-date methods for
the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of graft in government, the
elimination of crimes of violence, in short the ideal way to minimize
the ills that human governments are heir to, while every day and every
dollar spent out there by Americans induced by him to go there, are
time and money tensely arrayed against the ultimate independence he
purports to favor. Give the Americans out there a square deal. Let
them know whether we are going to keep the islands or whether we
are not. Honesty is a far better policy than the present policy. The
Americans in the islands, Mr. Taft's agents in the Philippines, talk no
uncandid and misleading stuff about the Philippines being exclusively
for the Filipinos. And they do considerable talking. They need looking
after, if the present pious fiction is to be kept up at this end of the
line. Nobody in the Philippines to-day, among the Americans, considers
talk about independence as anything other than political buncombe very
hampering to their work. Listen to this high official of the insular
government, who writes in the North American Review for February, 1912:


    The somewhat blatant note with which we at the beginning
    proclaimed our altruistic purposes in the Philippines has died
    away into a whisper. To say much about it is to incur a charge
    of hypocrisy. [367]


The most important problem which confronted Mr. McKinley when he
sent Judge Taft to the Philippines was how to so handle the supreme
question of public order as to avoid any necessity of having to
ask Congress later for more volunteers to replace those whose terms
of enlistment would expire June 30, 1901. We have already reviewed
the strenuous efforts of General MacArthur during the twelve months
immediately following the arrival of the Taft Commission in June,
1900, to get rid of the shadow of this necessity by the date named,
the regular army having been reorganized meantime and considerably
increased by the Act of February 2, 1901. On March 22, 1901, while
the Taft Commission was going around the islands with their Federal
party folk, holding out the prospect of office to those who would
quit insurging and come in and be good, General MacArthur reported
progress to Secretary of War Root by cable as follows: "Hope report
cessation of hostilities before June 30." [368] His idea was to get
a good military grip on the situation, if possible, by that time,
and, as a corollary, of course, that the grip thus obtained should
be diligently retained for a long time, not loosened, so that the
disturbed conditions incident to many years of war might have a few
years, at least, in which to settle. In his annual report dated July 4,
1901, the date of the inauguration of Judge Taft as "Civil Governor,"
he says, in regard to the imperative necessity for continuing the
military grip by keeping on hand sufficient forces:


    Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede the activity
    or reduce the efficiency of these instruments will not only be a
    menace to the present, but put in jeopardy the entire future of
    American possibilities in the archipelago. [369]


General MacArthur believed in keeping the islands permanently. His
views were frankly imperialistic. He had no salve to offer to the
conscience of pious thrift at home anxious to believe that the
Filipinos were not bitterly opposed to our rule, and very much in
favor of what was supposed to be a glittering opening for Trade
Expansion. He was thoroughly imbued with the British colonial idea
known as The White Man's Burden. On the other hand, Governor Taft
firmly believed that kindness would cure the desire of the people for
independence. The difference between these two gentlemen was fully
ventilated afterward before the Senate Committee of 1902. A statement
of General MacArthur's embodying the crux of this difference was read
to Governor Taft by Senator Carmack, and the Governor's reply was:


    We did not then agree with that statement, and we do not now
    agree with it. [370]


A little later, in the same connection, he said to the same Senate
Committee, with the cheery tolerance of conflicting views which comes
only from entire confidence in the soundness of one's own:


    I have been called the Mark Tapley of this Philippine business.


There is no doubt about the fact that President Taft is an
optimist. But while optimism is a very blessed thing in a sick-room or
a financial panic, it is a very poor substitute for powder and lead
in putting down an insurrection, or in weaning people from a desire
for independence accentuated by a long war waged for that purpose,
especially when your kindness must be accompanied by assurances to
the objects of it that on account of a lack of sufficient intelligence
they are not fit for the thing they want. It was upon a programme of
this sort that Governor Taft entered upon the task of reconciling the
Filipinos to American rule more than ten years ago. The impossibility
of the task is of course obvious enough from the mere statement of
it. The subsequent bitterness between him and the military authorities
was quite carefully and very properly kept from the American public
because it might get back to the Filipino public. The military folk
knew that to go around the country setting up provincial and municipal
governments, carrying a liberal pay-roll, with diligent contemporaneous
circulation of the knowledge that anybody who would quit fighting
would stand a good chance to get an office, would seem to many of the
Filipinos a confession of weakness and fear, sure to cause trouble
later. Many of them--of course it would be inappropriate to mention
names--simply did not believe that Mr. Taft was honest in his absurd
notion. They simply damned "politics" for meddling with war, and let
it go at that. But the real epic pathos of the whole thing was that
Mr. Taft was actually sincere. He believed that the majority of the
Philippine people were for him and his policies. As late as 1905,
he seems to have clung to this idea, according to various accounts
by Senators Newlands, Dubois, and others, in magazine articles
written after their return from a trip to the Philippines in that
year in company with Mr. Taft, then Secretary of War. In fact so
impressed were they with the general discontent out there, and yet so
considerate of their good friend Mr. Taft's feelings in the matter and
his confidence that the Filipinos loved benevolent alien domination,
that one of them simply contented himself with the remark:


    When we left the islands I do not believe there was a single
    member of our party who was not sorry we own them, except Secretary
    Taft himself.


Indeed it is not until 1907 that, we find Mr. Taft's paternal
solicitude for his step-daughter, Miss Filipina, finally reconciling
itself to the idea that while this generation seems to want Home
Rule as irreconcilably as Ireland herself and "wont be happy 'til
it gets it," yet inasmuch as Home Rule is not, in his judgment, good
for every people, this generation is therefore a wicked and perverse
generation, and hence the Filipinos must simply resign themselves to
the idea of being happy in some other generation. This attitude was
freely stated before the Millers' convention at St. Louis, May 30,
1907, the speech being reported in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat the
next day. Said Mr. Taft on that occasion, after admitting that the
Islands had been a tremendous financial drain on us:


    If, then, we have not had material recompense, have we had it in
    the continuing gratitude of the people whom we have aided?


Answering this, in effect, though not in so many words, "Alas, no,"
he adds, with a sigh which is audible between the lines:


    He who would measure his altruism by the thankfulness of those
    whom he aids, will not persist in good works.


Thus we see the Mark Tapley optimism of 1902 become in 1907 a species
of solicitude which Dickens describes in Bleak House as "Telescopic
Philanthropy," in the chapter by that title in which he introduces
the famous Mrs. Jellyby, mother of a large and interesting family,
"a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes
herself entirely to the public," who "has devoted herself to an
extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at
present devoted to the subject of Africa, with a general view to the
cultivation of the coffee berry--and the natives,"--to the woeful
neglect of her own domestic concerns and her large and expensive
family of children. Since 1907, Mr. Taft has frankly abandoned his
early delusion about the consent-of-the-governed, and boldly takes
the position, up to that time more or less evaded, that the consent
of the governed is not at all essential to just government.

The apotheosis of Uncle Sam as Mrs. Jellyby is to be found in one of
Mr. Taft's speeches wherein he declared that the present Philippine
policy was "a plan for the spread of Christian civilization in the
Orient."

Thus has it been that, under the reactionary influence of a colonial
policy, this republic has followed its frank abandonment of the idea
that all just government must derive its origin in the consent of
the governed by a further abandonment of the idea that Church and
State should be kept separate. I do not wish to make President Taft
ridiculous, and could not if I would. Nor do I seek to belittle him
in the eyes of his people,--for we are "his people," for the time
being. No one can belittle him. He is too big a man to be belittled
by anybody. Besides, he is, in many respects beyond all question, a
truly great man. But he is not the only great man in history who has
made egregious blunders. And there is no question that we are running
there on the confines of Asia, in the Philippines, a superfluous
governmental kindergarten whose sessions should be concluded, not
suddenly, but without unnecessary delay. The two principal reasons
for retaining the Filipinos as subjects, or "wards," or by whatever
euphemism any one may prefer to designate the relation, are, first,
that a Filipino government would not properly protect life and
property, and second, that although they complain much at taxation
without representation through tariff and other legislation placed or
kept on the statute books of Congress through the influence and for
the benefit of special interests in the United States, yet that such
taxation without representation is not so grievous as to justify them
in feeling as we did in 1776. Whether these reasons for retaining the
Filipinos as subjects indefinitely are justified by the facts, must
depend upon the facts. If they are not, the question will then arise,
"Would a Filipino government be any worse for the Filipinos than the
one we are keeping saddled on them over their protest?"

In his letter of instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission,
Mr. McKinley first quoted the noble concluding language with which
the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila gave an immediate
and supremely comforting sense of security to a city of some three
hundred thousand people who had then been continuously in terror of
their lives for three and one half months, thus:


    This city, its inhabitants, * * * and its private property of
    all description * * * are placed under the special safeguard of
    the faith and honor of the American army;


and then added:


    As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of
    the United States to give protection for property and life * * *
    to all the people of the Philippine Islands. * * * I charge this
    commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation,
    which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.


How the premature setting up of the civil government of the Philippines
in 1901 under pressure of political expediency, and the consequent
withdrawal of the police protection of the army, was followed by a
long series of disorders combated by prosecutions for sedition and
brigandage, toward the end of which the writer broke down and left the
Islands exclaiming inwardly, "I do not know the method of drawing an
indictment against a whole people," will now be traced, not so much
to show that the Philippine insular government has failed properly and
competently to meet the most sacred obligations that can rest upon any
government, but to show the inherent unfitness of a government based
on the consent of the governed to run any other kind of a government.

There were five officers of the Philippine volunteer army of 1899-1901
appointed to the bench by Governor Taft in 1901. Their names and the
method of their transition from the military to the civil régime
are indicated by the following communication, a copy of which was
furnished to each, as indicated in the endorsement which follows the
signature of Judge Taft:


    UNITED STATES PHILIPPINE COMMISSION

    President's Office, Manila, June 17, 1901.

    Major-General Arthur MacArthur, U. S. A.,

    Military Governor of the Philippine Islands, Manila.


    Sir:

    I am directed by the commission to inform you that it has made
    the following appointments under the recent Judicial Act passed
    June 11, 1901:

    You will observe that among our appointees are five army officers:
    Brigadier General James F. Smith, Lieutenant James H. Blount,
    Jr., 29th Infantry, Captain Adam C. Carson, 28th Infantry; Captain
    Warren H. Ickis, 36th Infantry; and Lieutenant George P. Whitsett,
    32d Infantry.

    It is suggested that it would be well for these officers to resign
    their positions in the United States military service to the end
    that they may accept the civil positions, take the oath of office,
    and immediately begin their new duties.

    I have the honor to be, very respectfully,


        Your obedient servant,

        (Signed) Wm. H. Taft,
        President.


    Official extract copy respectfully furnished Lieutenant James
    H. Blount, Jr., 29th Infantry, U. S. Vols., Manila, P. I. Your
    resignation, if offered in compliance with above letter, will be
    accepted upon the date preferred.

    By command of Major-General MacArthur:


        (Signed) E. H. Crowder
        Lieutenant-Colonel and Judge Advocate, U. S. A. Secretary.
        Military Secretary's Office,
        June 18, 1901.


General Smith had come out as colonel of the 1st Californias, and had
won his stars on the field of battle, as has already been described in
an earlier chapter. He went from the army to the Supreme Bench--at
Manila. The archipelago had been divided by the Taft Commission
into fifteen judicial districts, containing three or four provinces
each,--each district court to be a nisi prius or trial court. Judge
Carson (Va.) went to the Hemp Peninsula District in the extreme south
of Luzon, already described, and four years later to the Supreme Bench,
where he still is. Judge Ickis (Ia.) went to Mindanao, and later died
of the cholera down there. Judge Whitsett (Mo.) went to Jolo (the
little group of islets near British North Borneo), but his wife died
soon afterward, and he resigned and came home. The writer (Ga.) went
to northern Luzon, to the First District hereinafter noticed.

Just here it may be remarked that the reader will need no long
complicated description of the details of the organization of the new
government, interspersed with unpronounceable names, if he will simply
assume the view-point Governor Taft had in the beginning. Governor
Taft simply analogized his situation to that of a governor of a State
or Territory at home. His fifty provinces were to him fifty counties,
twenty-five of them in the main island of Luzon, which, as heretofore
stated, is about the size of Ohio or Cuba (forty odd thousand square
miles), and contains half the population and over one-third the total
land area of the archipelago. However, each of his provincial governors
was liberally paid, and the authority of a governor of a province
was, on a small scale, more like that of one of our own state chief
executives than like the authority and functions of the chairman of
the Board of County Commissioners of a county with us. For instance,
the governorship of Cebu, with its 2000 square miles of territory
and 650,000 inhabitants, was quite as big a job as the governorship
of New Mexico, or some other one of our newer States.

So that the task on which Governor Taft entered July 4, 1901, was
the governing of a potential ultimate federal union in miniature,
containing nearly eight millions of people. One slight mistake I
think he made was in providing that the governors of the provinces
should be ex-officio sheriffs of the Courts of First Instance
(of the fifteen several judicial districts aforesaid). This was to
enable the Judges of First Instance to keep a weather eye on the
provincial governors, the judiciary at first being largely American,
and it being the programme to have native governors, some of them
recently surrendered insurgent generals, as rapidly as practicable
and advisable. The scheme was good business, but not tactful. It
subtracted some wind from the gubernatorial sails to be a sheriff,
a provincial governor under the Spanish régime having been quite a
vice-regal potentate. But the judges were as careful to treat their
native governors with the consideration the authority vested in them
called for as Governor Taft himself would have been. So no substantial
harm was done, and the real power in the provinces of questionable
loyalty remained where it belonged, in American hands.

Just after Governor Taft's inauguration, the four newly appointed
district judges just out of the army called on the governor. Judge
Carson was the spokesman, though without pre-arrangement. He said:
"Governor, we have called to pay our respects and say goodbye before
going to the provinces. We have been acting under military orders so
long, that while we are not here to get orders, we would like to have
any parting suggestions that may occur to you." Governor Taft said:
"Well, Gentlemen, all I can think of is to remind you that if what
we have all heard is true the Spanish courts usually operated to the
delay of justice, rather than to the dispensing of it. So just go
ahead to your respective districts, and get to work, remembering that
you are Americans." So we did. Of course none of us loaned ourselves
for a moment to the amiable Taft fiction that "the great majority of
the people are entirely willing to government under the supremacy
of the United States." We had all had a share in the subjugation
of the Islands as far as it had progressed at that time, and had
seen the Filipinos fight--unskilfully and ineffectively, it is true
(because they none of them understood the use of two sights on a rifle,
and simply could not hit us much), but pluckily enough. We knew the
Filipinos well, and our attitude was simply that of "Pharaoh and the
Sergeant," in Kipling's ballad of the conquest of Egypt. However,
we knew nothing of the Egyptians, except what we had learned in the
Bible, gave no thought to whether our occupation was to be "temporary"
like the British occupation of Egypt since 1882, or temporary like
the American occupation of Cuba in 1898. That was a matter for the
people of the United States to determine later. But somebody had to
govern the Islands, and there we were, and there were the Islands. In
the scheme of things some one had to do that part of the world's work,
and, as the salaries were liberal, we went to the work, not concerning
ourselves with amiable fictions of any kind. I think our attitude
was really one of more intimately sympathetic understanding of the
Filipinos than that of Governor Taft himself, because we had all known
them longer, and all spoke their language, i. e., the language of
the educated and representative men (Spanish), and knew their ways,
their foibles, and their many indisputably noble traits. But we did
not start out to play the part of political wet-nurses. Our attitude
was, if Mr. Filipino does not behave, we will make him.

Judge Carson and myself had one peculiar qualification for fidelity
to the Taft policies for which we were entitled to no credit. We
instinctively resented any suggestion comparing the Filipinos to
negroes. We had many warm friends among the Filipinos, had shared
their generous hospitality often, and in turn had extended them
ours. Any such suggestion as that indicated implied that we had been
doing something equivalent to eating, drinking, dancing, and chumming
with negroes. And we resented such suggestions with an anger quite as
cordial and intense as the canons of good taste and loyal friendship
demanded. I really believe that the southern men in the Philippines
have always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any other
Americans out there, and for the reasons just suggested. Not only
is the universal American willingness to treat the educated Asiatic
as a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights going to
redeem him from the down-trodden condition into which British and
other European contempt for him has kept him, but the American from
the South out there is a guarantee that he shall never be treated as
if he were an African. The African is æons of time behind the Asiatic
in development; the latter is æons ahead of us in the mere duration
of his civilization. The Filipino has many of the virtues both of the
European and the Asiatic. Christianity has made him the superior in
many respects, of his neighbor and racial cousin, the Japanese. And
Spanish civilization has produced among them many educated gentlemen
whom it is an honor to call friend.

The five lawyers, who on ceasing to be volunteer officers became
judges, had other incentives also to make the Taft Government a
success. The possession of power is always pleasant. We knew the
military folk were going to stand by and watch the civil government,
and prophesy failure. This of course put us on our metal to impress
upon the dictatorial gentry of the military profession, with didactic
firmness, the fundamental importance to all American ideals that the
military should be subordinate to the civil authority.

The First Judicial District to which the writer was first assigned
comprised four provinces, Ilocos Norte, in the Ilocano country, the
province situated at the extreme northwestern corner of Luzon, in the
military district the conquest of which by General Young has already
been fully described; and the three provinces of the Cagayan valley,
[371] overrun by Captain Batchelor on his remarkable march from the
mountains to the sea in November, 1899, also already described. Here
I remained for a year, and then came home on leave, desperately
ill; being given, on returning to the Islands after my recovery,
an assignment in one of the southern islands, hereinafter dealt with.

We volunteers were all commissioned as judges as of the 15th of June,
though none of us I believe were mustered out until June 30th. The
day after I was notified of my appointment as judge, as above set
forth, desiring to enter upon my judicial emoluments, which were
several times those I was receiving as a soldier, I removed the
shoulder-straps and collar ornaments from my white duck suit, and
went over and took the oath of office before the Chief Justice of
the Islands. We had not yet been mustered out of the army, but as
above stated, Governor Taft had suggested to General MacArthur that
we resign without waiting for the day of muster out, so we could
get to work that much sooner, and General MacArthur had notified us
that if we cared to resign at once as suggested, he would cable our
resignations to Washington. Immediately after qualifying before the
Chief Justice, I left his office and on emerging from the court-house
hailed a carromata, [372] but the driver said No, he would not carry
me. I suggested in a very rudimental way, in rather rudimental Spanish
suited to him, that he was a common carrier, and as such under a
duty to transport me. He said his horse was tired. His horse did
not look tired. He would not have thus casually toyed with veracity
if I had had my shoulder-straps on. An autoridad (a representative
of constituted authority) is to the masses of the Filipino people
something which instinctively challenges their respect and obedience,
more especially where the "authority" is firm and just. Respect for
authority is their most conspicuous civic trait, and it is on this
element in the lower ninety, on the intelligence and capacity to
guide them of the upper ten, and on the ardent patriotism of both,
that I predicate my difference with President Taft as to the capacity
of the Filipino people for self-government. However, as I was to all
appearances not an "authority," this ignorant man treated me as merely
one of the Americans who, having invaded his country, apparently were
not sure whether they were afraid of his people or not. Again I tried
diplomacy, offering him an exorbitant fare. "Nothing doing." It was
about siesta time, and he would not budge. Here then was the civil
government proposition in a nutshell, to take the ignorant people and
teach them their rights under theoretically free institutions, instead
of letting their own people do it in their own way; to reason directly
with such people as this cochero (hackman), to begin at the bottom of
the social scale right on the jump, the idea being to fit them, the
sacred (?) majority, to know their rights and "knowing dare maintain"
them against the educated minority, as if the latter did not have
a greater natural interest in their welfare than any stranger could
possibly have. That I indulged all these reflections at the time I
of course do not mean to say. The significance of the incident has
of course deepened in the light of the subsequent years. At any rate,
I did not succeed in budging that cochero. I walked home, forego the
difference between the military and the judicial salary for the two
weeks remaining before muster-out day, put my shoulder-straps back on,
and kept them on until June 30, 1901. [373]

When I first landed on the China seacoast of the district I was to
preside over, I was met by quite a reception committee of the leading
men, who conducted me with great courtesy to the provincial capital. A
little later the justices of the peace paid their respects. One
of them came thirty miles to do so. The court-room was very long,
and when I first spied this last man, he was at the other end of
the room bowing very low. He would bow, then advance a few steps,
then bow again, then resume the forward march toward me. I reminded
myself of some ancient king, so profound were his obeisances. At
first I thought to myself, "He bows too low, he must have been up to
some devilment lately!" Experience showed me later that it was simply
one of the ever-present manifestations of the respect of the Filipino
for constituted authority. They positively love to show their respect
for authority, just as a good soldier loves to show his respect for
an officer. Here some American remarks: "Ah, but that is not good
proof of capacity for self-government. They would not 'cuss out' the
party in power enough." I answer: Who made you the judge to say that
our particular form of government and our particular way of doing
things is better for each and every other people under the sun than
any they can devise for themselves? But there was of course another
possible reason for the profundity of the obeisances of my judicial
subordinate above mentioned. When I reached that province of Ilocos
Norte in July, 1901, the people were in a state of submission that was
simply abject. They had at first worked the amigo business on General
Young, and treachery of that kind had been so inexorably followed by
dire punishment, that every home in the country had its lesson. Yet
that was the only way. The poor devils did not seem to know when they
were licked. This is not maudlin sentiment. It is a protest against the
cotemporary libel on Filipino patriotism about "the great majority"
being "entirely willing" to accept our rule, and the cotemporary
belittling of the work the army had to do to make them accept it.

I remained in charge of the First Judicial District for more
than a year, and during that period tried few or no crimes of a
political character, that is to say, indictments for sedition or the
like--attempts to subvert the government. The district comprised a
total population of about a half million people, more than one-eighth
of the population of Luzon, and a total area of over 13,000 square
miles, nearly one-third of all Luzon. But remember, this was in
northern Luzon, where the work of pacification was lucidly completed
by the army before the "peace-at-any-price" policy began. We will see
what happened in my friend Judge Carson's district, and in the rest of
southern Luzon later. The principal broad general fact I now recall,
in connection with the administration of justice in the First Judicial
District during the year or more I had it, is that the main volume of
business on the court calendars was crimes of violence of a strictly
non-political character due to lack of efficient police protection
in the several communities, consequent on withdrawal of military
garrisons. The country was in an unsettled state. The aftermath
of war, lawless violence, was virulently present, and the presence
of troops scattered through a province, under such circumstances,
is a wonderful moral force to restrain lawlessness. However high
the purpose, however kindly the motive, the setting up of a civil
government in the Philippines at the time it was set up, when the
country was far from ready for it, was a terrible mistake. Of course
no one man in a given province or judicial district had a bird's-eye
view of the whole situation and the whole panorama at the time,
such as we can get at this distance, in retrospect. Of course it did
not lie in human nature for the men responsible for the mistake to
see it at first, and, the die once cast, they had to keep on, with
intermittent resort to military help, the extent of which help was
always minimized thereafter. To show how little the general state of
the archipelago was understood by American provincial officials busy in
a given part of it, and getting little or no news of the outside world,
I remained in the First Judicial District from July, 1901, to August,
1902, and heard nothing of the great insurrection in southern Luzon,
in Batangas, and the adjacent provinces, which raged during the winter
of 1901-02, except a vague rumor that there was trouble down there. The
Filipinos did, however. Of course for Mr. Root to be able to furnish
in December, 1901, a report, as Secretary of War, to the President,
for consumption by Congress and the people of this country, to the
effect that his volunteer army had been mustered out on schedule time,
June 30, 1901, and a "civil" government set up and in due operation,
was a nice showing, calculated to sooth latent public discontent with
wading through slaughter to over-seas dominion. Reports thereafter of
disturbances could always be waived aside as merely local in character,
and not serious. If it were stoutly asserted that everything was
quiet all over the archipelago except in certain parts of certain
localities, naming them, that sounded well, and as the public at home
simply skipped the unpronounceable names, not caring much whether they
represented molecules or hemispheres, all went well. For instance,
most of the provinces of the archipelago were organized under "civil"
government prior to the inauguration of Governor Taft, which occurred,
July 4, 1901, and on July 17th, thereafter, Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol
were restored to military control. [374] I suppose the fact that
Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol had been so restored was duly announced
at the time in the Associated Press despatches from Manila. But
what light did it throw on the situation? Who knew whether any one
of these names represented a mountain lair, a country village, a
remote islet, or a large and populous province? As a matter of fact,
each was a province, and the total population of the three provinces
was 1,180,655, [375] and their total area 4651 square miles. [376]
The eminent gentlemen charged with the government of the Islands,
once they committed themselves to their "civil" government, persisted
always in treating the insurrection, as General Hancock's campaign
speeches used to treat the tariff--as "a local issue." The true
analogy, that of a house on fire, with the fire partly but not wholly
under control, and momentarily subject to gusts of wind, never seems
to have occurred to them. Here were provinces aggregating nearly
twelve hundred thousand people, officially admitted to be still in
insurrection within less than two weeks after the announcement of
the inauguration of a civil government, which included them, with
its implied assertion of a state of peace as to them.

If to the three provinces above named you add the province of Samar,
later of dark and bloody fame, you have a fourth province as to which
not only had there been no "civil" government organized on paper, but
no claim yet made by any one that we had ever conquered it. We had been
so busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not yet had time to bother
very much with Samar. The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its
population 266,237. (See the census tables already cited.) In their
report dated October 15, 1901, [377] you find the Commission admitting
that "the insurrection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu" and
"parts of" Laguna and Tayabas provinces. Now the euphemistic limitation
implied in the words "parts of" is quite negligible, for any serious
purpose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather constantly on the
move, and the population in all the "parts of" any province that was
still holding out backed up the combatants morally and materially,
with information as to our movements, supplies, etc., whenever
the insurgent detachments, in the course of their peregrinations,
happened to pass through those "parts." So, to make a recapitulation
presenting the political situation admitted by the Commission to exist
a little over three months after the inauguration of civil government,
we have the insurrection still in progress as follows:


    Province             Area (sq. m.)          Population

    Batangas              1,201                   257,715
    Cebu                  1,939                   653,727
    Bohol                 1,511                   269,223
    Laguna                  629                   148,606
    Tayabas               5,993                   153,065
    Samar                 5,276                   266,237
                         ------                 ---------
        Total            16,549                 1,748,573


According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on
October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his "civil" government on
the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among
one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total
area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the
reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos
and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles,
having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the
case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of
the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration
as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain
why I have so frequently put the word "civil" in quotations in
referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly
speaking, if "civil" does not imply consent of the governed, it
at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate,
and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the
Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it
was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people
to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get
criticised afterwards for "subserviency" to the government you are
thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now
the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine
judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug,
pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home
an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on
the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of
the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench,
never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was
any "consent" on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been
in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed
there a civil régime under a military name. We were now, in the
Philippines, serving a military régime under a civil name. We had all
of us doubtless--if there was an exception it is immaterial--served
on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty,
that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins,
the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission
of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and
travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from
the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis's attacks, [378]
the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to
the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective,
I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly,
by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield
Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether
or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there,
to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, "No,
the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have
never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct." But the distinguished
Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been
since 1909, Governor of the Philippines--and who, before he went out
there was a representative of Big Business in Boston--Governor Forbes,
and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered
any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the
Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft,
Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission
null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and
before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness,
Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines [379]
because he liked that kind of a judge.

Having sown the wind by setting up his civil government too soon,
let us now observe the whirlwind Governor Taft reaped within six
months thereafter. Of course the civil and military folk were at
daggers' points. That goes without saying. But their differences
were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos did not get hold
of them. To that end, the situation was also diligently concealed
in the United States. In his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find
President Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of that
rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, General Chaffee, and
also commending Governor Taft, and telling them how harmoniously they
had gotten along together to the credit of their common country. But
in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee had relieved General MacArthur,
you find the following cablegram:


                                          Executive Mansion, Washington,
                                                        October 8, 1901.

    Chaffee, Manila: I am deeply chagrined, to use the mildest possible
    term, over the trouble between yourself and Taft. I wish you
    to see him personally, and spare no effort to secure prompt and
    friendly agreement in regard to the differences between you. Have
    cabled him also. It is most unfortunate to have any action which
    produces friction and which may have a serious effect both in
    the Philippines and here at home. I trust implicitly that you
    and Taft will come to agreement.

        Theodore Roosevelt. [380]


The most important words of the above telegram are "and here at
home." The "serious effect here at home" so earnestly deprecated was
that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might
be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out
the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil
government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was
recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal
of the police protection of the army from districts in which there
were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and
willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch
contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has
already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor
Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that "the great majority"
were "entirely willing" to American sovereignty. It would also show
up Mr. Root's nonsense about "the patient and unconsenting millions,"
so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his
pious Philippics against delivering said millions "into the hands of
the assassin, Aguinaldo," [381] and would reveal the truth confessed
by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July,
1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor
and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just
completed the suppression of "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people."

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt's above
cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular
waters, a company of General Chaffee's command, Company C, of the
9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place
called Balangiga, in the island of Samar. [382] This had made General
Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody
drama of which General "Jake" Smith was the central figure, whereby
Samar was made "a howling wilderness." But Governor Taft was filled
with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government
than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos
of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty
Chaffee with remarks like this: "The people are friendly to the civil
government," and suavely speaking of "the evidence which accumulates
on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and
protection by the civil government." [383] The same Taft report goes
on to deprecate "rigor in the treatment" of the situation and the
"consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the
Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread
and development of the civil government."

General "Jake" Smith was sent to Samar shortly after the Balangiga
massacre, and did indeed make the place a howling wilderness, with his
famous "kill-and-burn" orders, instructions to "kill everything over
ten years old" and so forth, and the army was in sympathy generally
with most of what he did,--except, of course, the unspeakable "10 year
old" part--piously exclaiming, as fallible human nature often will in
such circumstances, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Now the civil
government could have put a stop to all this if it had wanted to. It
had the backing of President Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the
benefit of such "fear of God"--to use the army's rather sacrilegious
expression about that Samar campaign--as the military arm put into
the heart of the Filipino, and went on the even tenor of its way,
still maintaining that the Filipinos must like us because the civil
government was so benevolent,--as if the Filipinos drew any nice
distinctions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or supposed
the two did not represent one and the same government, the government
of the United States. There was much investigation about that awful
Samar campaign afterward. General Smith was court-martialed and partly
whitewashed, at least not dismissed. At General Smith's court-martial,
there was some dispute about the alleged orders to "kill and burn,"
to "kill everything over ten years old," etc. But the nature of the
campaign may be inferred from General Smith's famous circular No. 6,
which, issued on Christmas eve, 1901, advised his command, in effect,
that he did not take much stock in the civil commission's confidence
that the people really wanted peace; that he was "thoroughly convinced"
that the wealthy people in the towns of his district were aiding the
insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that he proposed to


    adopt a policy that will create in all the minds of all the
    people a burning desire for the war to cease; a desire or longing
    so intense, so personal, and so real that it will impel them to
    devote themselves in real earnest to bringing about a real state
    of peace. [384]


During all his trial troubles, General Smith "took what was coming
to him" without a murmur, and General Chaffee stuck to him as far as
he could without assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful
orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went to Samar, his
superior officer, General Chaffee, was in just the direly vengeful
frame of mind he, General Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted
him to do, substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no
means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put the blame on his
chief. But a fearful lesson was given the Filipinos, and the civil
government profited by it. General Chaffee was never really pressed
on whether he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he did;
Governor Taft was never even criticised for not protesting; but with
a flourish of presidential trumpets, General Smith was finally made
"the goat," by being summarily placed on the retired list, and that
closed the bloody Samar episode of 1901-02. I wonder General Smith
has not gone and wept on General Miles's shoulder and like him become
a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston. Some of the best
fighting men in the army say that as a soldier in battle General
Smith is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation in the
following passage of the Scriptures which fits and describes his case:


    But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be
    presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him,
    and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. [385]


In his Report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the four principal
provinces, including Batangas, which gave trouble shortly after the
civil government was set up in that year, and had to be returned
to military control, were organized under civil rule "on the
recommendation" of the then commanding general (MacArthur) [386]: It
certainly seems unlikely that the haste to change from military rule
to civil rule came on the motion of the military. If the Commission
ever got, in writing, from General MacArthur, a "recommendation" that
any provinces be placed under civil rule while still in insurrection,
the text of the writing will show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the
will of Mr. McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contemporaneous
evidence will show that General MacArthur told them, substantially,
that they were "riding for a fall." In fact, whenever an insurrection
would break out in a province after Governor Taft's inauguration as
governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philippines, from
the commanding general down, was "I told you so." They did not say
this where Governor Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge
that they were much addicted to damning "politics" as the cause of
all the trouble.

Governor Taft's statement in his report for 1901, that the four
principal provinces, above named, Batangas and the rest, were organized
under civil rule "on the recommendation of General MacArthur,"
is fully explained in his testimony before the Senate Committee of
1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted from President
McKinley's state papers concerning the Philippines, especially
his messages to Congress, the political pressure Mr. McKinley was
under from the beginning to make a show of "civil" government, thus
emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial opposition
to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity for the use of force,
so as to palliate American repugnance to forcing a government upon an
unwilling people, has been made clear. There were to be no "dark days
of reconstruction." The Civil War in the United States from 1861 to
1865 was a love feast compared with our war in the Philippines. Yet the
work of reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated on the
theory of consent, so persistently urged by President McKinley before
the American people from the beginning, viz., that the insurrection
represented only a small faction of the people. We have seen how
General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, entertained this
notion, and how by the time he took Malolos in March, 1899, he had
gotten over this notion, and had--regretfully--recognized that "the
whole people are loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents." And
now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of continuous
fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on behalf of Mr. McKinley,
that he, MacArthur, did not know what he was talking about, and that
"the great majority" were for American rule. The representative
men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return of the State to
military control in 1870. Most of them had been officers of the
Confederate army. The Federal commander simply told them that if
they could not restrain the lawless element of their own people, he
would. By premature setting up of the Philippine civil government,
the lawless element was allowed full swing. General MacArthur had
been in the Civil War. He knew something about reconstruction. But
here were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. McKinley to
the effect that civil government, government "essentially popular in
form," was to be set up as fast as territory was conquered. It didn't
make any difference about the government being "essentially popular"
just so it was "essentially popular in form." To the Senate Committee
of 1902, Governor Taft said:


    General MacArthur and the Commission did differ as to where the
    power lay with respect to the organization of civil governments,
    as to who should say what civil governments should be organized,
    the Commission contending that, under the instructions, it was
    left to them, and General MacArthur thinking that everything was
    subject to military control ultimately, in view of the fact that
    the islands were in a state of war. [387]


Governor Taft then added that he and General MacArthur reached a
modus vivendi. When a good soldier once finds out just what his
commander-in-chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good
faith, to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how
unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General MacArthur saw what
President McKinley wanted done, he proceeded to co-operate loyally
with Governor Taft to carry out the plan. He well knew the country
was not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley was bent on
crowding civil government forward as fast as territory was conquered,
he would make his recommendations on that basis. In the matter of
the utter folly of the prematurity with which the civil government
was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the terrible consequences
to the hapless Filipinos, hereinafter described, which followed,
by reason of the premature withdrawal of the police protection of
the army and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated,
from a country just recovering from some six years of war, General
MacArthur's exemption from responsibility is shown by his reports
for 1900 and 1901. [388] The former has already been fully examined,
and the original sharp differences between him and Governor Taft
made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the date of
the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, if I mistake not, the
day of General MacArthur's final departure for the United States,
the latter washes his hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense,
born of political expediency, about there having never been any real
fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncertain terms thus:


    Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede the
    activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments [our
    military forces,] will not only be a menace to the present, but
    put in jeopardy the entire future of American possibilities in
    the archipelago. [389]


No, President Taft can never make General MacArthur "the goat" for
what General Bell had to do in Batangas Province in 1901-02 to make
our "willing" subjects behave. Nor can the ultimate responsibility
before the bar of history for the awful fact that, according to the
United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Atlas of the Philippines of
1899, the population of Batangas Province was 312,192, and according
to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903 it was 257,715,
[390] rest entirely on military shoulders. An attempt to place the
responsibility for the prematurity of the civil government on General
MacArthur was made by Honorable Henry C. Ide, who was of the Taft
Commission of 1900, and later Governor General of the Islands, and
is now Minister to Spain, in the North American Review for December,
1907. But Mr. Taft, a man of nobler mould, has at least maintained a
decorous silence on the subject except when interrogated by Congress,
and when so interrogated, his testimony, above quoted, if analyzed,
places the responsibility where it honestly belongs. In 1900 the Taft
Commission were not taking much military advice.

Batangas province was first taken under the wing of the
peace-at-any-price policy by the Act of the Taft Commission of May 2,
1901, entitled "An Act Extending the Provisions of 'the Provincial
Government Act' [391] to the Province of Batangas." By the Act of
the Commission of July 17, 1901, the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, and
Bohol, were restored to military control. When the civil authorities
turned those provinces back to military control, they well knew the
frame of mind the military were in, and there is no escape from the
proposition that they, in effect, said to the military: "Take them
and chasten them; go as far as you like. After you are done with them,
it will be time enough to pet them again. But for the present we mean
business." General Bell was scathingly criticised on the floor of the
United States Senate for what he did in Batangas in 1901-02, but by
the time he took hold there it had become a case of "spare the rod
and spoil the child." The substitution by the Commission of kindness,
and a disposition to forget what the Filipinos could not forget, for
firmness and the policy of making them submit unreservedly to the
inevitable,--viz., abandonment of their dream of independence--had
created among them a well-nigh ineradicable impression that, for some
reason or other, whether due to disapproval in the United States
of the so-called "imperial" policy or what not, we were afraid of
them. General Bell's task in Batangas, therefore, was to eradicate
this impression all over the archipelago by making an example of the
Batangas people.

In General Chaffee's report for 1902, [392] he prefaces his account
of General Bell's operations in Batangas as follows:


    The long-continued resistance in the province of Batangas and
    in certain parts of the bordering provinces of Tayabas, Laguna,
    and Cavite, had made it apparent to me and to others that the
    insurrectionary force keeping up the struggle there could exist
    and maintain itself only through the connivance and knowledge
    of practically all the inhabitants; that it received the active
    support of many who professed friendship for United States
    authority, etc.


This last was a thrust at Governor Taft's new-found Filipino friends
and advisers, in whose lack of sympathy with the cause of their
country the Governor so profoundly believed, but in whose continuing
co-operation in the killing of his soldiers General Chaffee believed
still more profoundly.

General Bell's famous operations on a large scale in Batangas began
January 1, 1902. The great mistake of the Civil Commission, to which
they adhered so long, was in supposing that when the respectable
military element of the insurgents was pursued to capture or surrender,
these last could and would thereafter control the situation. As a
matter of fact, whether they could or not, they did not.

In his celebrated circular order dated Batangas, December 9, 1901,
General Bell announced:


    To all Station Commanders:

    A general conviction, which the brigade commander shares,
    appears to exist, that the insurrection in this brigade continues
    because the greater part of the people, especially the wealthy
    ones, pretend to desire, but do not in reality want peace; that
    when all really want peace, we can have it promptly. Under such
    circumstances, it is clearly indicated that a policy should be
    adopted that will, as soon as possible, make the people want
    peace and want it badly.

    The only acceptable and convincing evidence of the real sentiments
    of either individuals or town councils should be such acts
    publicly performed as must inevitably commit them irrevocably to
    the side of Americans by arousing the animosity of the insurgent
    element. * * * No person should be given credit for loyalty simply
    because he takes the oath of allegiance, or secretly conveys to
    Americans worthless information and idle rumors which result in
    nothing. Those who publicly guide our troops to the camps of the
    enemy, who publicly identify insurgents, who accompany troops in
    operations against the enemy, who denounce and assist in arresting
    the secret enemies of the Government, who publicly obtain and
    bring reliable and valuable information to commanding officers,
    those in fact who publicly array themselves against the insurgents,
    and for Americans, should be trusted and given credit for loyalty,
    but no others. No person should be given credit for loyalty solely
    on account of having done nothing for or against us so far as
    known. Neutrality should not be tolerated. Every inhabitant of
    this brigade should be either active friend or be classed as enemy.


In his Circular Order No. 5, dated Batangas, December 13, 1901, [393]
General Bell announced that General Orders No. 100, Adjutant General's
Office, 1863, approved and published by order of President Lincoln,
for the government of the armies of the United States in the field,
would thereafter be regarded as the guide of his subordinates in the
conduct of the war. This order is familiar to all who have ever made
any study of military law. Ordinarily, of course, a captured enemy
is entitled to "the honors of war," i. e., he must be held, housed,
and fed, unless exchanged, until the close of the war. But where an
enemy places himself by his conduct without the pale of the laws of
war, i. e., where he does not "play the game according to the rules,"
he may be killed on sight, like other outlaws.

Under General Orders No. 100, 1863, men and squads of men who,
without commission, without being part or portion of the regularly
organized hostile army, fight occasionally only, and with intermittent
returns to their homes and avocations, and frequent assumption of the
semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character
and appearance of soldiers; armed prowlers seeking to cut telegraph
wires, destroy bridges and the like, etc., are not entitled to the
protection of the laws of war and may be shot on sight. In other
words, the game being one of life and death, you must take even
chances with your opponent. General Bell's defenders on the floor of
the Senate simply relied on General Orders No. 100. However, there is
nothing about reconcentration in that order. We learned that from the
Spaniards. In fact we never did succeed in bringing to terms the far
Eastern colonies we bought from Spain, until we adopted her methods
with regard to them. Another of the expedients adopted by General Bell
in Batangas seems harsh, but it was used by Wellington in the latter
end of the Napoleonic wars, and by the Germans in the latter end of
the Franco-Prussian War. It was to promise the inhabitants of a given
territory that whenever a telegraph wire or pole was cut the country
within a stated radius thereof, including all human habitations,
would be devastated. It is in General Bell's Circular Order No. 7
of December 15, 1901, [394] that we find the genesis of the idea of
basing tactics used by Weyler in Cuba on Mr. Lincoln's General Order
100. He there says:


    Though Section 17, General Orders 100, authorizes the starving
    of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided
    it leads to a speedier subjection of the enemy, it is considered
    neither justifiable nor desirable to permit any person to starve
    who has come into towns under our control seeking protection.


This order goes on to direct that all food supplies encountered
be brought to the towns. Of course this does not mean supplies
captured from the enemy's forces, which may lawfully be destroyed
at once. To those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it
should be explained that reconcentration means this: You notify,
by proclamation and otherwise, all persons within a given area, that
on and after a certain day they must all leave their homes and come
within a certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named town is
usually the centre, there to remain until further orders, and that
all persons found outside that zone after the date named will be
treated as public enemies. General Bell's order of December 20th,
provided that rice found in the possession of families outside the
protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with them to the town
which was the centre of the zone, that that found apparently cached
for enemy's use should be confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary.


    Whenever it is found absolutely impossible to transport it [any
    food supply] to a point within the protected zone, it will be
    burned or otherwise destroyed. These rules will apply to all
    food products.


No person within the reconcentration zones was permitted to go
outside thereof--cross the dead line--without a written pass. The
Circular Order of December 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate
commanders might become infected with the Taft belief in Filipino
affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, all the municipal
officials, members of the police force, etc., "who have not fully
complied with their duty by actively aiding the Americans and rendering
them valuable service," shall be summarily thrown into prison. [395]
Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, provided that,


    in order to make the existing state o£ war and martial law
    so inconvenient and unprofitable to the people that they will
    earnestly desire and work for the re-establishment of peace and
    civil government,


subordinate commanders might, under certain prescribed restrictions,
put everybody they chose to work on the roads. [396] This was an
ingenious blow at the wealthy and soft-handed, intended to superinduce
submission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds of affection
thus sown for the civil government under the reconstruction period
which was to follow. In one of Dickens novels there occurs a law
firm by the name of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite
fond of considering himself, and of being considered by others, as
tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. When the widow and the orphan
would plead with Mr. Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage,
that benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expression of
infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could for them, but that
they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, "who is a very exacting man,"
he would say. In the dual American politico-military régime in the
Philippines of 1901-02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, General
Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former always seemed to harbor the
amiable delusion that the Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as
the movants in each proceeding against them, and that on the contrary
they were sure to make a favorable contrast in their hearts between
the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He
seemed blind to the fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was
done by any of us, spelled us--U. S.

General Bell's Circular Order No. 22, also a Christmas Eve product,
re-iterates the usual purpose to make the people yearn for civil
government, and the usual warning that none of them really and truly
want the blessings of American domination and Benevolent Assimilation
as they truly should, and adds:


    To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of
    war as insupportable as possible; and there is no more efficacious
    way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people
    in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such
    conditions will soon become unbearable. Little should be said. The
    less said the better. Let acts, not words, convey intentions. [397]


Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell reports:


    I am now assembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, who will be
    used in columns of fifty each. I expect to accompany the command.
    * * * I take so large a command for the purpose of thoroughly
    searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents
    and for food, expecting to destroy everything I find outside of
    town. All able-bodied men will be killed or captured.


Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran
Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned
wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling
to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is
beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the
nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs
the soldier above mentioned had lost many a "bunkie," there had gone
on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy,
whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could
fill, much appointing to municipal and other offices of Filipinos,
many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful
to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade
business. With this and the Balangiga massacre ever in mind, the
men of General Bell's brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood
which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to "make living
unbearable" for the Filipino "by acts, not words." Also, the American
soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly,
until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is
beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy
in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell's 2500 men began
that Batangas campaign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference,
out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran:


            "He may be a brother of William H. Taft
            But he ain't no friend of mine,"


and between songs they would say purringly to one another, "Remember
Balangiga." And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of
this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and
the ring of his iron heel:


    I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. I shall then
    move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country
    westward to the ocean and south of Cavite, returning through
    Lipa. I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging
    northward, the country in the vicinity of [here follows a long
    list of towns] will be scoured, ending at [a named mountain],
    which will then be thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging
    back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the
    country of which [two named mountains] are the main peaks.


And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in Batangas was commended
in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as
well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as "a model in suppressing
insurrections under like circumstances." [398] The Batangas programme
was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the
United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the
Batangas severities and the Samar "kill and burn" orders. I tried
in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved
fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it
had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the
McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of
alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling,
had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people
used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making
sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them,
and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying
them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in
Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in
his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the
Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and
a personal friend of the Senator's, whose name he withheld, but for
whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to "a reconcentrado,
pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is
shot"; spoke of "this corpse-carcass stench wafted in" (to where the
letter-writer sat writing) as making it "slightly unpleasant here,"
and made your flesh crawl thus:


    At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on their
    orgies over the dead.


This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like
Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered
in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell, [399]
and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled
matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in
those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the
dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations,
which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is
not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give
it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were
daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General
Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar
surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged
of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of
insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents
surrendered. [400]

The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse than his
"bite." The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901-02
lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not
as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite
naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was
made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was
312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the
outset to make General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we
are considering his "bite"--how many lives his Batangas lesson to
the Filipino people cost--another bit of testimony is tremendously
relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas
Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due
to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to a little over 200,000
the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province
had." [401] Considering that General Bell's 1901-'02 campaign in that
ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,--how many of the 209
wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered--the
Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from
the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of
"suppressing insurrection under like circumstances." But it was never
again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon's
"corpse-carcass stench" from supposed reconcentrado pens and his
"clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the
dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain
out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the
noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor
Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most
sobbingly in love with "a benign civil government" and had forgotten
all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a
campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home
a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at
the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair
made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again
in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least;
whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon's army friend's "clouds of
vampire bats softly swirling" over the corpses of reconcentrados, were
doing said swirling not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man
familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces can see from
the letter that it was written from Samar. Moreover, Colonel Wagner
afterwards testified before the Senate Committee of 1902 [402] that
if there had been any great mortality in the reconcentration camps
in Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected practically
all those Batangas camps. Nobody who was in the islands at the time
doubts but what such conditions may have obtained in some places
under General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that any such
conditions would have been tolerated under General Bell. General Bell
has that aversion to either causing or witnessing needless suffering,
which you almost invariably find in men who are both constitutionally
brave and temperamentally generous and considerate of others. But the
moral sought to be pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration
in Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in Samar were
hellish, but that, in all matters concerning the Philippines, the army,
as in the case of Senator Bacon's friend, is gagged by operation of
law, and its enforced silence is peculiarly an asset in the hands of
the party in power seeking to continue in power, in a distant colonial
enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his friend's name, because for an
army officer to tell the truth about the Philippines would be likely
to get him into trouble with the President of the United States. The
President, be it remembered, is also the leader of the political party
to which he belongs. That is why the country has never been able to
get any light from those who know the most about the Philippines and
the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. In 1898 this
republic was beguiled into abandonment of the faiths of the founders
and started after a gold brick, thinking it was a Klondyke. Then and
ever since, the most important and material witnesses concerning the
wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the army,--which best
of all knows the rank folly of it--have been gagged by operation
of law. All republics that have heretofore become monarchies, have
become so through manipulation of the army by men in power seeking
to continue in power. We should either resign our expensive kingship
over the Philippines or get a king for the whole business, and be
done with it. We have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R. [403]

"On June 23, 1902," says General Chaffee, in his report for that year,
[404] "by Act No. 421 of the Philippine Commission, so much of Act
No. 173, of July 17, 1901, as transferred the province of Batangas
to military control was revoked. Civil government was re-established
in the province at 12 o'clock noon, July 4, 1902." The rest of the
1,748,573 people herein above mentioned as constituting the population
of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in
turn made to "want peace and want it badly," and on July 4, 1902,
President Roosevelt issued his proclamation declaring that a state of
general and complete peace existed. This is the famous proclamation
in which he congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men of
his command on "a total of more than 2000 combats, great and small,"
most of them subsequent to the Taft roseate cablegrams of 1900,
and the still more roseate reports of 1901 from the same source. The
proclamation appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66,
Adjutant General's Office, Washington, dated July 4, 1902. [405]
It directed, in the body of it, that it be "read aloud at parade in
every military post." It thanked the officers and enlisted men of the
army in the Philippines, in the name of the President of the United
States, for the courage and fortitude, the indomitable spirit and loyal
devotion with which they had been fighting up to that time, alluded
to the impliedly lamb-like or turn-the-other-cheek way in which they
had been behaving (no special reference is made either to Batangas,
Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully Rooseveltian
war-whoop about the "more than 2000 combats, great and small," above
mentioned. It also referred to how, "with admirable good temper and
loyalty to American ideals its (the army's) commanding generals have
joined with the civilian agents of the government" in the work of
superinducing allegiance to American sovereignty. This document is
one of the most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable of
men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of ability to mould
powerful discordant elements to his will. It put everybody in a good
humor. And yet, read at every military post, it served notice on the
military that if they knew which side their bread was buttered on,
they had better forget everything they knew tending to show the
prematurity of the setting-up of the civil government, sheath all
tomahawks and scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting
for Governor Taft's exit from office, abstain from chatty letters to
United States Senators telling tales out of school, such as the one
Senator Bacon had read on the floor of the Senate (already noticed),
and dutifully perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as
officially announced in the proclamation itself.

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, declares that the
insurrection "as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of
the United States" is over (p. 3). They then proceed, with evident
sincerity, to describe the popularity of themselves and their
policies with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in
your Congressional district, in the type of man who thinks he could
be elected to Congress "in a walk" if he should only announce his
candidacy, when as a matter of fact, the great majority of the people
of his district are, for some notorious reason connected with his
past history among them,--say his war record--very much prejudiced
against him. They repeat one of their favorite sentiments about the
whole country--always except "as hereinafter excepted"--being now
engaged in enjoying civil government. But they casually admit also that
"much remains to be done" in suppressing lawlessness and disturbances,
so as to perfect and accentuate said "enjoyment."

Let us see just what the state of the country was in this regard
according to their own showing. They say:


    The six years of war to which these islands have been subjected
    have naturally created a class of restless men utterly lacking
    in habits of industry, taught to live and prey upon the country
    for their support by the confiscation of food supplies as a
    war measure, and regarding the duties of a laborer as dull and
    impossible for one who has tasted the excitement of a guerrilla
    life. Even to the man anxious to return to agricultural pursuits,
    the conditions existing present no temptation. By the war
    and by the rinderpest, chiefly the latter, the carabaos, or
    water-buffaloes, have been reduced to ten per cent. of their
    former number.


Think of the condition of a country, any country, but especially one
whose wealth is almost wholly agricultural, which has just had nine
tenths of its plow animals absolutely swept off the face of the earth
by war and its immediate consequences. The report proceeds:


    The chief food of the common people of these islands is rice,
    and the carabao is the indispensable instrument of the people in
    the cultivation of rice,


adding also that the carabao is the chief means of transportation
of the tobacco, hemp, and other crops to market, and that the few
remaining carabaos, the ordinary price of which in normal Spanish
times had been $10 was now $100. Then, after completing a faithful
picture of supremely thorough desolation such as the Islands had never
seen since they first rose out of the sea, certainly not during the
sleepy, easy-going Spanish rule, they say: "The Filipino people of
the better class have received the passage of the Philippine Act with
great satisfaction"--meaning the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, the
Philippine Government Act. Gott im Himmel! What did the people care
about paper constitutions concerning benevolent assimilation? What they
were interested in was food and safety, not politics; food, raiment,
shelter, and efficient police protection from the brigandage which
immediately follows in the wake of all war, not details as to what we
were going to do with the bleeding and prostrate body politic. But
the Commission had started out to govern the Filipino people on a
definite theory,--apparently on the idea that if Americans wore white
duck and no brass buttons, in lieu of khaki and brass buttons, the
Filipinos would at once forget the war and be happy with an exceeding
great happiness. Now the real situation was this. The Islands had not
yet been thoroughly beaten into submission. Northern Luzon had been
conquered. The lake region of Southern Luzon had been conquered. The
most important of the Visayan Islands had been conquered. But the
extreme southern portion of Luzon, the enormously rich hemp peninsula
already described in a former chapter, and the adjoining hemp island of
Samar, were still seething with sedition which later broke out. All
through the winter of 1900-01 General MacArthur had tried to get
Mr. Root to let him close the hemp ports. But some powerful influence
at Washington had prevented the grant of this permission. On January 9,
1901, General MacArthur had wired Mr. Root:


    Hemp in southern Luzon in same relation to present struggle as
    cotton during rebellion. [406]


Nothing doing. General MacArthur must worry along with the
"blockade-runners" as best he could, no matter how much hemp money
might be poured into the insurgent coffers. So that in the latter
part of 1902, although the more respectable of the insurgent leaders
had then surrendered, even in the hemp country, the flames of public
disorder, which had flickered for a spell after the Batangas lesson,
broke out anew in the province of Albay, and in parts of Sorsogon,
the two provinces of the hemp peninsula having the best sea-ports. The
man at the head of this Albay insurrection was a sorry scamp of some
shrewdness by the name of Simeon Ola, with whom I afterwards had an
interesting and in some respects most amusing acquaintance. But that
is another story. I have simply brought the whole archipelago abreast
of the close of 1902, relatively to public order. In this way only
may the insurrections in Albay and elsewhere in 1902-03, described
in the chapter which follows, be understood in their relation to a
comprehensive view of the American occupation from the beginning,
and not be regarded as "a local issue" like General Hancock's tariff,
having no general political significance. In this way only may those
insurrections be understood in their true relation to the history of
public order in the Islands. The Commission always represented all
disturbances after 1902 as matters of mere banditti, such as have
been chronic for generations in Calabria or the Transcaucasus, wholly
distinct from, instead of being an inevitable political sequel of,
the years of continuous warfare which had preceded. Their benevolent
obsession was that the desire of the Philippine people for independence
was wholly and happily eradicated.






CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903

                            Me miserable! Which way shall I fly?

                                                          Paradise Lost.


Throughout the last year of Governor Taft's administration in the
Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in
the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The
military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901-2 had
precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at
the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public,
already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had
never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of "the days
when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when,
before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
thundered against the oppressor of Africa." [407] He did not want to
order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated
him to his native municipal police and constabulary, experimental
outfits of doubtful loyalty, [408] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as
it afterwards turned out, [409] for the maintenance of public order and
for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security
for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as
well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity
of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, though not so enamored
of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about
resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see
brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that
sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in
the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many
years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded
by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army
were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would
at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous
institution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a
year, in 1902-3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago,
the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon,
and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had
begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked,
because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and
inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of
weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately
vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the
Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an
attitude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration,
but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must
ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American
sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as
senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American
statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year
ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the
political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he
may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft's administration
of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible
effect it might have on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an
elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor
party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, let us examine his
course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines
in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every
government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley's original instructions of April 7, 1900,
to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the
articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:


    This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all
    descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard
    of the faith and honor of the American army;


the President had added:


    As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of
    the United States to give protection for property and life
    * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

    * * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance
    of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of
    their country.


We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the
Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of
citizen in the republic to-day than the man now [410] at the head of
it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article
on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President
Roosevelt, entitled "The First Civil Governor," which began as follows:


    A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public
    life and American public men [411] remarked that the first Governor
    of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make
    a first-class President of the United States with the qualities
    which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States,
    and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was
    Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.


The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing
estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or
not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President
Taft's policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his
chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him
honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in
the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though
as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of
the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem
of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With
this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and
the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has
preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being
animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person
of the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and
fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion,
viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we
blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house
divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with
the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what
may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will
always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the
controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that
in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect
the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly
enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley's
original instructions to him, lest "the full performance of this
obligation" might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend,
Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged,
then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing
business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes
any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled to
a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it "concerns
the honor and conscience of their country."

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders
in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned,
together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then,
that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled
by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary
incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of
"civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace
the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage
prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the
riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked
on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming
subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which
must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I
know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly
nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God.

The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which
began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying
embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials
by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three
distinct stages:

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental
formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having
terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated,
patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of
provinces, until the summer of 1902.

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious
in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil
government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things
had been given time to settle down in them to normal.

These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above
mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really
understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration
applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens
such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through
which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction
is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from
one of the military reports of 1902:


    The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left
    the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands
    of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and
    nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous
    class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live
    without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the
    guise of patriotism. [412]


Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to
public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the
two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have
called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those
of the latter's colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year
previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded
an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa,
etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion:


    Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the
    Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province
    of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole
    archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware, [413]
    having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he
    has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary,
    officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American
    volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded
    out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there
    are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as
    soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set
    to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over
    the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit
    as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to
    act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any
    Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot
    a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior
    economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing
    rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the
    same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of
    the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to
    handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to
    mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures
    through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may,
    possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be
    made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them
    when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other
    cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can
    see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands,
    or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the
    ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners
    will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all
    until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb
    driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore,
    in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary
    force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain
    that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now
    confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series
    of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The
    majority of the people of the province are really sick of the
    war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there
    is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of
    Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless
    element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together
    nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is
    terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto,
    and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole
    province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands
    that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore,
    this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common
    concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and
    order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for
    the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell
    or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province
    just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it.


At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though
tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with
Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington,
calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial
Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The
man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an
annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt
bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus:


    I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for
    his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar,
    and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can
    be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith
    in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from
    reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats swirling out
    on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend,
    whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never
    did have any application to Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did
    a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice
    of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in
    Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that
    all those people received daily medical treatment.


For the correctness of the picture of conditions presented in the
above hypothetical talk, I of course intend to be understood as
vouching. If such a talk could have been had in 1903 by President
Roosevelt with Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared his
views, the Albay situation might have been handled creditably. But the
Administration was in no position to be frank with the Opposition. No
Administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a
position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the
situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given
time there was always so much that it could not afford to re-open
and explain. Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too
closely as to why, when Secretary of War, he had gone around the
country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. McKinley, and talking
about "the patient and unconsenting millions" so anxious to be rid
of "Aguinaldo and his band of assassins," when at that very time his
(Mr. Root's) generals in the Philippines were engaged in activities,
the magnitude of which may be inferred from a telegram sent from
Washington to General Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly
spare the 10th Infantry, and adding:


    Imperative that we have immediate use of every available company
    that we can lay our hands on for service in the Philippines, [414]


although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets how nobly the army
had labored in putting down "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." No,
the Administration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank
concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not recapitulate
here any more of the long train of reasons why, because they have all
been fully explained in the preceding chapters. Of course President
Roosevelt had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. He
was not in constant daily contact with army officers at the War
Department, familiar with the actual situation in the Philippines,
as Mr. Root was. He was simply "sticking to Taft." Somewhere along
about the time the military folk in the Philippines were scoffing at
the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to the lack of a strong
government, President Roosevelt had written his warm personal friend,
Hon. George Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, who had
been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, was then an official
of the civil government of the Philippines, and later Governor of
New Mexico, by appointment of Mr. Roosevelt: "Stick to Taft, George"
or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt's attitude was simply that
of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft who simply assumed that the
Philippine Government was not going to tolerate impotence in the matter
of protecting life and property. But everybody at both ends of the line
was too deep in the mire of all the long and systematic withholding
of facts from the American public which had been occurring ever since
1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to
illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published
official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical
conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position
to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil
government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked
notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own
and Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency,
respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from
the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized
the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left
to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order
in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just
suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What
then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological
order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would
suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do.

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases
arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way
region as "the affair of March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for
1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor
Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of
Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer
in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while
they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town,
and departed. But Mr. Taft's report disposes of the whole incident
in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that
a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the
provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country,
hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of
them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and
stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements
arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to present the gravity of
the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent
solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote
provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified list," to
say nothing of politically negligible native life therein. [415]
Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the
ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope
with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in
the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy
with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair,
Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and
get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one
hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken
away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people
who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th
Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United
States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as
deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under "civil"
government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark,
and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never
taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying "the peace and
protection of a benign civil government." The writ of habeas corpus
was never suspended for a moment.

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft remarks that if
the prompt steps he did take (he had already described the prompt
sending of the military to the scene) had not been taken, "the trouble
might have spread." But the Surigao affair seemed to teach the civil
government nothing in the matter of subsequent protection of life,
nor did it lessen their persistence in relying on their constabulary
for due extension of such protection in time of need.

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for avoiding calling on the
military. When you are in a foreign country building a new government
on the ruins of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you
can about how the old one met its problems. The Spaniards had had
the same problem in their day about not ordering out the military,
because they did not have any military to order out. They were too poor
to garrison the various provinces. They had long followed the plan,
from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main towns of disturbed
districts all the country population they could get to come in, and
then acting on the assumption that all who did not come in were public
enemies. This meant that when the country people came in, they simply
looked out for themselves, while away from their homes, and farms,
as best they could. Of course nobody at all looked after the farms,
and nobody provided medical attention for the reconcentrados, or
sanitary attention for the reconcentration camps. This general plan
was formally sanctioned by the Commission, in so far as the following
law sanctioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is section
6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all the constabulary
problems, of which this was one. It read:


    In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or
    outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the outlying
    barrios [416] are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory
    raids--


think of permitting a country to get into any such condition when you
have an abundance of American troops on hand available to prevent it--


    and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or outlaws
    their sources of food supply, and it is not possible with the
    available police forces constantly to provide protection to
    such barrios--


there being all the time "available police forces," in the shape
of regular troops, amply able to handle these unsettled conditions,
which were the inevitable aftermath of lawlessness consequent on five
or six years of guerrilla warfare--


    it shall be within the power of the Governor-General, upon
    resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize the
    provincial governor to order that the residents of such outlying
    barrios be temporarily brought--


observe the length of time this may last is not limited--


    within stated proximity to the poblacion, or larger barrios, of
    the municipality, there to remain until the necessity for such
    order ceases to exist.


To house and ration the reconcentrados, the following provision is
made by the statute we are considering:


    During such temporary residence, it shall be the duty of the
    provincial board, out of provincial funds, to furnish such
    sustenance and shelter as may be needed to prevent suffering
    among the residents of the barrios thus withdrawn.


The act also provides that during the course of the reconcentration,
where the province does not happen to have the necessary ready
cash, it may apply to the Commission, in distant Manila, for an
appropriation to meet the emergency. What is to be done with those
who starve during the temporary deficit, it does not say. If you
must have reconcentration, to leave it to such agencies as the above,
with the native police and constabulary as understudies, in lieu of
availing yourself of the superb equipment of the American army, with
all its facilities for handling great masses of people, as they did,
for instance, after the San Francisco fire, is like preferring the
Mulligan Guards to the Cold-stream Guards. Furthermore, there is no
escape from the logic of the fact that reconcentration is essentially
a war measure. The difference between what is lawful in war and what
is lawful in peace is not a technical one. In war the innocent must
often suffer with the guilty. In peace the theory at least is that
only the guilty suffer. Hence it is that our Constitution is so
jealous that in time of peace no man's life, liberty, or property,
shall be taken from him without "due process of law," a provision
which becomes inoperative in war times, being superseded by martial
law. I know that the early question, "Does the Constitution follow
the flag?" was answered by the Supreme Court of the United States in
the negative as to the Philippines. But the Act of Congress of July
1, 1902, under which we were governing the Philippines in 1903,
and still govern them, known as the Philippine Government Act,
extended to the Islands all the provisions of the Bill of Rights of
our Constitution except the right of jury trial and the individual
right to go armed--"bear arms." It specifically said in section 5:


    No law shall be enacted in said Islands which shall deprive any
    person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.


It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the rural population
of a whole district out of house and home, and make them come to town
to live indefinitely on such public charity as may drain through the
itching fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning meantime
their growing crops, and the household effects they cannot bring with
them, is depriving people of their property, and restraining them
of their liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, in
the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine Report, page 116,
during an insurrection in Batangas, to control which, the presidential
election of 1904 being then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus
had been suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court of the
Philippines held that detention of people as reconcentrados under
such circumstances "for the purpose of protecting them" was not an
illegal restraint of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been
suspended. This decision held it to be both the prerogative and the
duty of the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus
when the public safety so required.

I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, the former
wise and just judge, in whom is now vested by law the mighty power
of filling vacancies on the highest court in this great country of
ours, will seriously contend that that reconcentration law is not in
direct violation of the above quoted section of the Act of Congress
of July 1, 1902, for the government of the Philippines, and therefore
null and void. The truth is, it was a piece of careless legislation,
dealing with conditions that were essentially war conditions, under
a government which was forever vowing that peace conditions existed,
and determined not to admit the contrary. The civil government was
like Lot's wife. It could not look back.

The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual provision permitting
the governor to declare martial law in a given locality in his
discretion. But the reconcentration law passed by the Philippine
Commission was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority,
so as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces to which
it might be applied, regardless of how many lives it might cost. In
its last analysis the reconcentration law was at once an admission
of a duty to order out the military and a declaration of intention
to neglect that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who enacted
it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives how to maintain
order themselves by letting them stew in the dregs of their own
insurrection. Yet no one can read the Commission's own description
of the widespread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the
guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without seeing,
from their own showing, how obvious was their duty to have waited,
originally, until law and order were restored, by not interfering
with the war itself until it was over, and by keeping the country
properly garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it
was over, until something like real peace conditions should exist,
on which to begin the work of post-bellum reconstruction. After all,
it all gets us back to the original pernicious programme outlined in
President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1899,
wherein was announced the intention to send out the Taft Commission,
which message also announced, in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley's
purpose to begin the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient
and unconsenting millions "loyal to our rule" should be rescued from
the clutch of the hated Tagals.

Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the moral quality
of executive action putting it in operation was not unlike that which
would attach should the Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering
the state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a dozen
towns around Boston, issue a proclamation something like this:


    The situation has grown so serious that your local police force,
    as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the situation. You
    will all, therefore, thrust your tooth-brushes, night-gowns,
    and a change of clothing, into the family grip, and assemble
    on the Boston Common and in the public gardens, there to remain
    until the necessity for this order ceases to exist, and we will
    there take the best care of you we can, as was done in the case
    of the San Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order
    out the military.


If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought at the time to the
validity of the reconcentration law, in its relation to the "due
process of law" clause of the Philippine Government Act, which none
of them probably did, he must simply have justified the means by the
benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so much better than
Congress possibly could, the needs of the local situation. But if you
read this law in the light of a knowledge of its practical operation,
there is more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon's friend's
"corpse-carcass stench" and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling
out on their orgies over the dead" than there is of benevolence. It
really was unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted
reconcentration to the native police and constabulary the native
governors had, and it was wholly indefensible for them to take the
liberty of violating an act of Congress in order to live up to their
pet fiction about the war being "entirely over."

After the term of court at Surigao in the month of May, 1903, I was
sent to Misamis province, where I remained until September, handling an
insurrection down there. This province also was nominally in a state of
peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of the existence of the
insurrection by suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Curiously
enough, as I wrote Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of
disturbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their movement
was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection in Albay I dealt with
later, but they were by no means unmitigated cut-throats. I have often
wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They
did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed
purpose was to subvert the existing government. The use of this word
"insurrection" in connection with these various disturbances recalls
a pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the Supreme Bench
of the Islands. Some of my friends, members of the bar of my district,
got up a petition to the then Governor-General setting forth in most
partial terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in the
Philippines, in the candor of informal social intercourse, all of
us always called a spade a spade, i.e., we called an insurrection an
insurrection, instead of referring to the disturbance in the guarded
and euphemistic terms which you find in all the official reports
intended for home consumption. So in their petition, these gentlemen
recited, among my other supposed qualifications, that I had held
court in three different provinces "during insurrections in the same."

The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to deal with during
Governor Taft's administration as Governor of the Philippines. This
was the insurrection headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of
this man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Government in
connection with the Albay disturbances of 1902-3 is in the report
of the colonel commanding the constabulary for the district which
included Albay, Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903. [417] This
report contains a sort of diary of events for the year preceding the
date of it. An entry for October 28, 1902, begins:


    Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon Ola, chief
    of the ladrones in this province, with a view of inducing him
    to surrender.


Think of this great government negotiating with the leader of a band
of thieves who were openly and flagrantly defying its authority! The
entry proceeds:


    After many promises and conferences extending over a period of
    forty days, during which hostilities were suspended, Ola broke
    off negotiations and withdrew his entire force and a large number
    of additional recruits that he had secured during the armistice.


Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to have had a total
command ranging at various times from a thousand to 1500 men. And I
think Colonel Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him,
first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. Ola also
makes an official reappearance in the report of the Governor of Albay
Province for 1904. [418] It there appears that reconcentration was
begun in Albay as part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in
March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of that year. Says
this report of the Governor of Albay concerning reconcentration:


    Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in a
    limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and
    ordinary living accommodations.


The Governor does not say how large the "unusual volume of persons"
was that was herded into the reconcentration zones, nor does he
furnish any mortality statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was
of the awful mortality and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling
out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend
correspondent encountered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. The
number of people affected by reconcentration in Albay and an adjacent
province that caught the contagion of unrest and had to be given
similar treatment, was about 300,000. [419]

In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insurrection of 1902-3,
Governor Taft says: "A reign of terror was inaugurated throughout
the province." He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied
the reconcentration tactics. In the same report he describes what
is to my mind the most humiliating incident connected with the
whole history of the American Government in the Philippines, viz.,
Vice-Governor Wright's visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance
of the peace-at-any-price policy that the Manila Government was
bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil government's dealings with
His Excellency, the Honorable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands,
that General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino member of the
Commission, went down to Albay and "talked to the people," the idea
apparently being that those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should
go after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out the military,
and summarily putting a stop to the reign of terror as became the
dignity of this nation. I think these talks had something to do with
the origin of the charge afterwards made that immunity was promised
Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. Of course General
Wright made no such promises. But the idea got out in the province
that the word was, "Get the guns," the inference being that if Ola
and his people would come in and surrender their guns they would be
lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philippine Problem, Professor
Willis, at page 140, gives what purports to be an agreement signed
by Colonel Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Bandholtz
promises Ola immunity, and also promises a number of other things
which are on their face rankly preposterous. Ola was much on the
witness stand before me during that term of court, and, everything
"came out in the wash." He was represented by competent, intelligent,
and fearless Filipino counsel, and they did not suggest the existence
of any such document. No proof of any offer of immunity was adduced
before me. I think Ola simply finally decided to throw himself on
the mercy of the government, on the idea that there would be more joy
over the one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that
are already saved. He was probably as much afraid that Governor Taft
would order out the military as the wretched pacificos were that he
would not. He immediately turned state's evidence against all the men
under him of whose individual actings and doings he had any knowledge,
the prosecuting attorney making, with my full approval, a promise
to ask executive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with the
practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions throughout the
English-speaking world.

The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be somewhat appreciated
from the financial loss it occasioned. Says Governor Taft, in his
report for 1903:


    The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production and sale
    have been interfered with to the extent of some ten to twelve
    millions of dollars Mexican [which is equivalent to five or six
    million dollars American money]. [420]


As the population of the province was about 250,000, [421] a loss
of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for the six months or
so of reconcentration during which the farms were neglected. This
would be equivalent to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length
of time to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which is the
total population figure for the United States according to the Census
of 1910.

It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, that Ola finally
surrendered with some five hundred or six hundred men. I was sent to
Albay about the middle of November, to assist the regular judge of
the district, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of the
Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of the case arising
out of the Ola performances. Conditions at the time were also very
much perturbed in various neighboring and other provinces, and the
courts and constabulary were kept very busy.

An incident recurs to memory just here which illustrates the state of
public order. But before relating it a decent respect to the opinions
of the reader requires me to state my own attitude toward that whole
situation at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind that as
society stands at present, capital punishment is a necessary part of
any sensible scheme for its protection. I have no compunction about
hanging any man for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe
it to the community as a measure of protection to your life and mine
and all others. So far as public order was concerned in the country
now under consideration in 1903, the "civil" government was simply a
well-meaning sham, a military government with a civil name to it. When
the constabulary would get in the various brigands, cut-throats, etc.,
who might be terrorizing a given district, some of them masquerading as
patriots, others not even doing that, the courts would try them. None
of the judges cared anything about any particular brigand in any
given case except to find out how many, if any, murders, rapes,
arsons, etc., he had committed during the particular reign of terror
of which he had been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven,
the punishment would always be "a life for a life." And you have no
idea how absolutely wanton some of the murders were, and how cruelly
some of the young women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated
after they were carried off to the mountains. I would hate to try to
guess how much more of this sort of thing would have had to occur in
Albay in 1903 than did occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive
Albay of "the protection of a benign civil government"--one of the pet
expressions of contemporaneous official literature--and say the word
to the army to take hold of the situation and give the people decent
protection. But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly after I
reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. of the district court,
while my colleague, Judge Carson, held Part I. we had a call from a
third judge, Judge Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some
other perturbed region. I think that by that time, late in November,
1903, Governor Taft must have known he was soon to leave the Islands to
become Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able to make
the best showing possible, in his farewell annual report as Governor,
as to the "tranquillity" conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger
came to see us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at
the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge Carson had had a
gallows erected near the public square of the town, for the execution
of some brigand he had convicted, whether it was for maltreating some
poor farmer's daughter until she died, or burying an American alive,
or what, I do not now recollect. But in going around the town some
one suggested, as we passed this gallows, that we go up on it to
get the view. So we went--the three of us. Then each looked at the
other and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge Carson smiled
and dispelled the momentary sombreness by repeating with grim humor,
an old Latin quotation he happened to remember from his college days
at the University of Virginia: Hæc olim meminisse juvabit ("It will
be pleasant to remember these things hereafter").

The Ola insurrection had continued from October, 1902, to October,
1903, without suspension of civil government. During that period the
jail had been filled far beyond its reasonable capacity most of the
time. It sometimes had contained many hundreds. As to the sanitary
conditions, in passing the jail building one day in company with
one of the provincial officials, he remarked to me, nonchalantly:
"It's equivalent to a death sentence to put a man in that jail." I
afterwards found out that this was no joke. During most of my visit
to the province I was too busy holding court and separating the sheep
from the goats, to think much of anything else. But toward the close of
the term, after Christmas, after Governor Taft had left the Islands
and gone home to be Secretary of War, an incident happened that
produced a profound impression on me, suggested a new view-point,
and started troubled doubts as to whether the whole Benevolent
Assimilation business was not a mistake born of a union of avarice
and piety in which avarice predominated--doubts which certain events
of the following year, hereinafter related, converted in conviction
that any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos would
be better for all concerned than any government we could give them,
hampered as we always will be by the ever-present necessity to argue
that government against the consent of the governed is not altogether
wrong, and that taxation without representation may be a blessing in
disguise. The Yule-tide incident above alluded to was this. Most of
the docket having been disposed of, and there being a lull between
Christmas and New Year's day which afforded time for matters more or
less perfunctory in their nature, the prosecuting attorney brought in
rough drafts of two proposed orders for the court to sign. One was
headed with a list of fifty-seven names, the other with a list of
sixty-three names. Both orders recited that "the foregoing" persons
had died in the jail--all but one between May 20 and Dec. 3. 1903
(roughly six and one-half months) as will appear from an examination
of the dates of death--and concluded by directing that the indictments
be quashed. The writer was only holding an extraordinary term of court
there in Albay, and was about to leave the province to take charge
of another district to which Governor Taft had assigned him before
leaving the Islands. The newly appointed regular judge of the district,
Judge Trent, now of the Philippine Supreme Court, was scheduled soon
to arrive. Therefore the writer did not sign the proposed orders
but kept them as legal curios. A correct translation of one of them
appears below, followed by the list of names which headed the other
(identical) order:


    THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, EIGHTH
    JUDICIAL DISTRICT

    In the Court of First Instance of Albay

    The United States against

    Cornelio Rigorosa              died December    3, 1903
    Fabian Basques                 died September  25, 1903
    Julian Nacion                  died October    14, 1903
    Francisco Rigorosa             died October    18, 1903
    Anacleto Solano                died November   25, 1903
    Valentin Cesillano             died November    6, 1903
    Felix Sasutona                 died September  26, 1903
    Marcelo de los Santos          died June        3, 1903
    Marcelo Patingo                died November   15, 1903
    Julian Raynante                died September   7, 1903
    Dionisio Carifiaga             died October     4, 1903
    Felipe Navor                   died September  17, 1903
    Luis Nicol                     died November   23, 1903
    Balbino Nicol                  died September  23, 1903
    Damiano Nicol                  died November   23, 1903
    Leoncio Salbaburo              died November   20, 1903
    Catalino Sideria               died July       25, 1903
    Marcelo Ariola                 died October    26, 1903
    Francisco Cao                  died November   26, 1903
    Martin Olaguer                 died November   13, 1903
    Juan Neric                     died November   16, 1903
    Eufemio Bere                   died November   21, 1903
    Julian Sotero                  died October    30, 1902
    Juan Payadan                   died September  10, 1903
    Benedicto Milla                died July       30, 1903
    Placido Porlage                died June       13, 1903
    Gaudencio Oguita               died October    11, 1903
    Alberto Cabrera                died September   8, 1903
    Julian Payadan                 died August      4, 1903
    Eusebio Payadan                died August     10, 1903
    Leonardo Rebusi                died November    2, 1903
    Julian Riobaldis               died October     2, 1903
    Victor Riobaldis               died October    23, 1903
    Mauricio Balbin                died September  27, 1903
    Tomas Rigador                  died July       23, 1903
    Miguel de los Santos           died July       28, 1903
    Eustaquio Mapula               died November   18, 1903
    Eugenio Lomibao                died November    1, 1903
    Francisco Luna                 died August      7, 1903
    Gregorio Sierte                died October    31, 1903
    Teodoro Patingo                died November   21, 1903
    Teodorico Tua                  died September  23, 1903
    Ceferino Octia                 died November   10, 1903
    Graciona Pamplona              died September  12, 1903
    Felipe Bonifacio               died November   26, 1903
    Baltazer Bundi                 died October    12, 1903
    Julian Locot                   died October    13, 1903
    Francisco de Punta             died August     20, 1903
    Pedro Madrid                   died August     24, 1903
    Felipe Pusiquit                died July       17, 1903
    Rufo Mansalan                  died July       14, 1903
    Ignacio Titano                 died June       20, 1903
    Alfonso Locot                  died June       29, 1903
    Gil Locot                      died May        23, 1903
    Regino Bitarra                 died September   7, 1903
    Bonifacio Bo                   died August      2, 1903
    Francisco de Belen             died September  29, 1903


    DECREE

    The defendants above named, charged with divers crimes, having
    died in the provincial jail by reason of various ailments, upon
    various dates, according to official report of the jailer, it is

    ORDERED BY THIS COURT, That the cases pending against the said
    deceased persons be, and the same are hereby, quashed, the costs
    to be charged against the government.


    Judge of the Twelfth District acting in the Eighth.

    Albay, December 28, 1903.


The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. As already indicated,
the second order was like the first. It contained the names of
sixty-three other deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit:


    Anacleto Avila                 died September  2, 1903
    Gregorio Saquedo               died July      21, 1903
    Francisco Almonte              died October   11, 1903
    Faustino Sallao                died October    9, 1903
    Leocadio Pena                  died October   16, 1903
    Juan Ranuco                    died October   16, 1903
    Esteban de Lima                died February   4, 1903
    Estanislao Jacoba              died October    7, 1903
    Macario Ordiales               died October   19, 1903
    Laureano Ordiales              died October   27, 1903
    Reimundo Narito                died October    4, 1903
    Antonio Polvorido              died September 12, 1903
    Norverto Melgar                died June      14, 1903
    Bartolome Rico                 died November   8, 1903
    Simon Ordiales                 died September 13, 1903
    Candido Rosari                 died September 29, 1903
    Saturnino Vuelvo               died October   18, 1903
    Vicente Belsaida               died May       26, 1903
    Felix Canaria                  died June      12, 1903
    Pedro Cuya                     died July      26, 1903
    Evaristo Dias                  died July      24, 1903
    Felix Padre                    died July       8, 1903
    Alberto Mantes                 died August     7, 1903
    Joaquin Maamot                 died September  5, 1903
    Santiago Cacero                died May       28, 1903
    Hilario Zalazar                died July      26, 1903
    Tomas Odsinada                 died October    1, 1903
    Julian Oco                     died October    4, 1903
    Julian Lontac                  died August    27, 1903
    Ambrosio Rabosa                died September 19, 1903
    Mariano Garcia                 died September 12, 1903
    Ramon Madrigalejo              died August    19, 1903
    Albino Oyardo                  died October    1, 1903
    Felipe Rotarla                 died September 29, 1903
    Urbano Saralde                 died October    5, 1903
    Gil Mediavillo                 died June      13, 1903
    Egidio Mediavillo              died June      16, 1903
    Mauricio Losano                died October    5, 1903
    Bernabe Carenan                died September 27, 1903
    Pedro Sagaysay                 died September 29, 1903
    Laureano Ibo                   died August     5, 1903
    Vicente Sanosing               died July      17, 1903
    Francisco Morante              died June      10, 1903
    Anatollo Sadullo               died September 16, 1903
    Lucio Rebeza                   died August    27, 1903
    Eugenio Sanbuena               died August    13, 1903
    Nicolas Oberos                 died August    26, 1903
    Eusebio Rambillo               died September 13, 1903
    Tomas Rempillo                 died August    19, 1903
    Daniel Patasin                 died August    19, 1903
    Ignacio Bundi                  died September  7, 1903
    Juan Locot                     died May       23, 1903
    Zacarias David Padilla         died August     7, 1903
    Juan Almazar                   died September 12, 1903
    Rufino Quipi                   died June      13, 1903
    Antonio Brio                   died June      13, 1903
    Timoteo Enciso                 died September 12, 1903
    Hilario Palaad                 died August    28, 1903
    Ventura Prades                 died May       24, 1903
    Alejandro Alevanto             died May       22, 1903
    Rufino Pelicia                 died May       20, 1903
    Alejo Bruqueza                 died July      19, 1903
    Prudencio Estrada              died September 15, 1903


These lists were printed in an article by the author which appeared
in the North American Review for January 18, 1907, which article was
reprinted by Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, in the Congressional
Record for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that President
Taft saw the article, and that if it had contained any inaccuracies
they would long since have been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in
1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta,
on a small scale.

If the military authorities had had charge of the Albay insurrection
and of the prisoners in the Albay jail in 1903, it is safe to say
that the great majority of those who died would have lived. But to
have ordered out the troops would have been to abandon the official
fiction that there was peace.

Of Ola's five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and I, assisted by
the chief prosecuting attorney of the government, Hon. James Ross,
turned several hundred loose. Another large batch were disposed of
under a vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on the
roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, usually six to
twelve months. Most of the remainder, a few score, we tried under the
sedition law, and sent to Bilibid, the central penitentary at Manila,
for terms commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. The
more serious cases were sent up for longer terms under the brigandage
law. We indulged in no more maudlin sentiment about those precious
scamps who had been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally
invoking its name in the course of a long season of preying upon
their respectable fellow-countrymen than Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles
would have indulged. I am quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan
Cailles would have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch than
Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown to have committed
crimes usually punished capitally in this country that we sentenced
to death--a dozen or more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the
state. He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting attorney
to convict the men who had followed him for a year. He was given a
sentence of thirty years (by Judge Carson), as a sort of expression
of opinion of the most Christian attitude possible concerning his
real deserts, but his services as state's evidence entitled him to
immunity, and for that very good and sufficient reason Judge Carson,
Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and myself so recommended to the Governor.

Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he was quite an
ignorant man. But to show what his control must have been over the
rank and file of his men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going
up to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, Ola was
aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as he was a prospective
recipient of executive clemency, though the guards kept an eye on him,
he was allowed the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up,
the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom sometime after
midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, and went back to the storm
steering-gear at the stern of the ship, to spend the rest of the night
more comfortably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassignable
cause, I realized that the crown of another head was tangent to the
crown of my own, and occupying part of my pillow. It was Ola, the
chief of the brigands. I raised up, shook the intruder, and said:
"Hello, Ola, what are you doing here?" He wakened slowly. He had no
idea of any first-class passenger being back there, and had taken
it for granted that I was one of the ship's crew, when he decided to
share my pillow. As soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his
feet with profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck until
morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect of the incident
on my recommendation concerning himself.

After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went back to
sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened by some of the guards
chattering. But I heard Ola, who had apparently been keeping watch
over my august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious tone to
the guards, his keepers, "Hush, the judge is sleeping." They looked
at the brigand chief, and cowed, obeyed.

Ola was pardoned.






CHAPTER XVII

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903 (Continued)

                            The Philippines for the Filipinos.

                                                Speech of Governor Taft.


Just before Governor Taft left the Islands in 1903, he made a speech
which made him immensely popular with the Filipinos and immensely
unpopular with the Americans. The key-note of the speech was "The
Philippines for the Filipinos." The Filipinos interpreted it to
mean for them that ultimate independence was not so far in the dim
distance of what is to happen after all the living are dead as to
be a purely academic matter. And there was absolutely nothing in
the speech to negative that idea, although he must have known how
the great majority of the Filipinos would interpret the speech. On
the other hand, the Americans in the Islands, popularity with whom
was then and there a negligible factor, interpreted the speech,
not inaccurately, to mean for them: "If you white men out here, not
connected with the Government, you Americans, British, Germans and
Spaniards, and the rest of you, do not like the way I am running this
country, why, the boats have not quit running between here and your
respective homes." [422] Then he came back to the United States and
has ever since been urging American capital to go to the Philippines,
all the time opposing any declaration by the law-making power of the
Government which will let the American who goes out there know "where
he is at," i.e., whether we are or are not going to keep the Islands
permanently, and how to formulate his earthly plans accordingly, though
the educated Filipinos are concurrently permitted to clamor against
American "exploitation," American rule, and Americans generally,
and to keep alive among the masses of their people what they call
"the spirit of liberty," and what the insular government calls the
spirit of "irreconcilableness." Clearly, a policy which makes for race
friction and race hatred is essentially soft-headed, not soft-hearted,
and ought not to be permitted to continue. Yet it has been true for
twelve years, as one of President Taft's admiring friends proudly
boasted concerning him some time since:


    One man virtually holds in his keeping the American conscience
    with the regard to the Philippines. [423]


This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should either stop
the clamor, or stop the American capital and energy from going to
the Islands. After an American goes out to the Islands, invests his
money there, and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade,
he sticks to his own people out there. Then the Taft policy steps in
and bullyrags him into what he calls "knuckling to the Filipinos,"
every time he shows any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision
reversing the verdict of all racial history--which has been up to
date, that wheresoever white men dwell in any considerable numbers
in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white man will
rule. Yet the American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into
going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has taken his family to
the Islands, and all his worldly interests are there. Yet he is living
under a despotism, a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the
non-office-holding American does not openly oppose the government's
policies, but one which, however benevolent, is, so far as regards any
brooking of opposition from any one outside the government hierarchy,
as absolute as any of the other despotic governments of Asia. Though
the Governor of the Philippines does not wear as much gilt braid
as some of his fellow potentates on the mainland of Asia, still,
in all executive matters he wields a power quite as immediate and
substantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his royal
colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either to the American
Government official in the Philippines, or to the American citizen
engaged in private business there who is in entire accord with the
policies of the insular government and on terms of friendship with
the officials, that the government under which he is living is any
more of a despotism than the Government of the United States. The
shoe never pinches the American citizen engaged in private business
until he begins, for one reason or another, to be "at outs" with the
insular government, and to have "opinions" which--American-like--he
at once wants to express. If he permits himself to get thoroughly
out of accord with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the
Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious single fact
in the present situation. There is no public opinion to help such a
person, in any case where he differs with any specific act or policy
of the insular government. The American colony is comparatively small,
say between ten and twenty thousand all told, outside the army (which
consists of ten or twelve thousand individuals living wholly apart
from the rest of the community). The doctor who is known to have
the patronage of high government officials is sure of professional
success, and his wife is sure to receive the social recognition her
husband's position in the community naturally commands; and this
permits her to make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at
precedence with her next neighbor called "society," so dear to the
hearts of many otherwise sensible and estimable women--to say nothing
of carpet knights, callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also
if the doctor and his lady have adult children, their opportunities
to marry well are multiplied by the sunlight from the seats of the
mighty. Thus the doctor and his wife are a standing lesson to the man
"with convictions" that yearn for utterance, but who is also blessed
with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the general welfare and
happiness of all the family than in seeing her husband's name in
the paper. What is true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer
known to be persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper
man in favor with the government is sure to get his share of the
government advertising, according to a very liberal construction,
and that insures his being able to command reportorial and editorial
talent such as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is
sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mercantile community,
thus placing success for him on a solid, comfortable basis. Also, a
contrary course will, slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash
competitor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines is deprived
of one of his most precious home pleasures, viz., letting off steam,
in some opposition paper, about the real or imagined shortcomings of
the men in charge of the government. For the reasonable expectancy
of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically brief. The
hapless editor on the prosperous paper, whatever his talents,
who happens to become afflicted with "views" which he airs in his
editorial columns, is soon upbraided by his friends at his club as
"getting cranky," and is told by the orthodox old-timers among them,
"John, you've been out here too long. You better go home." If he does
not change his tone, the receipts of the advertising department of his
paper soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, who
"knows how to get along with people," is not long in agreeing with
the rest of his friends that he has "been out here too long." Again
the successful merchant has too many interests at stake in which he
needs the cordial friendship of the government to be able to afford
to antagonize it. And so on, through every walk of life, the influence
of the government permeates every nook and corner of the situation.

The average public man in the United States would not feel "nat'ral"
unless intermittently bedewed with steam from the exhaust valve of
the soul of some "outraged citizen," through the medium of the public
press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous
position with the government may be very generally detested and
actually not know it. [424] The American in the Philippines, with
all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to
the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or
speech,--even supposing any paper would publish it--which, copied by
the papers back in the United States, would embarrass the National
Administration's Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to
talking too freely for the newspapers when home on a visit.

I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent
impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about
current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there
must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with
shaping the course of the government out there for which they are
responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their
governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not
change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial
situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on
a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of
lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and
future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly
foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka
or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are
fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government
we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of
the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable
governmental asset, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion
which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can
accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of
questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.

To show how absolute was the executive and legislative power over
8,000,000 of people entrusted by the sole authority of President
McKinley to Governor Taft--without consulting Congress, though
afterwards the authority so conferred was ratified by Congress and
descended from Governor Taft to his successor--an incident related
to me in the freedom of social intercourse, and not in the least
in confidence, by my late beloved friend Arthur W. Fergusson,
long Executive Secretary to Governor Taft, will suffice. In 1901
the Commission had passed a law providing for the constitution of
the Philippine judiciary, [425] according to which law an American,
in order to be eligible to appointment as a Judge of First Instance
(the ordinary trial court, or nisi prius court, of Anglo-Saxon
jurisprudence) must be more than thirty years old, and must have
practised law in the United States for a period of five years before
appointed. In 1903 President Roosevelt wanted to make Hon. Beekman
Winthrop (then under thirty years of age) now (1912), Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, a Judge of First Instance. Governor Taft called
Fergusson in and said: "Fergy, make me out a commission for Beekman
Winthrop as a Judge of First Instance." Fergusson said: "You can't do
it, Governor. It's against the law. He's not old enough." Winthrop was
a graduate of the Harvard Law School. Governor Taft said humorously,
"I can't eh? I'll show you. Send me a stenographer." A law was dictated
[426] striking out thirty years and inserting twenty-five, and adding
after the words "must have practised law for a period of five years"
the words "or be a graduate of a reputable law school." Fergusson
was then called in, and told to go down the hall, see the other
commissioners, [427] and get them together, which he did, and
the law was passed in a few minutes. Then Fergusson was sent for,
and the Governor said, handing him the new "law"; "Now make out
that commission." Even if Fergusson colored the incident up a bit,
in the exercise of his inimitable artistic capacity to make anything
interesting, his story was certainly substantially correct relatively
to the absoluteness of the authority of the Governor, as will appear
by reference to the two laws cited.

It is only fair to say that Winthrop made a very good judge. There
used to be current in the Philippines a story that Governor Taft
had said, in more or less humorous vein: "Gentlemen, I'm somewhat
of an expert on judges. What you need in a judge is"--counting with
the index finger of one hand on the fingers of the other--"firstly,
integrity; secondly, courage; thirdly, common sense; and fourthly,
he must know a little law." Winthrop's integrity, courage, and common
sense were beyond all question. It could hardly have been otherwise. He
came of a long line of sturdy and distinguished men, the first of whom
had come over in the Mayflower days to the Massachusetts coast. And,
he did know a little law. But the manner of his appointment is none
the less illustrative of how much quicker, Governor Taft could make
and publish a law than any of his fellow despots [428] over on the
mainland of Asia, considering how slow-moving all their various grand
viziers were, compared with Fergy, and his corps of stenographers.

Having now given, I hope, a more or less sympathetic insight into
what absolute rulers our governors in the Philippines have been, in
the very nature of the case, from the beginning, let us observe the
change of tone of the government, after the reign of the first ended,
and the reign of the second began.






CHAPTER XVIII

GOVERNOR WRIGHT--1904

                                The blame of those ye better
                                The hate of those ye guard.

                                           Kipling's White Man's Burden.


Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903,
to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and
shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the
governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was
no more hammering it into the American business men having money
invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their "little brown
brother," for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more
than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the
Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans,
because, soon after he came into power, he "let the cat out of the
bag," by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as
well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as
he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft's
"Philippines for the Filipinos" need not cause any specially billowy
sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos
now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in
some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused
them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest
of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to
tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were
wholly unfit for self-government--all of which, in effect, meant
that Governor Taft had been merely "Keeping the word of promise to
the ear and breaking it to the hope."

The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and all feel:
"Alackaday! Our true friend has departed." But as Secretary of War
Taft, after four years more of trying to please both sides, at home, at
last frankly told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the opening
of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, practically just what
Governor Wright had begun to tell them from the moment his predecessor
had exchanged the parting tear with them on the water-front at Manila
in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy of uncompromising honesty
on the present political situation, may easily be guessed.

Governor Wright's method of repudiating the Taft straddle took for its
key-note, in lieu of "The Philippines for the Filipinos," the slogan
"An Equal Chance for All." What Governor Wright meant was merely that
there would be no more browbeating of Americans to make them love
their little brown brother as much as Governor Taft was supposed
to love him, but that everybody would be treated absolutely alike
and nobody coddled. However, the Filipinos of course knew that they
could not compete with American wealth and energy, and so did the
Americans in the islands. So what the Wright slogan, unquestionably
fair as was its intent, inexorably meant to everybody concerned except
the dignified, straightforward and candid propounder of it, was, in
effect, the British "White Man's Burden" or Trust-for-Civilization
theory, a theory whereunder the white man who wants some one else's
land goes and takes it on the idea that he can put it to better
use than the owner. Thus early did the original "jollying" Mr. Taft
had given them become transparent to his little brown brother. Thus
early did it become clear to the Filipinos that behind the mask of
executive protestations that they shall some day have independence
when fit for it, lurks a set determination industriously to earn for
an indeterminate number of generations yet to come


                The blame of those ye better
                The hate of those ye guard.


This book has been written, up to this point, in vain, if the
preceding chapters have not made clear how much political expediency,
looking to the welfare of a party in power naturally seeking to
continue in power, necessarily dominates Philippine affairs under
American rule. We have observed under the microscope of history,
made available by the official documents now accessible, the long
battle between the political expediency germ and the independence
bug which began in General Anderson's dealings with Aguinaldo and
continued through General Merritt's and General Otis's régimes. We
have seen General MacArthur's attempt at a wise surgical operation
to excise the independence bug from the Philippine body politic--so
that the expediency germ might die a natural death from having nothing
to feed on. We have seen that operation interfered with by the Taft
Commission during the presidential campaign of 1900, because the men
in control of the republic could not ignore considerations of political
expediency; and we saw the consequent premature setting up of the civil
government in 1901, with all its dire consequences in the then as yet
unconquered parts of the archipelago, southern Luzon, and some of the
Visayan Islands. We have observed the effective though heroic local
treatment administered to the Philippine body politic by General Bell
in Batangas in 1901-2, with a view of killing off the independence
bug there. We have seen the fierce struggle between some of the bug's
belated spawn and the expediency germ's now more emboldened forces
in Albay in the off year, 1903. We are now to take our fifth year's
course in the colonial department of politico-entomological research,
the presidential year 1904.

It was the way the Samar insurrection of 1904-5-6 was handled which
finally convinced me that the Filipinos would not kill any more of
each other in a hundred years than we have killed, or permitted to
be killed, of them, in the fell process of Benevolent Assimilation.

American imperialism is not honest, like the British variety. American
imperialism knows that Avarice was its father, and Piety its
mother, and that it takes after its father more than it does
after its mother. British imperialism frankly aims mostly to make
the survivors of its policies happy, not the people it immediately
operates on. American imperialism pretends to be ministering to the
happiness of the living, and, though it realizes that it is not a
success in that line, it resents identification with its British
cousin, by sanctimonious reference to the alleged net good it is
doing. Yet in its moments of frankness it says, with an air of infinite
patience under base ingratitude, "Well, they will be happy in some
other generation," and that therefore the number of people we have
had or may have, to kill, or permit to be killed, in the process of
Benevolent Assimilation, is wholly negligible. This is simply the old,
old argument that the end justifies the means, the argument that has
wrought more misery in the world than any other since time began.

When Judge Taft, General Wright, and their colleagues of the Taft
Commission, came out to the Philippines in 1900, they came full of the
McKinley convictions about a people whom neither they or Mr. McKinley
had ever seen, bound hand and foot by political necessity to square the
freeing of Cuba with the subjugation of the Philippines. A perfectly
natural evolution of this attitude resulted in the position they
at once took on arriving in the Islands, viz., that to do for the
Filipinos what we have done for the Cubans would mean a bloody welter
of anarchy and chaos. And the presidential contest of 1900 was fought
and won largely on that issue. After 1900, for all the gentlemen above
referred to, the proposition was always res adjudicata. All protests
by Filipinos to the contrary caused only resentment, and welded the
authorities more and more hermetically to the correctness of the
original proposition. Loyalty to the original ill-considered decision
became impregnated, in their case, with a fervor not entirely unlike
religious fanaticism, and belief in it became a matter of principle,
justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might thereafter
do. So that when General Wright "came to the throne" in our colonial
empire, as Governor, and legatee of the McKinley-Taft Benevolent
Assimilation policies, his attitude in all he did was thoroughly
honest, and also thoroughly British. He honestly believed in the
"bloody welter of anarchy and chaos" proposition, and was prepared,
in any emergency that might arise, to follow his convictions in that
regard whithersoever they might lead, without variableness or shadow
of turning. Take him all in all, Governor Wright was about the best
man occupying exalted station I ever knew personally, President Taft
himself not excepted; although I still adhere to Colonel Roosevelt's
opinion of 1901 concerning Mr. Taft, quoted in the chapter preceding
this, from the Outlook of September 21, 1901, notwithstanding that in
the contest for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1912,
the Colonel "recalled" that opinion. Seriously, a man may "combine the
qualities which would make a first class President of the United States
with the qualities which would make a first class Chief Justice of the
United States" and still cut a sorry figure trying to fit a square peg
into a round hole, or a scheme of government, the breath of whose life
is public opinion, into the running of a remote colonial government,
the breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered with by
public opinion.

After the Albay insurrection of 1903 had been cleaned up, I took charge
of the Twelfth Judicial District, having been appointed thereto by
Governor Taft just before he left the islands to become Secretary of
War. In those trying pioneer days they always seemed to give me the
insurrections to sift out, but it was purely fortuitous. Whenever you
ceased to be busy, prompt arrangements were made for you to get busy
again. Judge Ide, the Minister of Justice, wasted no government money.

The Twelfth District consisted of the two island provinces of Samar and
Leyte, two of the six Visayan Islands heretofore noticed as the only
ones worth considering in a general view of the archipelago such as
the student of world politics wants or needs. Leyte had a population
of 388,922, [429] and an area of 3008 square miles. [430] Samar's
population was 266,237, and its area, 5276 square miles, makes it the
third largest island of the Philippine Archipelago. So that as Judge
of the Twelfth District, consisting of two provinces, the Governor of
each of which was ex-officio sheriff of the court for his province,
I was, in a sense, a sort of shepherd of a political flock of some
650,000 people, whom I always thought of as a whole as "my" people.

Samar and Leyte are separated, where nearest together, by a most
picturesque winding strait bordered with densely wooded hills. San
Juanico Strait is much narrower than the inland sea of Japan at its
narrowest point, and almost as beautiful. In fact, at its narrowest
point it seems little more than a stone's throw in width. It is as
pretty as the prettiest part of the Golden Horn. Leyte had been put
under the Civil Government in 1901, and this premature interference
with the military authorities in the midst of their efforts to pacify
the island had had the usual result of postponing pacification, by
filling local politicians, wholly unable to comprehend a government
which entreated or reasoned with people to do things, with the notion
that we were resorting to diplomacy in lieu of force because of fear
of them. Leyte and Samar were strategically one for the insurgents,
just as the provinces of the Lake district of Luzon, described in
an earlier chapter, were, because they could flee by night from
one province to another in small boats without detection, when hard
pressed by the Americano. The main insurgent general in Samar, Lucban,
had surrendered to General Grant in 1902, but the cheaper fellows
stayed out much longer, preying upon those who preferred daily toil
to cattle-stealing and throat-cutting as a means of livelihood,
and continuing the political unrest intermittently in gradually
diminishing degree, through 1903. By the spring of 1904, however,
there still remained in Samar riffraff enough, the jetsam and flotsam
of the insurrection--professional outlaws--to get up some trouble,
so that, as brigand chiefs, they might resume the rôles of Robin
Hood, Jesse James, et al. During the first half of that year the
opportunity these worthies had been waiting for, while resting on
their oars, developed. The crop of municipal officials resulting from
the original McKinley plan of beginning the work of reconstruction
during, instead of after, the war, and among the potential village
Hampdens, instead of among the Cromwells, had resulted in some very
rascally municipal officials who oppressed the poor, getting the hemp
of the small farmer, when they would bring it to town, at their own
prices--hemp being to Samar what cotton is to the South. From the
lowland and upland farmers the ever-widening discontent spread to
the hills, where dwelt a type of people constituting only a small
fraction of the total population of the Islands--"half savage and
half child"--but loving their hills, and wholly indisposed, of their
own initiative, to start trouble, unless manipulated. Obviously,
then, "the public mind" of Samar--those who know Samar will smile
with me at the phrase, but it will do, for lack of a better--was
likely soon to be in a generally inflammable condition. By July,
1904, the Robin Hoods, Jesse Jameses, et al., touched the match to
the material and a political conflagration started, apparently as
unguided--save by the winds of impulse--and certainly as persistent,
as a forest fire. Every native of the Philippine Islands, whether
he be of the 7,000,000 Christians or of the 500,000 non-Christian
tribes, is born with a highly developed social instinct either to
command or to obey. The latter tendency is quite as common in the
Philippines as the former is in the United States. Hence the Samar
disturbances of 1904-5-6, though made up at the outset of raids and
depredations by various roving bands of outlaws yielding allegiance
only to their immediate chief, soon took on a very formidable military
and political aspect. [431] The roving bands would ask the peaceably
inclined people our flag was supposed to be protecting, "Are you for
us or for the Americans?" promptly chopping their heads off if they
showed any lack of zeal in denouncing American municipal institutions
and things American in general. Pursuant to Mr. McKinley's original
scheme--concocted for a people he had never seen, under pressure of
political necessity--to rig up in short order a government "essentially
popular in form," a lot of most pitiable municipal governments had
been let loose on the people, a part of our series of kindergarten
lessons. The plan was as wise as it will be for the Japanese--some
one please hold Captain Hobson while I finish the analogy--when
they conquer the United States, to go to the Bowery and the Ghetto
for mayors of all our cities. Thus by our pluperfect benevolence,
we had contrived in Samar by 1904 to rouse the highland folk, or hill
people, whom the Spaniards had always let alone, against the pacific
agricultural lowland people and the dwellers in the coast villages. The
latter, or such of them as did not join the hill folk for protection,
we permitted to be mercilessly butchered by wholesale, from August to
November, 1904, as hereinafter more fully set forth, because ordering
out the army to protect them might have been construed at home to mean
disturbances more serious and widespread than actually existed, and
might therefore affect the presidential election in the United States
by renewing the notion that the Administration had never been frank
with the American people concerning conditions in the Philippines.

The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 is dated
November 1st, which was just a week before the presidential election
day of that year. Their annual report for 1905 is dated November 1,
1905. In their report for 1904, the Commission deal with the general
state of public order in the same roseate manner which, as we have
seen, had made its first appearance during the political exigencies
of 1900 in the language about "the great majority of the people"
being "entirely willing" to benevolent alien domination in lieu
of independence. When Rip Van Winkle was trying to quit drinking,
he used to say after each drink: "Oh, we'll just let that pass." In
their report for 1904, the Commission swallow the conditions in Samar
with equal nonchalance. After stating that some (impliedly negligible)
disturbances had occurred in Samar "two months since," they add that
"the constabulary of the province took the field" against the bands
of Pulajans, or outlaws, and that "as a result, they were soon broken
up, and are being pursued and killed or captured" (p. 3). In their
report dated November 1, 1905, by way of preface to an account of
the extensive military operations inaugurated in Samar shortly after
the presidential election of 1904, which operations had not only
been in progress for nearly a year on the date of the 1905 report,
but continued for more than a year thereafter, the Commission explain
their 1904 nonchalance about Samar thus: "It was then believed that
the constabulary forces had succeeded in checking the further progress
of the outbreak" (p. 47).

Let us examine the facts on which they based this statement, since it
meant that they believed that a duly reported epidemic of massacres
of peaceably inclined people, over whom the American flag was floating
as a symbol of protection to life and property, had stood effectually
checked by November 1, 1904, the date of their report. And first,
of the massacres themselves, their nature and extent.

The Samar massacres of 1904 began with what we all called down there
"the outbreak of July 10th." In August, 1904, I went to Samar to
handle the cases arising out of the disturbances there, assisted by
the (native) Governor of the province, who, under the law already
alluded to, was ex-officio sheriff of the court, and an army of
deputy sheriffs, as it were, the constabulary, numbering several
hundred. The outbreak of July 10th was always known afterwards as
"the Tauiran affair." This Tauiran affair was a raid by an outlaw
band on the barrio of Tauiran, one of the hamlets of the municipal
jurisdiction of the township called Gandara, in the valley of the
Gandara River, in north central Samar, wherein one hundred houses,
the whole settlement, were burned, and twenty-one people killed. The
term of court lasted from early in August until early in November. The
day after the Tauiran affair, over on the other fork of the Gandara
River, occurred what was called "the Cantaguic affair." Cantaguic was
a hamlet or barrio about the size of Tauiran. The brigands killed the
lieutenant of police of Cantaguic and some others, but they did not
kill everybody in the place. Instead, after killing a few people,
they went to the tribunal (town hall), seized the local teniente,
or municipal representative of American authority, tied the American
flag they found at the tribunal about the head of the teniente, turban
fashion, poured kerosene oil on it, and took the teniente down stairs
and out into the public square, where they lighted and burned the
flag on his head, the chief of the band, one Juliano Caducoy by name,
remarking to the onlookers that the act was intended as a lesson to
those serving that flag. They then cut off the lips of the teniente
so he could not eat (he of course died a little later), burned the
barrio and carried off fifty of the inhabitants. Caducoy was captured
some time afterward, and I sentenced him to be hanged. There was
practically no dispute about the facts. After the Cantaguic affair,
during the term of court mentioned, the provincial doctor, Dr. Cullen,
an American who had been a captain doctor of volunteers, had occasion
to run up to Manila. The doctor was a most accomplished gentleman,
but he had a fondness for the grewsome in description equal to Edgar
Allan Poe himself. After he came back he told me about having told the
Governor-General of the Cantaguic affair, and repeated with an evident
pleased consciousness of his ability to make his hearer's blood curdle,
how the Governor had said to him slowly, "Doctor, that--is--awful!"

Blood seemed to whet the appetite for slaughter. The records of the
August-November, 1904 term of the court of first instance of Samar show
all the various barrios of the Gandara Valley in flames on successive
days, after the affairs of July 10th and 11th. I do not speak from
memory, but from documents contained in a large bundle of papers
kept ever since, in memory of that incarnadined epoch. You find one
barrio burned one day and another another day, until all the people
of the Gandara Valley were made homeless. One of the constabulary
officers, Lieutenant Bowers, a very gallant fellow, testified before
me that from July 10th to the date of his testimony, which was on or
about September 28th, some 50,000 people had been made homeless in
Samar by the operations of the outlaws. I deem Lieutenant Bowers's
estimate quite reasonable. His figures include only one-fifth of the
population of an island which was in the throes of an all-pervading
brigand uprising. The conservative nature of Lieutenant Bowers's
estimate concerning the mischief that had already been wrought
by the end of September, 1904, and was then gathering destructive
potentiality like a forest or prairie fire, may be inferred from the
contents of a memorandum appearing below, furnished me by a Spanish
officer of the constabulary, a Lieutenant Calderon, who had been an
officer of the Rural Guard in the Spanish days. It contains a list
of fifty-three towns, villages, and hamlets (a barrio may be quite a
village, sometimes even quite a town, though usually it is a hamlet)
burned up to the date the memorandum was furnished me.

In order to a clear understanding of these Samar massacres and
town-burnings of 1904, as well as for general geographical purposes,
a few preliminary words of explanation will be appropriate just here.
A province in the Philippines has heretofore been likened to a county
with us. But in the largest provinces, the subdivisions of provinces
called municipalities are more like counties; and each municipality
is in turn subdivided into sections called barrios. A municipality
(Spanish, pueblo) in the Philippines is not primarily a city or town,
as we understand it, i.e., a more or less continuous settlement
of houses and lots more or less adjacent, but a specific area of
territory, a township, as it were. This area or territory may be 5 ×
10 square miles, or 10 × 20, or more, or less. For example, Samar's
area is 5276 square miles. Yet it contained in 1904, and probably still
contains, only twenty-five townships or municipalities all told, each
municipality being subdivided in turn into barrios. Municipalities
in the Philippines vary in size as much as counties do with us, and
their total area accounts for and represents the total area of the
province, just as the total area of the counties of a State represents
with us the total area of the State. The seat of government of the
municipality always bears the same name as the municipality itself,
just as the county seat of a county usually, or frequently, bears
the same name as the county, with us. Take for instance, the name of
the first municipality or township in the list which appears below,
Gandara. The municipality of Gandara might be described by analogy
as the "county" of Gandara, the list of barrios burned as a list of
towns and villages of the "county" of Gandara.

The municipality of Gandara included a watershed in north central Samar
from which the Gandara River flowed in a southwesterly direction to
the sea. Within this watershed, parallel 12 1/2 north of the equator
intersects the 125th meridian of longitude east of Greenwich. Northern
Samar is a very rich hemp country, Catarman hemp being usually quoted
higher than any hemp listed on the London market. If you stand at the
highest point of the Gandara watershed you can see four streams flowing
off north, northwest, northeast, and southwest to the sea. There are
some half dozen streams having their source there. Brigands making
their headquarters there could always, when hard pressed, get away
in canoes toward the sea in almost any direction they wished. The
following is Lieutenant Calderon's list:


    RELACION POR MUNICIPIOS DE LOS BARRIOS QUEMADOS.

    (List by Municipalities of the Barrios Burned.)

    MUNICIPALITY OF GANDARA

    Tauiran                    July 10
    Cantaguic                  July 12
    Cauilan                    July 13
    Erenas                     July 16
    Blanca Aurora              July 19
    Bulao [432]                July 21
    Pizarro                  August  8
    Cagibabago               August  8
    Nueva                    August 10
    Hernandez                August 10
    San Miguel               August 10
    Buao                     August 15
    El Cano                  August 17
    San Enrique              August 20
    San Luis                 August 25


    MUNICIPALITY OF CATBALOGAN

    (Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)

    Malino                   July   31
    Silanga                  August  9
    Ginga                    August 13
    San Fernando             August 15
    Maragadin                August 20
    Talinga                  August 21
    Santa Cruz               August 22
    Dap-dap                  August 29
    Palencia                 August 31
    Albalate           (date not given)
    Villa Hermosa      (date not given)


The above list of villages burned in the township of Catbalogan
shows how bold the Pulajans had then grown. By that time they were
committing depredations, robbery, murder, and town-burning, in all the
various villages within the municipal jurisdiction of the township
of Catbalogan, coming often within a few miles of the town proper
of Catbalogan itself, the seat of the provincial government. In the
attack on Silanga, which occurred August 9th, a number of people
were killed. Silanga was but little more than an hour's walk from
the court-house at Catbalogan. The Governor at once wired Manila
as follows:


                                        Catbalogan, Samar, Aug. 9, 1904.

    Executive Secretary, Manila:

    The peaceably inclined people of the barrios near here are
    collecting here in large numbers, terrorized by Pulajans who are
    boldly roaming the country, burning barrios within seven or eight
    miles from Catbalogan. They kill men, women, and children without
    distinction. These Pulajans have fled from Gandara where they are
    being actively pursued by constabulary. All forces that could be
    spared have gone out. We have about thirty available fighting
    men here. Pulajans liable at any time to enter Catbalogan. We
    are in danger of some occurrence quite as serious as the Surigao
    affair. [433] There are buildings here which I must protect at all
    hazards--Treasury, Provincial Jail with ninety-five prisoners, and
    commissary and ordnance stores of constabulary. We need at once at
    least three hundred men, scouts if possible, to handle situation,
    between here and Gandara. Pulajans undoubtedly have friends in
    Catbalogan. I suspect certain of the municipal authorities here. I
    estimate number of Pulajans now operating at about five hundred.

        (Signed) Feito, Governor.


On September 2d, the Provincial Governor of Samar sent to Manila the
following telegram:


                                              Catbalogan, Sept. 2, 1904.

    Carpenter, Actg. Ex. Secy., Palace, Manila:

    Seven-thirty this evening simultaneous reports from north
    and south sides of town Pulajans approaching. They have not
    entered yet and may not, but have gathered Americans with wives
    and children in my house. Arms supplied. Treasury twenty-five
    thousand Conant. [434] One hundred forty prisoners in jail. Only
    forty-seven constabulary here. If Pulajans enter much needless
    sacrifice life pacific citizens here. Feel sure Pulajans have
    friends in Catbalogan. Request company either scouts or soldiers
    from Calbayog stationed here, preferably former. Their presence
    guarantee stability.

        (Signed) Feito, Governor.


Of course Governor Feito did not call for the regular army of the
United States. His job, poor devil, was to demonstrate as best he
could that the military were not needed. He would at once have been
suspected of trying to scuttle the ship of "benign civil government"
if he had admitted that the regular army was needed. But to return
to Calderon's list:


    MUNICIPALITY OF CALBAYOG [435]

    (Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)


    Ylo                       August 17
    Napuro                    August 17
    Balud                     August 17


    MUNICIPALITY OF WRIGHT

    (Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)

    Guinica-an                  July 25
    Calapi                      July 28
    Bonga                      August 4
    Tutubigan                 August 19
    Motiong                 September 1
    Lau-an                   October 10
    Sao Jose           (date not given)


A sample of the distressing communications I was getting as these
massacres progressed is the notification of the Motiong affair
of September 1st set forth below, which I give as a type of the
methodical stoicism of those bloody times. Motiong was seven miles
down the coast road from Catbalogan:


    In the district of Motiong, municipality of Wright, province of
    Samar, Philippine Islands, September 1, 1904.

    In the presence of the undersigned Peregrin Albano, member of
    the village council, there being also present the president of
    the Municipal Board of Health, Mr. Tomas San Pablo, and the
    principal men of the place, there has this day occurred the
    burial of the corpses, victims of the Pulajans, in the cemetery
    of this place, to wit: The officer of volunteers, Rafael Rosales,
    and the following volunteers, viz., Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle,
    Dionisio Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo; also the two women,
    Eustaquia Sapiten and Apolinaria N., also one unknown Pulajan. This
    in fulfilment of the official letter of instructions No. 136,
    from the office of the presidente of the town of Wright dated
    to-day. Said burial ceremonies were conducted by the Reverend
    Father Marcos Gomez, and were attended by the whole volunteer
    force of this place because of the death of their officer Rosales.


    Tomas San Pablo,
    President of the Board of Health.

    Peregrin Albano,
    Councillor.

    (Illegible)----Moro, Captain of Volunteers. [436]


Fancy having documents like the foregoing handed you with
ever-increasing regularity as you sauntered, morning after morning,
from your bath to your coffee and rolls, preparatory to the daily
sifting of incidents such as that which included the burning of
the American flag on the head of the municipal representative of
American authority already mentioned, and other like acts of poor
misguided peasants stirred up by trifling scamps representing the
dregs of insurrection. Motiong was not only within seven miles of
the court-house at Catbalogan, but it was so near to Camp Bumpus,
over in Leyte, where the 18th Infantry lay, that an order to them
to move in the morning would have made life and property in all that
brigand-harried region safe that night and continuously thereafter.

General Wm. H. Carter, Major-General U. S. A., well known to the
American public as the able officer who, in 1911, commanded the United
States forces mobilized on the Mexican border during the Mexican
revolution of that year, that ousted President Diaz and seated
President Madero, was in command at the time--the fall of 1904--of
the military district of the Philippines which included Samar and
Leyte. A word of request to him would have made life definitely safe
in all the coast towns and their vicinity within two or three days
after receipt of such a request.

Besides Gandara, Catbalogan, Calbayog, and Wright, Lieutenant
Calderon's list included the trio of ill-fated municipalities set
forth below, concluding with the illustrious name of Taft:


    MUNICIPALITY OF CATUBIG

    Poblacion              September  5
    Tagabiran                 August 11
    San Vicente               August --


Catubig was toward the north end of Samar. On the day of the burning
and sacking of the poblacion of Catubig, September 5th, which was done
by a force of several hundred Pulajans, the scouts and constabulary,
so it was afterward reported, killed a hundred of the Catubig Pulajans
in an engagement. If this report were correct, as is likely, it was
the biggest single killing of natives since the early days of the
insurrection. [437] But it did not in the least check the Pulajan
insurrection, which simply swerved its fury from the Catubig region
toward the coast (the Pacific coast), descending upon the towns,
villages, and hamlets of the townships of Borongan and Taft, thus:


    MUNICIPALITY OF BORONGAN

    (Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)

    Sepa                     Sept. 23
    Lucsohong                Sept. 23
    Maybocog                 Sept. 23
    Maydolong                Sept. 23
    Soribao                  Sept. 23
    Bugas                     Oct. 10
    Punta Maria               Oct. 10
    Canjauay                  Oct. 11


    MUNICIPALITY OF TAFT

    (Calderon's List continued)

    Del Remedio              Sept. 22
    San Julian               Sept. 22
    Nena                     Sept. 22
    Libas                    Sept. 22
    Pagbabangnan             Sept. 22
    San Vicente              Sept. 21
    Jinolaso                 Oct.   3


Of the twenty-five pueblos or townships of Samar, the Calderon
list only pretended to throw light on events in nine of them,
those being the only ones from which definite news had then reached
headquarters. But as a reign of terror prevailed all over Samar at the
time, the rest may be imagined, though it can never be ascertained. Of
these nine, the last two were:


    MUNICIPALITY OF LLORENTE

    Pagbabalancayan          Sept. 23


    MUNICIPALITY OF ORAS

    Concepcion               Sept. 23
    Jipapad                     --


Now it feels just as uncomfortable to be boloed in Pagbabalancayan
as it would in a place with a more pronounceable name, and the same
is true of the comparatively mellifluous Jipapad. True, some of
these places were mere hamlets of twenty to forty houses, but you
may be sure there were five or six people, on an average, to each
house. On the other hand, glance back again at the list of towns of
the township of Taft that were sacked and burned, and consider that
San Julian was about the size of the provincial capital, Catbalogan,
and that Catbalogan, the town proper, contained a population of
four thousand, though looked at from the amphitheatre of hills which
surround it, Catbalogan does not look like such a very large group
of houses. Filipino houses are usually full of people. It is easier
to live that way than to build more houses.

After the Pulajan descent on Llorente, the people of Llorente all went
off to the hills to the Pulajans for safety. They were not allowed
to have firearms. This was forbidden by law, except on condition of
making formal application for permission, getting it finally approved,
and giving a bond, conditions which, in practical operation, made
the prohibition all but absolute. The law was general for the whole
archipelago. The theory of the law was that the inhabitants were under
"the peace and protection of a benign civil government." The real
reason of the law was that if the people were allowed to bear arms it
was very uncertain which side they would use them on, our side or the
other. But, by 1904, the lowland and coast people of Samar would have
been glad enough to have stuck to us and gone out after the mountain
robber bands had we armed them. Left unprotected, a feeling seemed
to spread in many places that about the only thing to do to be safe
was to depart from under the "protection" of the American flag and
take to the hills and join, or seem to join, the uprising.

Toward the last of September, the provincial treasurer of Samar, an
American, a Mr. Whittier, visited the east coast of Samar, including
Taft. On October 5th, he stated before me as follows:


    All the presidentes that I have talked with, and this man Hill,
    [438] said that they wanted some protection for their towns. Except
    at Borongan there are no guns in the hands of the municipal
    police. [439] This band near Taft was said to have nineteen
    guns, and they felt they could not defend their towns with spears
    against these guns. There were reported to be between 200 and 600
    in operation on the coast at that time, and they felt that they
    could not defend their towns with the means at hand. I found at
    Taft that they had taken all the records of the municipality,
    and the money, and taken it over to an island away from the
    main coast, in order to protect their money and their records,
    and I understand the same thing was done at Llorente. At Oras
    they had practically decided to take the same step if it became
    necessary. All of the commercial houses on the east coast and
    a large number of people congregated at Borongan, which was
    safe on account of the protection of the constabulary; and the
    constabulary there were doing very good work, doing everything
    they could with their small force, and they (the presidentes)
    felt that if they had guns in the hands of the municipal police
    or if they had the constabulary to guard their towns, they could
    go out after these people themselves.


The importance of all this testimony, relatively to its forever
sickening any one acquainted with it with colonization by a republic,
is that a transcript of Mr. Whittier's statement of October 5th
was placed in the hands of the Governor-General a few days later by
Mr. Harvey, the Assistant Attorney-General, and yet this situation
continued until shortly after the presidential election. Several
years afterwards, in the North American Review, Judge Ide, who
was Vice-Governor in 1904, after admitting that he was in constant
consultation with the Governor-General all through that period (by
way of showing his opportunities for knowing whereof he spoke),
denied that the failure to order out the military to protect the
people from massacre had any relation whatever to the presidential
election then going on in the United States.

Mr. Whittier also stated before me that the total population of the
municipality of Taft was 18,000, and that twenty-five men armed with
guns in each of the four principal villages thereof that were burned
would have prevented the destruction of those villages. So we did not
protect the people, and we would not let them protect themselves. I
do not select the pueblo of Taft on account of its distinguished
name. "What's in a name?" The fate of Taft and its inhabitants was
simply typical of the fate which descended upon scores of other places
in "dark and bloody" Samar between the outbreak of July 10, 1904, and
the presidential election of November 8th, of that year, and between
those two dates the shadow of such a fate was over all the towns of
the island on which it did not in fact descend. Mr. Whittier stated to
me informally that at the time he was speaking of in the above formal
statement, there were pending and had been pending for a long time
(he seemed to think they must have been pigeon-holed) applications
for permission to bear arms from fifteen different pueblos. After
Mr. Whittier had finished his statement the Presidente of Taft made
a like statement on the same day, October 5th. My retained copy
shows that this official bore the ponderous name of Angel Custodio
Crisologo. He declared a willingness to lead his people against
the Pulajans if given guns, though the fervent soul did qualify
this martial remark by adding, "If I am well enough," explaining
that the presidential body was subject to rheumatism. Mr. Crisologo
stated among other things that there had been eight hundred houses
burned in the jurisdiction of Taft before he left the east coast
for Catbalogan--about a week before. Like Mr. Whittier's, a copy
of Mr. Crisologo's statement was delivered a few days later to
the Governor-General in person by the Assistant Attorney-General,
Mr. Harvey, who had been present when it was made and taken down.

This Mr. Harvey need not be, to the western hemisphere reader, a
mere nebulous antipodal entity, as the Hon. Angel Custodio Crisologo
might. He is a very live American, a very high-toned gentleman, and
an excellent lawyer, and was at last accounts still with the insular
government of the Philippine Islands, though in a higher capacity
(Solicitor General) than he was at the date of the events herein
narrated. There was very little congenial society in Catbalogan when
Mr. Harvey came there to help dispose of the criminal docket, and his
advent was to me a very welcome oasis in a desert of "the solitude
of my own originality"--or lack of originality. On September 19th I
had wired Vice-Governor Ide that there were 172 prisoners in the jail
awaiting trial and "many more coming." Of course no justice of the
peace would be trusted to pass on whether an alleged outlaw should
or should not be held for trial. If he were secretly in sympathy
with the discomfiture American authority in Samar was having, he
might let the man go, no matter what the proof. Also he might seek to
clear himself of all suspicion in each case by committing men against
whom there was no proof, thus unnecessarily crowding an already fast
filling provincial jail of limited dimensions, wherein beriberi [440]
was already making its dread appearance.

So the writ of habeas corpus remained unsuspended, thus making it
possible to so state in later official certificates covering that
period. But habeas corpus cut no more figure in the situation than
it did at the battle of Gettysburg, or at the crossing of the Red
Sea by the chosen people, or at the sinking of the Titanic. The
constabulary would worry along with such force as they had in the
island of Samar, only a few hundred, certainly nearer five hundred
than one thousand. And, whenever they had a battle with the outlaws,
if they themselves were not annihilated, which happened more than
once, they would bring back prisoners in droves and put them in
the jail, and I was expected to sift out how much proof they had,
or claimed to have, of overt acts by persons not actually captured
in action. Of course a race then began, a race against death, to see
whether death or I would get to John Doe or Richard Roe first. And
though I held court every day except Sunday from August to November
8th, sometimes getting in sixteen hours per day by supplementing a
day's work with a night session, death would often beat me to some
one man on the jail list whom I happened to have picked out to get to
the next day. Men so picked out were men as to whom something I might
have heard held out the hope of being able to dispose of their cases
quickly by letting them loose, [441] thus getting that much farther
from the danger limit of crowding in the jail. Some of these would be
specially picked out because reported sick. I kept track of the sick
by visiting them myself when practicable, and talking to them. Of
course many of them were brigands---Pulajans--but some of them were
the saddest looking, most abject little brigands that anybody ever
saw. Of course you might catch some nasty disease from them, but
nobody, somehow, ever seemed to have any apprehension on that score
in the Philippines. This does not argue bravery at all. It is merely
the listless stoicism that lurks in the climate. I recollect going
to walk one afternoon, after adjourning court at 5 o'clock, saying to
the prosecuting attorney before adjourning, "We will take up the case
of Capence Coral in the morning; there does not seem, from what I can
understand, to be enough proof to convict him of anything." Of course
when you were dealing with hundreds of people, you did not have any
nerve-racking hysterics about any one man. Leaving the court-house I
passed by the hospital, where Capence had been transferred, pending
the arrival of witnesses against him and the rest of the crowd captured
with him. I asked the hospital steward how Capence was. The answer was
he had died at 4:45--some twenty minutes before. Death had beat me to
Capence. When I meet Capence he will know I did the best I could. I
was under a great strain, a sort of writ of habeas corpus incarnate,
the only thing remotely suggesting relief from unwarranted [442]
detention on the whole horizon of the situation. I was trying to do
the best I could by the Constitution, in so far as the spirit of it
had reached the Philippines. I broke down totally under the strain
about November 8th, came home in the spring of the following year
and remained an invalid for several years thereafter; and as a noted
corporation lawyer once said after recovery from a similar illness,
"I haven't had much constitution since, but have been living mostly
under the by-laws."

American office-holding in the Philippines is not so popular with
the Filipinos as to have moved them to any outburst of gratitude in
the shape of an effort to create a pension system for Americans who
lose their health in the government service out there. When they
leave the Islands they become as one dead so far as the Philippine
insular government is concerned. And the men whose health is more or
less permanently impaired by disability incurred in line of duty in
the Philippines are not and will never be numerous or powerful enough
back home to create any sentiment in favor of a pension system for
former Philippine employees, since the Philippine business is not a
subject of much popular enthusiasm at best. So if I had not had private
resources, the results of the Samar insurrection of 1904 would have
left me also in the pitiable plight in which I have beheld so many
of my repatriated former comrades of the Philippine service in the
last seven years, to whom the heart of the more fortunate ex-Filipino
indeed goes out in sympathy. But to return to the race to beat death
to prisoners in that grim and memorable fall of 1904.

In September the crowded condition of the jail had begun to tell on
the inmates. The constabulary force at Catbalogan was quite inadequate
for the varied emergencies of the situation, there being, besides
the town itself to protect, the provincial treasury to guard, the
governor's office, the court-house, and the jail. Consequently the jail
guard was too small. The jail buildings were in an enclosure a little
larger than a baseball diamond, surrounded by high stone walls. But
it was not safe to let the inmates sleep out in the enclosure at
night. They had to be kept at night in the buildings. Any American
who has visited the central penitentiary at Manila called Bilibid
has seen a place almost as clean as a battleship. This is American
work. But the Filipinos are not trained in sanitary matters, and all
they know about handling large crowds of prisoners they learned from
the Spaniards. The Governor was a native half-caste, a very excellent
man, but free from that horror, which I think is an almost universal
American trait, of seeing unnecessary and preventable sacrifice of
human life, no matter whose the life. I inspected the jail as often
as was practicable, and managed to keep down the death-rate below
what it might have been, the prisoners being allowed to go out in
the open court during the day. They also had such medical attention
as was available. However, during the last five or six weeks of that
term of court I would be pretty sure to find on my desk every two or
three days, on opening court in the morning, a notice like this:


    Carcel Provincial de Samar, I. F.
    Oficina del Alcaide

    Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.,
    22 de Septiembre de 1904.

    Hon. Sr. Juez de Ia Instancia de esta provincia,
    Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.

    Señor:

    Tengo el honor de poner en conocimiento de ese juzgado, que
    anoche entre 12 y 1 de ella, fallecio el procesado, Ramon Boroce,
    a consecuencia de la enfermedad de beriberi, que venia padeciendo.

    Lo que tengo el honor de communicar a ese Juzgado para su superior
    conocimiento.

    De U. muy respetuosamente,
    Gonzalo Lucero,

    Alcaide de la Carcel Provincial.


which being interpreted means:


    Provincial Jail of Samar, P. I.

    Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.,
    September 22, 1904.

    His honor, the Judge of First Instance of this province,
    Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.

    Sir:

    I have the honor to bring to the knowledge of the court that last
    night between 12 and 1 o'clock, the accused person Ramon Boroce
    died in consequence of the disease of beriberi from which he has
    been suffering; which fact I have the honor to communicate to
    the court for its superior knowledge.

    Very respectfully,
    Gonzalo Lucero,

    Warden of the Provincial Jail.


Now a jail death-rate of only ten or twelve a month was not at all a
bad record for an insurrection in a Philippine province. It would be
rank demagoguery at this late date to be a party to anybody's getting
excited about it. I was rather proud of it by comparison with the jail
death-rate of the Albay insurrection of the year before, where 120
men had died in the jail in about six months. But it began to get on
one's nerves to have to expect a billet-doux like the above on your
desk at the opening of court each day, when the accused person had
had no commitment trial and may have been wholly innocent. It all
came back to the difference between war and peace, viz., that in war
it is to be expected that many innocent persons will suffer, but that
in peace only the guilty should suffer. Moreover, in war that admits
it is war, your agents, your army, are better able to handle crowds
of prisoners than native police and constabulary, and the percentage
of innocent who suffer with the guilty in such war will be far less;
whereas the contrary is true of war--waged by constabulary checked
by courts--which pretends that a state of peace exists, i.e., which
pretends there is no need for declaring martial law and calling on
your army.

It was this Samar insurrection which convinced me that waging war
with courts and constabulary in lieu of the recognized method was,
in its net results, the cruelest kind of war, and that the civil
government of the Philippines was a failure, in so far as regarded
Mr. McKinley's original injunction to the Taft Commission; where,
after alluding to the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila
to our forces, which concluded with the words:


    This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all
    descriptions * * * are placed under the special safeguard of the
    faith and honor of the American Army,


he added:


    As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of
    the United States to give protection for property and life * * *
    to all the people of the Philippine Islands. I charge this
    commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation,
    which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.


Commenting on this in his inaugural address as Governor of the
Philippines, Governor Taft had said:


    May we not be recreant to the charge, which he truly says,
    concerns the honor and conscience of our country.


No matter who was to blame, here we were in Samar, with the
14th Infantry three hours away in one direction at Calbayog,
doing nothing, and the 18th Infantry five hours away in another
direction, at Tacloban, doing nothing, and a reign of terror going
on in Samar, with the peaceably inclined people of the lowlands
and coast towns appealing to us for protection and not getting it,
sometimes crouching in abject terror without knowing which way to fly,
sometimes taking to the hills and joining the outlaws as a measure
of self-preservation. 'Twas pitiful, wondrous pitiful! I then and
there decided that we ought to get out of the Philippines as soon
as any decent sort of a native government could be set up, and that
our republic was not adapted to colonization. In his North American
Review article above cited, in denying that the unwillingness of
the Manila government to order out the army in Samar in the fall
of 1904 had anything to do with the possible effect so doing might
have had on the presidential election, then in progress in the United
States, Governor Ide rebuked me with patronizing self-righteousness
thus: "Was Judge Blount opposed to kindness?" He means in giving
the Filipinos, under such circumstances, the "protection of civil
government," instead of ordering out the army. No, but I was opposed
to using a saw, in lieu of a lancet, in excising the ulcers of that
body politic at that time. In protesting that there was "nothing
sinister" about the failure to use the troops, Judge Ide cunningly
wonders whether my attitude was subsequently assumed after I left
the Islands because of "proclivities as a Democrat," or whether it
was merely due to "predilections in favor of military rule." Read
Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Taft Commission, above quoted,
that to protect life and property concerned the honor and conscience
of their country, and consider if the Ide suggestion does not seem to
hide its head and slink away in shame before the strong clear light
of what was then a plain duty. As a matter of fact Judge Charles
S. Lobinger, who is still with the Philippine judiciary, visited me
en route to another point, during that Samar term of court, and he
will recall, should he ever chance upon this book and this chapter,
with what vehemence I said to him at the time, in effect, "Judge,
we belong in the Western Hemisphere. We have no business out here
permanently." If proclivities and predilections in favor of affording
decent protection to the lives and property of defenceless people
by properly garrisoning their towns constitutes lack of kindness,
then the Ide rebuke was well taken.

These details are not related with Pickwickian gravity in order to
acquaint the reader with my utterances as being important per se. But
it is important to make clear to the reader, and he is entitled,
in all frankness, to have it made clear by one who has now so long
detained his attention on this great subject, to know just when "the
light from heaven on the road to Damascus" broke upon this witness,
and how and why he came to be in favor of Philippine independence,
because the reasons which convinced him may seem good in the sight
of the reader also. If the man who reads this book shall see that
the man who wrote it was, in Samar in 1904, neither a Republican nor
a Democrat, but simply an American in a far distant land, jealous
of the honor of his country's flag in its capacity as a symbol of
protection to those over whom it floated, then the work will not have
been written in vain.

The presidentes or mayors of the various pueblos were in session
at Catbalogan in semi-annual convention during the first few days
of October, 1904, when the Assistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey,
visited Catbalogan. Mr. Harvey and the writer had taken a number of
long walks together in the suburbs of Catbalogan, though Major Dade,
commanding the Samar constabulary, an officer of the regular army,
had warned us it was not safe outside of town. We had talked over
the situation fully. Besides all its other aspects, there were a
number of American women in Catbalogan, an American lawyer's wife,
the wife of the superintendent of schools, her sister, and others. It
was not at all likely that the Pulajans would enter Catbalogan, but
there was always the possibility, not to be wholly ignored, that some
such episode as that of March 23d, of the preceding year, at Surigao,
already described, might be repeated. As hereinbefore noted, on August
9th, the Pulajans had done some killing and burning at Silanga, less
than ten miles north of Catbalogan and likewise at Motiong, less than
ten miles south of Catbalogan, on September 1st, and on the evening
of September 2d, about 7:30, there had been a false alarm caused
by some native of Catbalogan running down the main street yelling,
"Pulajans! Pulajans!" All of which did not tend to make you feel
that your American women were quite as entirely safe from harm as
they ought to be.

In the course of one of our walks Mr. Harvey and I had stopped on the
mountain side overlooking Catbalogan, to catch our breath and take in
the view of the town below and the sea beyond. I said to him, because
I knew his mind also was on the one great need of the hour: "Yes sir,
if President Roosevelt were here, and could see this situation as we
do, he would order out the army and protect these defenceless people,
no matter which way the chips might fly." Mr. Harvey agreed with
me. He promised to go back to Manila and tell the authorities there
so. After we came back to town, we were advised that the convention of
presidentes desired to have Mr. Harvey favor them with an address. He
said, "What shall I tell them?" I said, "Tell them that if they will
do their duty by the American Government, the American Government will
do its duty by them." He spoke Spanish fluently, made a good speech,
and told them in effect just that thing. Then he went back to Manila,
and shortly afterward wrote me the two letters which follow:


    Department of Justice, Philippine Islands,
    Office of the Assistant Attorney-General
    for the Constabulary,

                                        Manila, P. I., October 15, 1904.


    My dear Judge: We arrived in Manila on Tuesday morning,
    the 11th instant, and I prepared my report and submitted it
    to the attorney-general on the 12th, in the meantime making a
    transcript of your summary and delivering a copy of same with other
    information to the attorney-general along with my report. After
    dictating the report and before delivering it I had a conversation
    with General Allen on the situation in Samar and told him what
    my recommendations would be. He agreed that rewards should be
    offered for the capture of Pablo Bulan, Antonio Anogar, and Pedro
    de la Cruz, but took issue on the other recommendations, and to my
    mind he takes a very extreme view; but I thought at the time and
    still think that he wanted to tone me down in my feelings in the
    matter. I think the real cause for his opposition is the effect
    that he fears an aggressive attitude might have on the presidential
    election. In other words, whatever they do aggressively might be
    misconstrued and made use of as political capital.

    At Governor Wright's request I got the report from the
    attorney-general before it was sent up and went over to the
    Malacañan, and the governor read the report and read most of the
    data that I submitted with the report, including your summary, and
    while he did not say much what he did say convinced me that there
    would be something doing if it were not on the eve of election,
    and in my opinion there will be things doing in Samar within
    thirty days.

    I inclose herewith a copy of your summary, and also a copy of my
    report to the attorney-general. On the 18th instant I received
    your telegram to hold the completion of your summary until receipt
    of a letter mailed by you that day. I telegraphed you in reply
    that my report and your summary were placed in the hands of the
    attorney-general on the 12th instant. If there is any additional
    data in your letter mailed on the 13th I will submit it to the
    proper authorities.

    For the lack of time, I will close, and write more next time.


        Very truly yours,
        (Signed) Geo. R. Harvey,
        Assistant Attorney-General.




    Department of Justice, Philippine Islands,
    Office of the Assistant Attorney-General,
    for the Constabulary,

                                        Manila, P. I., October 19, 1904.


    My dear Judge Blount: Since mailing my letter to you of last
    Saturday I have found the copies of your summary on the situation
    in Samar and inclose two herewith, in accordance with my promise.

    This week we have received some good news from Samar with
    reference to important captures and killings of Pulajans. I
    am not in touch with what is going on with reference to Samar,
    and can give you no information along that line. As I remember,
    the governor told me the other day when I was talking with him
    that one more company of scouts will be sent down right away.

    I sincerely hope the situation is improving, and that you are
    getting along rapidly in disposing of the large docket before
    you. If there is not a very great improvement in the situation
    by the 9th of November, I think there will be a considerable
    movement of troops in Samar within thirty days. For the good of the
    government, I hope the situation will improve materially before
    that time. I would like to see them put the troops there right
    now. I am of the opinion that it would not affect the election a
    half-dozen votes, and it might save two or three or a half-dozen
    massacres and the destruction of much property.

    With best wishes for your success in your work, and with regards
    to Mr. Block, I am,


        Very truly yours,

        Geo. R. Harvey,

        Assistant Attorney-General, Philippines Constabulary.
        To Hon. James H. Blount,
        Judge of First Instance, Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.


These two letters may be found at p. 2532, Congressional Record,
February 25, 1908, where they were the subject of remark in the House
of Representatives by Hon. Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, apropos of
Governor Ide's North American Review article of December, 1907.

A few weeks after the presidential election I saw Mr. Harvey
in Manila. We naturally talked about Samar and his two letters
to me. The troops had then been ordered out. He referred to his
conference with the Governor-General and stated, "Yes, he told me
that was the reason," meaning that the reason for not ordering out
the troops was the one assigned in his (Harvey's) letter to me, viz.,
"Whatever we do aggressively might be misconstrued and made use of
as political capital."

On October 18, 1904, there was received at Manila the following
cablegram concerning the presidential campaign in the United States:


    New York, 16th. Judge Parker, in addressing campaign clubs at
    Esopus the past week returned to the subject of the Philippines
    in the evident hope of making it a paramount issue of the
    campaign. He repeated his former declaration that the retention
    of the Philippines and the carrying out of the policy of the
    Republican Administration have cost six hundred and fifty millions
    of dollars and two hundred thousand lives. Secretary of War Taft,
    in addressing a mass meeting held in Baltimore, Saturday night,
    ridiculed Judge Parker's statement and characterized his figures
    as alarmist.


Of course Judge Parker's figures were rather high--of which more
anon. He was not going to miss anything in the way of a chance of
"getting a rise" out of the Administration, by understatement. But some
statement from the Philippines at once became a supremely important
desideratum, to counterbalance Judge Parker's over-statement, some
optimism to meet the Parker pessimism. Encouraged by the public
interest aroused by the figures furnished him, and the consequent
apparent uneasiness it created in "the enemy's camp," Judge Parker
soon had the whole Philippine group of islands going to "the demnition
bow-wows." On October 20th, Secretary of War Taft cabled Governor
Wright, then Governor-General of the Islands, a long telegram, quoting
Judge Parker as having used, among other language descriptive of the
beatitudes we had conferred on our little brown brother, the following:
"The towns in many places in ruins, whole districts in the hands of
ladrones." [443]

At that time the whole archipelago was absolutely quiet for the nonce,
except Samar. Samar was the only island where Judge Parker's statement
was true, and as to Samar, it was absolutely true. On October 23d
Governor Wright wired Secretary of War Taft as follows:


    There is nothing warranting the statement that towns are in
    ruins. It is not true that there are whole districts in the hands
    of ladrones. Life and property are as safe here as in the United
    States. [444]


This was followed by a perfectly true and correct picture of the
peace and quiet which then prevailed for the time being everywhere
throughout the archipelago, except in Samar, which dark and bloody
isle was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement as to
Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic as any of the Taft
cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly inconsiderable "prowling bands" of
outlaws in Samar. Of course nobody at home knew the answer to this,
so it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar massacres proceeded
unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th
Infantry, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if contemptuous,
tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence of a republic trying to
make conquered subjects behave without colliding too violently with
home sentiment against having conquered subjects; sang their favorite
barrack room song,


            He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft,
            But he ain't no friend of mine;


and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did chafe under the
restraint, but it at least relieved them from the not altogether
inspiring task of chasing Pulajans through jungles and along the
slippery mire of precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time
permitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to swear fierce
blasé oaths, not wholly unjustified, about how much better he could
run the Islands than they were being run.

On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at Manila as follows:


    Since my letter of October 6th, situation appears worse. Additional
    depredations both on east and west coast. Smith-Bell closing
    out. [445] Reliable American residing in Wright says that during
    week ending last Sunday thirteen families living along river
    Nacbac, barrio of Tutubigan, said pueblo, kidnapped by brigands
    and carried off to hills. This means some sixty people having
    farms along river, rice ready to be harvested. Seven of the eleven
    barrios of Wright have been burned.

            Blount.


When I sent that telegram of October 26th, the situation in the pueblo
of Wright was typical of the reign of terror throughout the island.
Wright could have been reached by the 18th Infantry (then over at
Tacloban, in Leyte), and garrisoned on eight hours' notice. But I had
little hope that the telegram would stir the 18th. The best man I had
ever personally known well in high station was at the head of the
government of the Islands, and as he was my friend, I sat down to
think the situation out, determined, with the prejudice which is the
privilege of friendship, to analyze his apparent apathy, and to
conjecture how many times thirteen families "having farms along river,
rice ready to be harvested" would have to be carried off to the hills
by the brigands in order to move the 18th Infantry before the
presidential election. Then I wondered just how many seconds it
would have taken a British governor-general, backed by unanimous
home sentiment concerning the wisdom of having colonies, to have
acted, had a great British colonial mercantile house like Smith,
Bell & Co. appealed to him for protection of its interests. And that
brought me, there on "the tie-ribs of earth," as Kipling would phrase
it, to the fundamentals of the problem. The British imperial idea of
which Kipling is the voice and Benjamin Kidd the accompanist is based,
superficially, upon a supposed necessity for the control of the tropics
by non-tropical peoples, though fundamentally, it is an assertion of
the right of any people to assume control of the land and destinies
of another when they feel sure they can govern that other better than
that other can govern itself. Is this proposition tenable, and if so,
within what limits? Is it tenable to the point of total elimination of
the people sought to be improved? If not, then how far? How far is
incidental sacrifice of human life negligible in the working out of
the broader problem of "the greatest good of the greatest number?" In
his article in the North American Review for December, 1907, Governor
Ide makes exhaustive answer to "the doctors who for some months past,
in the columns of the North American Review and elsewhere, have
published prescriptions for curing the ills of the Filipino people,"
including Senator Francis G. Newlands, Hon. William J. Bryan, and the
writer. In the course of disposing of the quack last mentioned,
Governor Ide gets on rather a high horse, asking, with much dignified
indignation, "How many people in the United States would have known or
cared whether the army was or was not ordered out in Samar in 1904?"
I concede that the solicitude was a super-solicitude, as do the Harvey
letters, but like them, I must recognize its reality. However, when
Governor Ide reaches this rhapsody of conscious virtue: "It is
inconceivable that the Commission could have been animated by the
base and ignoble partisan prejudices thus charged against them,"
capping his climax by triumphantly pointing out that "Governor-General
Wright was a life-long Democrat," he doth protest too much. For the
angelic pinions he thus attaches to himself are at once rudely snapped
by the reflection that a very short while after his article came out
in the North American Review Governor Wright became Secretary of War
in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and a little later took the stump
for Taft and Sherman, in 1908. Governor Wright did not stoop to deny
or extenuate his share in the matter, and I honor him for it. [446]
But to stick to your own crowd and then deny afterwards that you did
so--that is another story. However, let us brush aside such petty
attempts to cloud the real issue, which is: How many people would
Governor Wright and Vice-Governor Ide have permitted to be massacred
by the Pulajans in Samar in 1904 before they would have ordered out
the military prior to the presidential election? Let us consider the
case, not with a view of clouding the issue, but of clearing it. The
truth is, Governor Wright was very gravely concerned about the Samar
situation from August to November, 1904. Of course it is due to him
to make perfectly clear that he did not realize the gravity of that
situation as vividly as those of us who were on the ground in Samar,
four or five hundred miles away. But the information hereinbefore
reviewed, conveyed to him by the Provincial Governor, by Mr. Harvey,
the Assistant Attorney General sent to Samar for the express purpose
of getting the Manila government in possession of the exact situation,
and by myself, was certainly sufficient to make him "chargeable with
notice" of all that happened thereafter, certainly chargeable with
knowledge of all that had happened theretofore. Of course there
was General Allen, the commander-in-chief of the constabulary, at
Manila, presumably speaking well of his command--the right arm of
the civil government--presumably giving industrious and tactful aid
and comfort to the idea that the authorities could afford to worry
along with the constabulary alone until after the presidential
election. But that could not discount the actual facts reported
from the afflicted province by the officials on the ground. General
Allen, it should be noted, remained in Manila all this time. So that
any Otis-like "situation-well-in-hand" bouquets he may have thrown
at his subordinates in Samar, and the situation there generally,
were mere political hothouse products, surer to be recognized as
such by the shrewd kindliness of the truly considerable man at the
head of the government than by most any one else he could hand them
out to. That man knew, to all intents and purposes, in the great and
noble heart of him, what was really going on in Samar. He knew that
massacres had been occurring, and that they were likely to keep on
occurring. In other words, he knew that preventable sacrifice of life
of defenceless people was going on, and that he could put a stop to it
any time he saw fit. The question he had to wrestle with was, should he
stop it, knowing the "Hell fer Sartin" the Democratic orators in the
United States would at once luridly describe as "broke loose" in the
Philippines? I insist that there is no use for any holier-than-thou
gentleman to become suffused with any glow of indignant conscious
rectitude based on the premises we are considering. Better to look
a little deeper, on the idea that you are observing your republic in
flagrante colonizatione, with as good a man as you ever have had, or
ever will have, among you, as the principal actor. Governor Wright's
course was entirely right, if the Philippine policy was right. If his
course was not right, it was not right because the Philippine policy
is fundamentally wrong. Governor Wright of course believed that the
Philippine policy was right. I myself did not come finally to believe
it was wrong until it was revealed in all its rawness by the period now
under discussion. Of course the Governor did not vividly realize that
the American women in Catbalogan were not entirely safe. If he had,
he would have rushed the troops there, politics or no politics. But
native life was politically negligible. What difference would a few
score, or even a few hundred, natives of Samar make, compared with
that pandemonium of anarchy and bloodshed all over the archipelago
which Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide had long been insisting would
follow Philippine independence? Was the whole future of 8,000,000 of
people to be jeopardized to save a few people in Samar? That was the
moral question before the insular government, in its last analysis. And
the government faced the proposition squarely, and answered it "No."

I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with Messrs. Taft,
Wright, and Ide, that Philippine independence meant anarchy in the
Islands, and the orthodox "bloody welter of chaos," I too might have
hesitated to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and
my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until the election
was safely over. So might yours, reader. Don't be so certain you
would not. Practically absolute power, sure of its own benevolence,
has temptations to withhold its confidence from the people that you
wot not of. Don't condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the policy, and
change your republic back to the course set by its founders. Give
the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have,
instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through
the medium of your next great war.

The question of whether the troops should have been ordered out
or not at the time above dealt with is by no means without two
sides. On the "bloody welter" side, you have the well-known opinions
of Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have before
you--for the moment--only my little opinion. So instead of having in
Governor Wright a Bluebeard, you simply have a man of great personal
probity and unflinching moral courage, following his convictions to
their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of turning, in the
act of colonization. In other words, Mr. American, you see yourself,
as others see you. So face the music and look at yourself. In your
colony business, you are a house divided against itself, which
cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino people far more
intimately than either Mr. Taft, Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke
their language--which they did not. I had met them both in peace and
in war--which they had not. I had held court for months at a time in
various provinces of the archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to
Mindanao--which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in their homes
for years on terms of free and informal intercourse impracticable
for any governor-general. It was therefore perfectly natural that I
should know them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. I was
not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending myself out of office
by assenting that our guardianship over the Filipinos should at once
be terminated, but I knew there was nothing to the "bloody welter"
proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too altogether a model
of freedom from discord, pervaded as it is by parental, filial, and
fraternal love, and their patriotism is too universal and genuine,
to give the "bloody welter" bugaboo any standing in court.

But whosoever questions for one moment Governor Wright's high personal
character, simply does not know the man. To do so, moreover, would
fatally cloud the issue I have sought to make clear between his
view of the duty of our government and my own. In his moods that
reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright used to say: "Don't shoot
the organist, he's doing the best he can." It is true that his
answer to Judge Parker was not a full and frank statement of the
case. But did it lie in American human nature, when your antagonist
was recklessly over-stating the case in the heat of debate on the
eve of a presidential election, to take him into your confidence
and tell him all you knew, in simple trusting faith that he would
thereafter quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil down to
the real issue, viz., how many lives it was permissible to abandon on
the "greatest good to the greatest number" theory, would obviously
jeopardize the existence of a government which the Governor of the
Philippines naturally believed to be better for all concerned than
any other. And there is your cul-de-sac. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

We can point with pride to many things we have done in the
Philippines, the public improvements, [447] the school system, the
better sanitation, and a long list of other benefits conferred. But in
the greatest thing we have done for them, we have builded wiser than
we knew. "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." In
fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one homogeneous
political unit. In a most charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in
the Philippines, [448] we can see our attempts to fit government by
two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without
sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a
squirrel. In one passage the British sister describes our programme
as one "to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may,
in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American
methods; but at the same time they have plenty of soldiers to knock
him on the head if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the
Americans think he is fit for it"--"A quaint scheme," she naïvely adds,
"and one full of the go-ahead originality of America."

The more we teach the Filipinos, the more intimately they will become
acquainted, in their own way, with the history of the relations
between our country and theirs from the beginning, including the
taxation without representation, through Congressional legislation
(hereinafter noticed) placed or kept on our statute-books by the hemp
trust and other special interests in the United States. And they will
learn all these things in the midst of a "growing gulf between the
two peoples." [449]

In fourteen years we have made these unwilling subjects, whom we
neither want nor need any more than they want or need us, a unit; a
unit for Home Rule in preference to alien domination, it is true; but,
nevertheless, a patriotic unit--one people--a potential body politic
which can take a modest, but self-respecting place in the concert of
free nations, with only a little more additional help from us.

In the handling of an insurrection in any given province with
courts and constabulary during the first four or five years after
the Taft government of the Philippines was founded, the function of
a representative of the office of the Attorney-General, coming from
Manila to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large docket
and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely analogous to that of a
grand jury. He originated prosecutions, found "No Bill," etc. When
Mr. Harvey came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I
suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after greeting him,
began an informal talk which was akin to the nature of a charge to
a grand jury, putting him in possession of the general aspects of
the uprising. He was a very just and kindly man, and entered into
the spirit of the task. I elaborated on the class of cases where
the defendant claimed, as most of them did, "Yes, I joined the band
of brigands, but I was made to do so." It was also indictable to
furnish supplies to the public enemy. This presented the class of
cases where the brigands would swoop down on a town and demand rice,
and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons refusing it,
and so intimidate the rest into finding rice for them. Also there was
the class of cases where a man would claim to have been one of the
inhabitants of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills in a
body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people by becoming part of
them. This sort of thing at one time threatened to become epidemic with
all the coast towns. It did not, however. A modus vivendi of some sort,
sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, would be arranged between
the coast people and the hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements
enabled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of safety, in
lieu of that we should have secured them but did not, by making the
hill folk believe that the coast men were against us and for them. At
one time the prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to
authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente of Balangiga,
the man supposed to have engineered the massacre of the 9th Infantry
in September 1901. I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his
arrest. But the native governor of the province, and also Major Dade,
the American regular officer commanding the constabulary, satisfied me
that we did not have force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the
Pulajans, if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata to
the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending on his town. To
arrest him would therefore mean, in their opinion, that the people
of Balangiga would take to the hills for protection, and join the
hill folk, or Pulajans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any
such example all the coast towns might follow it. So the supposed
perpetrator of the 9th Infantry massacre was allowed to remain
unmolested. The American court was impotent to enforce its processes.

In my mass of Philippine papers there is one containing a copy of my
remarks to the Assistant Attorney-General on his arrival at Catbalogan,
above referred to as analogous to a charge to a grand jury at home. It
is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, and is headed:
"Remarks by the court upon the occasion of the arrival of Assistant
Attorney-General Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in
Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition growing out of the
same." Certain parts of this contemporary document will doubtless
give the reader a more vivid apprehension of the then situation than
he can get from mere subsequent description. Of course the visiting
representative of the Attorney-General's office was familiar in a
general way with the manner of the handling of the Albay insurrection
in the previous year, described in the chapter preceding this. In
discussing the Samar situation the "remarks" of the court contain,
among other things, this passage:


    In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there were
    a great many people who strayed out to the mountains just like
    cattle. They did not know why or whither they went. As to those
    persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and myself were unanimous in the
    opinion that some of them could be indicted under the vagrancy
    law. There were others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did
    not appear to have been what you might call ordinary thieves,
    and we were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law,
    the limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus you
    do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the responsibility of
    sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a connection with
    bandits which may be but little more than technical. Besides those
    two classes, there were in Albay of course the bandits proper,
    to whom the bandolerismo [brigandage] law was specially intended
    to apply. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that this
    bandolerismo law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever
    was on the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the
    purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the wisest
    legislation, or to say that this is not the very best legislation,
    under the circumstances. How we administer the several laws
    alluded to governing public order, will settle whether or not
    substantial justice is done.


The men in the United States who in those days were slinging mud at
the Philippine trial judges as being "subservient," wholly missed
the core of the whole matter. In the provinces where so many heavy
sentences were imposed, the real situation was that a state of war
existed, and the judges believed, and I think correctly, that they were
practically a military commission of one, and much more able to give
a prisoner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than officers
briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting to act as a military
commission. We tried those men with as little prejudice as if they had
just come from the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding words
of the above excerpt from my talk to the Assistant Attorney-General,
it will be seen that the court had practically unlimited discretion
in the matter of punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court
of criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.

In the last analysis, the righteousness or unrighteousness of a civil
government in a country not yet entirely subjugated, depends on whether
more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation
with constabulary whose "prisoners of war" are tried, to see what
they may have done, if anything, by one-man courts, or whether more
innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation as
any other great power on earth but ourselves would have completed it,
with an army, trying the prisoners by military commission. Unless you
yourself were a traitor to your country, you considered as criminal
attempts to subvert your government by cut-throats that no one of
the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan Cailles down,
would have hesitated to have shot summarily. But you sought to
make the punishment in each case fit the crime, by ascertaining
as dispassionately as if the defendant were fresh from the moon,
just what each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, or
an American military commission would have had such people shot in
bunches, as not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war. The trouble
with the civil government did not lie in its judiciary, but in its
constabulary. It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners
by the constabulary, and their failure, because not numerous enough,
to protect peaceably inclined people, which made it a fact that turning
the situation over to the military would have meant less sacrifice of
the innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merciful to kill
a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go,
with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will
promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror
from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the
untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves,
merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman
Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign "civil" government.

In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. Harvey and the
writer sailed close to the wind, by holding only those responsible
who had taken active parts in the sacking and burning of villages and
the massacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or later some
officious prosecuting attorney of less noble mould than Harvey would
ask me to convict some poor creature of brigandage for giving a little
rice to the brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so,
and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all by expressing my
sentiments, in the decision, concerning the failure to give adequate
protection to defenceless people, along the lines indicated in this
chapter. No such case was in fact presented. I broke down under the
strain of graver cases early in November and left Samar forever,
bound for Manila.

Before I left, the whole island was seething with sedition. I was
told by a credible American that the chief deputy sheriff of the
court, an ex-insurgent officer, one of the "peace-at-any-price"
policy appointees, had remarked among some of his own people where he
did not expect the remark to be repeated: "I see no use persecuting
our brethren in the hills." The municipal officials of the provincial
capital, Catbalogan, were suspected by the native provincial governor,
and the latter in turn was suspected by the Manila government. In
fact the whole political atmosphere of the island had become full of
rumor and suspicion as to who was for the government, and who was
against the government. I left Samar, November 8th, which was the
day of the presidential election of 1904, determined to try no more
insurrections. By that time nearly everybody in the island was more
or less guilty of sedition, and I did not know the method of drawing
an indictment against a whole people.






CHAPTER XIX

GOVERNOR WRIGHT--1905

        My heart is heavy with the fate of that unhappy people.

                       Speech of Hon. A. O. Bacon in U. S. Senate. [450]


Because the especially cordial relations which existed to the last
between Governor Wright and myself [451] are familiar to a number of
very dear mutual friends, I deem it due both to them and to myself,
in view of the contents of the preceding chapter, to state that I
see no reason why, in writing a history of the American Occupation
of the Philippines, I should omit or slur the facts which convinced
me that that occupation ought to terminate as soon as practicable,
and that any decent kind of a government of Filipinos by Filipinos
would be better for all concerned than the McKinley-Taft programme of
Benevolent Assimilation whereof Governor Wright was the legatee. By the
thousand and one uncandid threads of that programme, slowly woven from
1898 to 1904, as indicated in the first sixteen chapters of this book,
Governor Wright had found himself as hopelessly bound to concealment
from the American people of the real situation in Samar in the fall
of 1904, as a Gulliver in Lilliput.

When I finally left Samar and came to Manila, in November, 1904, I
was not prepared to figure out how or how soon, the blunder we made
by the purchase of the Philippine archipelago could be corrected. But
my mental attitude toward the whole Philippine problem had undergone
a complete change. In 1901 Governor Wright, then Vice-Governor, had
written me: "You younger men out here, who have cast your fortunes with
this country, are to be, in all likelihood, in the natural course of
events, its future rulers." Up to 1903 I had clung to that idea with
the devotion of what was really high and earnest purpose, untroubled
with misgivings of any kind. In November, 1903, in Albay, Judge Carson
and myself had talked over the long struggle of the civil government
to walk without leaning on the military, and, with the readiness of one
vested with authority to believe such authority wisely vested, and the
readiness of a civilian lawyer to jealously guard the American home
idea that the military should be subordinate to the civil authority,
I had cordially agreed with a sentiment one day expressed by Judge
Carson concerning Governor Taft about "the splendid moral fibre of
the man," meaning in keeping the military from prancing out of the
traces. After Governor Taft left the Islands to be Secretary of War
(December 23, 1903), and while I was still in Albay, I had learned of
the 120 men who had died in the Albay jail while awaiting trial, and
thereafter something of the magnitude of the Ola insurrection there,
and that had given me pause as to the practical benevolence of the
operation of "a benign civil government." Then the Samar massacres
of 1904, and the gory panorama I had there witnessed, had finally
convinced me that a republic like ours is wholly unfitted to govern
people against their consent. But I did not tell anybody in Manila
all these things. I simply pondered them. Grover Cleveland was the
only man in the world I would have liked to talk to just then freely
and fully. And he was not about. "My heart was heavy with the fate
of that unhappy people" as Senator Bacon had said in the Senate in
1902, after visiting the Islands in 1901. I did not condemn Governor
Wright. I quite realized that I was "up against" about the largest
ethical problem of world politics, one on which the nations are much
divided, and that I was not infallible. I did not say to the Governor:
"Governor, let's resign and go home and tell our people that this whole
business is a mistake." Nor did I ever lose faith in Governor Wright
personally. If I had, I might just as well have said: "After this,
the deluge." I would simply have lost faith in human nature. I had not
then, nor have I since, known a man of higher personal character. I
had simply lost faith in Benevolent Assimilation, and begun to take
the Filipino people seriously as a potential nation, probably better
able to handle their own domestic problems than we will ever be able
to handle them for them.

The day after I resigned, Mr. Justice Carson, of the Supreme Court,
and Mr. Wilfley, the Attorney-General, came to call on me. My friends
knew I was very much troubled over the Samar business. I was doing
some grumbling, but without specifying, because to specify would mean
that we all of us ought to give up the life careers we had planned for
ourselves in the Islands. I knew the old familiar answer a grumbler
was sure to get in the Philippines, viz., "Old man, you've been out
here too long. You better go home." But I did a little more grumbling
to my friends Judge Carson and Mr. Wilfley, during the course of their
visit. They could both pretty well guess what was the matter. But Judge
Carson and I had come out in 1899, and had served through the war
together. He knew all about the Albay business, and somewhat of the
Samar business. Wilfley had not come out until the civil government
was founded in 1901. Mr. Wilfley said cheerily: "Oh, Blount, you are
too conscientious." I shall never forget what happened then. Judge
Carson said, with a ring of something like anger in his tone: "No,
Wilfley, I'll be d--d if he is." Is it any wonder that ever since I
have worn that man, as Hamlet would say, "in my heart's core"? Here was
as brave and true an Irishman as ever gained distinction on battlefield
or bench. And he understood. He did not say--which was the implication
of Wilfley's tone--"Old man, you've been out here too long, and illness
has made you peevish." He knew what was the matter. He knew that as
trial judges he and I had not been small editions of Lord Jeffries,
as some of our American critics had implied, BUT HE ALSO KNEW THAT
THERE WAS NO METHOD OF DRAWING AN INDICTMENT AGAINST A WHOLE PEOPLE.

Possibly the intensity of my feelings on this great subject, then
and ever since, hampers the power of clear expression. Therefore,
a word more in attempt at elucidation. In 1898, Judge Carson and I,
with many thousands of other young Americans, had trooped down to
Cuba, in the wake of the impetuous Roosevelt, to free the inhabitants
of that ill-fated island from Spanish rule, drive the Spaniards from
the Western Hemisphere, and put a stop to Spain's pious efforts "to
spare the great island from the dangers of premature independence,"
as she always expressed her attitude toward Cuba. We had many of us
been fired by the catchy Roosevelt utterance which did so much to
bring on the Spanish War, viz., "The steps of the White House are
slippery with the blood of the Cuban reconcentrados." Then in 1899,
we had gone to the Philippines, and had ever since been engaged there
in "sparing the Islands from the danger of premature independence,"
and the Samar massacres of 1904 were, to me, the apotheosis of the
work. So that after November 8, 1904, I felt "The steps of the White
House are slippery with the blood of the people of my district." It had
all been done under the pious pretence that the Filipinos welcomed our
rule--a pretence which had taken the form for six years of systematic
asseveration that they did so welcome it. Yet it was not true that
they, or any appreciable fraction of them, had ever welcomed our
rule. And it never will be true. Surely no man can see in this book
any scolding or unkindness. It is an attempt merely to bring home to
my countrymen a strategic fact, a fact which it is folly to ignore. But
to return to the thread of our story.

Four days after the presidential election of 1904, to wit, on November
12th, Governor Wright left Manila and went to Samar, including in
his itinerary various others of the southern islands. [452] Soon
after their return, the seven hundred native troops in Samar were
increased to nearly two thousand, and sixteen companies of regulars
(say one hundred men to a company) were also thrown into Samar. It
took until the end of 1906 to end the trouble. You cannot find in the
reports of the civil authorities anything explaining their three or
four weeks' stay in the Visayan Islands in November-December, 1904,
that is not absolutely in accord with the original Taft obsession of
1900 about the popularity of the proposed alien "civil" government with
its subjects. Governor Wright's description of the trip says: "The
warm hospitality of the Filipino people made this trip of inspection
a most agreeable one." As a matter of fact, on such occasions, the
more disaffected a leader of the people was, the more he would seek,
by "warm hospitality," "warm" oratory telling the visiting mighty
what the visiting mighty longed to hear, parades, fiestas, etc.,
to divert suspicion of sedition from himself. The poor creatures
had met General Young's cavalry column in northern Luzon in 1899
with their town bands, doing the only thing they knew of to do to
"temper the wind to the shorn lamb"--i.e., to temper it to their
several communities--many of them doubtless expecting to be put
to the sword by General Young's troopers, as the Cossacks did the
Persians during the brief and sensational sojourn of that brilliant
young administrator, Hon. W. Morgan Shuster, in Persia in 1911-12. I
have no doubt that high on the list of those extending some of the
"warm hospitality" above mentioned appeared the name of Don Jaime de
Veyra. Yet in the summer of 1904 Don Jaime had gotten out of a sick
bed to attend a convention called to send delegates to the Democratic
National Convention in the United States that year, [453] and also,
in that same year, had run for Governor of Leyte on a platform
the principal plank of which was Carthago est delenda--"Carthago"
being us, the American régime. De Veyra was defeated that time,
but ran again the next time and was elected. While the writer is not
one of those who seek to show their "breadth of view" by gossiping
with outsiders regarding what is peculiarly our own affair, still,
the British view-point of the situation in the Visayan Islands, as
conveyed by an Englishwoman whose husband was engaged in mercantile
business there in 1904-5, and who therefore was certainly in a position
to know the opinion of the little circle of British people at Cebu and
Iloilo, may not be superfluous here. This lady, living then at Iloilo,
wrote a series of letters to friends back home in England which she
afterwards published in book form. [454] In a letter dated Iloilo,
January 22, 1905 (page 86), she says:


    The Americans give out and write in their papers that the
    Philippine Islands are completely pacified, and that the Filipinos
    love Americans and their rule. This, doubtless with good motives,
    is complete and utter humbug, for the country is honeycombed
    with insurrection and plots; the fighting has never ceased; and
    the natives loathe the Americans and their theories, saying so
    openly in their native press and showing their dislike in every
    possible fashion. Their one idea is to be rid of the U. S. A.
    * * * and to be free of a burden of taxation which is heavier than
    any the Spaniards laid on them.


Also an Englishman who was in Samar in 1904-5, a Mr. Hyatt, who,
with his brother, served with the American troops there in the bloody
Pulajan uprising, afterwards wrote a book called the Little Brown
Brother, wherein he fully corroborates Mrs. Dauncey's appreciation
of the situation during that period.

In its blindness to the unanimity of Visayan discontent, as manifested
in its report now under consideration, the civil government of
the Philippines was not trying wilfully to deceive anybody. It was
deceiving itself. It was obeying the law of its life, its existence
having been originally predicated on the consent of a great free
people to keep in subjection a weaker people eager to be also free,
such consent having been obtained through diligent nursing of the
original idea that the subject people were not in fact so eager, but
were, on the contrary, in a mental attitude of tearful welcome toward
the proffered protection of a strong power. In his report for 1905
[455] General William H. Carter, commanding the Department of the
Philippines which included Samar and the rest of the Visayan Islands,
gives the key to the Commission's twenty-six-day stay in his district
in the following part of said report:


    Within a few days after the rendition of the annual report for
    last year [456] a serious outbreak occurred in the Gandara valley,
    Samar. This was followed by disorders in all the other large
    islands of the department, Negros, Panay, Cebu, and Leyte.


Nowhere in the civil government reports do you find the slightest
recognition that these disorders had any relation to each other, or to
the fundamental problem of public order, or any political significance
whatsoever, each being treated as a purely local issue, the idea that
the circumstance of Samar's having been thrown into pandemonium by
the successes of the enemies of the American Government might have
encouraged its enemies in the neighboring islands, never seeming to
occur to the authors of the said reports. General Carter's report goes
on to state that within five months after the Samar outbreak of July,
1904, seven hundred native troops had been put in the field in that
turbulent island. In December, 1904, troops began to be poured into
Samar, so that it was not long before the seven hundred native troops
had become seventeen hundred or eighteen hundred, and, says General
Carter, "in order to free them from garrison work in the towns, sixteen
companies of the 12th and 14th Infantry were distributed about the
disaffected coasts to enable the people who so desired to come from
their hiding places"--whither they had gone because the American flag
afforded them no protection--"and undertake the rebuilding of their
burned homes." General Carter avoids touching on the civil government's
(to him well-known) obsession about its popularity, a state of mind
which could see no "political" significance in outbreaks of any
kind. But he does use this very straightforward language about Samar:


    Whatever may have been the original cause of the outbreak, it was
    soon lost sight of when success had drawn a large proportion of
    the people away from their homes and fields. * * * Except in the
    largest towns it became simply a question of joining the Pulajans
    or being harried by them. In the absence of proper protection
    thousands joined in the movement.


Early in 1905, Hon. George Curry, of New Mexico, who was an officer
of Colonel Roosevelt's regiment in Cuba, and had gone out to the
Philippines with a volunteer regiment in 1899, remaining with the
civil Government after 1901, was made Governor of Samar. Governor
Curry has since been Governor of the Territory of New Mexico,
and is now (1912) a member of Congress from the recently admitted
State of New Mexico. Governor Curry has told me since he was
elected to Congress that it took him all of 1905 and most of
1906, aided by several thousand troops, native and regular, to
put down that Samar outbreak. Yet a certificate signed March 28,
1907, by the Governor-General and his associates of the Philippine
Commission states that "a condition of general and complete peace"
had continued in the Islands for two years previous to the date
of the certificate. [457] We will come to this certificate in its
chronological order later. How many and what sort of uprisings were
blanketed in that "forget-it" certificate of 1907 is material to the
question whether or not the National Administration has ever been or
is now frank with the country about the universality of the desire of
the Philippine people for independence and local self-government, and
pertinent to the insistently recurring query: "Why should we make of
the Philippines an American Ireland?" But inasmuch as, in addition to
the Samar uprising which raged all through 1905, another insurrection
occurred in that year, which was duly "forgotten" by said certificate,
this last movement must now claim our attention.

The provinces which were the theatre of the outbreak last above
mentioned were all near Manila. They were: Cavite, a province of
135,000 people almost at the gates of Manila; Batangas, a province of
257,000 inhabitants adjoining Cavite; and Laguna, a province of 150,000
people adjoining both. Some five hundred brigands headed by cut-throats
claiming to be patriots were terrorizing whole districts. Far be it
from me to lend any countenance to the idea that the leaders of this
movement, Sakay, Felizardo, Montalon, and the rest of their gang,
were entitled to any respect. But they certainly had a hold on
the whole population akin to that of Robin Hood, Little John, and
Friar Tuck. In refusing in 1907 to commute Sakay's death sentence
after he was captured, tried, and convicted, Governor-General James
P. Smith gives some gruesome details concerning the performance of
that worthy, and his followers, yet in dealing with the nature and
extent of the trouble they gave the Manila government he says they
"assumed the convenient cloak of patriotism, and under the titles of
'Defenders of the Country' and 'Protectors of the People' proceeded
to inaugurate a reign of terror, devastation, and ruin in three of
the most beautiful provinces in the archipelago." [458]

It has already been made clear that, during the time of the
insurrection against both the Spaniards and Americans, the insurrecto
forces were maintained by voluntary contributions of the people. Major
D. C. Shanks, Fourth U. S. Regular Infantry, who was Governor of Cavite
Province in 1905, after calling attention to this fact, adds [459]:


    When the insurrection was over a number of these leaders remained
    out and refused to surrender. Included among them were Felizardo
    and Montalon. The system of voluntary contributions, carried on
    during the insurrecto period, was continued after establishment
    of civil government.


Again Governor Shanks says, with more of frankness than diplomacy,
considering that he was a provincial governor under the civil
government:


    The establishment of civil government of this province was
    premature and ill-advised. Records show the capture or surrender
    since establishment of civil government of nearly 600 hostile
    firearms.


One of the causes contributory to the Cavite-Batangas-Laguna
insurrection is stated in the report of the Governor-General for
1905 thus:


    In the autumn of 1904 it became necessary to withdraw a number
    of the constabulary from these provinces to assist in suppressing
    disorder which had broken out in the province of Samar. [460]


Another of the contributory causes is thus stated:


    There was at the time [the fall of 1904] also considerable activity
    among the small group of irreconcilables in Manila, who began
    agitating for immediate independence, doubtless because of the
    supposed effect it would have on the presidential election in
    the United States, in which the Philippines was a large topic
    of discussion. Evidently this was regarded as a favorable time
    for a demonstration by Felizardo, Montalon, De Vega, Oruga, Sakay
    [etc]. All these men had been officers of the Filipino army during
    the insurrection.


Consider the benevolent casuistry necessary to include these fellows,
and the tremendous following they could get up, and did get up, in
Cavite, "the home of insurrection," and the adjacent provinces, in a
certificate to "a condition of general and complete peace" alleged
in the certificate to have prevailed for two years prior to March
28, 1907. To make a long story short, on January 31, 1905, a state
of insurrection was declared to exist, the writ of habeas corpus was
suspended in Cavite and Batangas, the regular army of the United States
was ordered out, and reconcentration tactics resorted to, as provided
by Section 6 of Act 781 of the Commission. This is the act already
examined at length, intended to meet cases of impotency on the part
of the insular government to protect life and property in any other
way. Political timidity is conspicuously absent from the resolution of
the Philippine Commission of January 31, 1905, formally recognizing
a break in the peerless continuity of the "general and complete
peace." It is virilely frank, the presidential election being then
safely over. [461] It concludes by authorizing the Governor-General
to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and declare martial law, "the
public safety requiring it." Then follows a proclamation of the same
date and tenor, by the Governor-General.

It appears from the case cited in the foot-note that in the spring of
1905, one, Felix Barcelon, filed in the proper court a petition for the
writ of habeas corpus, alleging that he was one of the reconcentrados
corralled and "detained and restrained of his liberty at the town of
Batangas, in the province of Batangas," by one of Colonel Baker's
constabulary minions down there. The writ was denied by the lower
court. In one part of the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case it
is stated (p. 116) that the petitioner "has been detained for a long
time * * * not for the commission of any crime and by due process of
law, but apparently for the purpose of protecting him." The opinion of
the court, delivered by Mr. Justice Johnson, very properly held that
the detention was lawful under the war power, basing its decision on
the authority conferred on the Governor-General of the Philippines
by the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, section 5 of which expressly
authorizes the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus "when in
cases of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion the public safety may
require it." A long legal battle was fought, the court holding that the
Executive Department of the Government is the one in which is vested
the exclusive right to say when "a state of rebellion, insurrection,
or invasion" exists, and that when it so formally declares, that
settles the fact that it does exist. At page 98 of the volume above
cited [462] the court held, as to the above mentioned resolution of
the Philippine Commission and the above mentioned executive order
declaring a state of insurrection in Cavite and Batangas:


    The conclusion set forth in the said resolution and the said
    executive order, as to the fact that there existed in the provinces
    of Cavite and Batangas open insurrection against the constituted
    authorities, was a conclusion entirely within the discretion of
    the legislative and executive branches of the Government, after
    an investigation of the facts.


Yet two years later the same "constituted authorities" certified to
the President of the United States, in effect, as we shall see, that
no open insurrection against the constituted authorities had occurred
during the preceding two years. They do not in their certificate
ignore Cavite and Batangas. They mention them by name, with a lot
of whereases, explaining that after all they really believe that the
majority of the people in the provinces aforesaid were not in sympathy
with the uprising. However, after they get through with their whereases
they face the music squarely, and certify to "the condition of general
and complete peace." Of the "nigger in the woodpile" more anon.

Governor Wright was not a party to the certificate of 1907. He
left the Islands on leave November 4, 1905. A speech made by him
prior to his departure, as published in a Manila paper, indicates
an expectation to return. He never did. In 1906 he was demoted to be
Ambassador to Japan, a place of far less dignity, and far less salary,
which he resigned after a year or so. Vice-Governor Ide acted as
Governor-General until April 2, 1906, on which date he was formally
inaugurated as Governor-General.

Just why Governor Wright did not go back to the Philippines as
Governor, after his visit to the United States in 1905-6, does
not appear. It would seem almost certain that if Secretary of War
Taft had wanted President Roosevelt to send him back, he would have
gone. Mr. Taft never did frankly tell the Filipinos until 1907 that
they might just as well shut up talking about any independence that
anybody living might hope to see. Governor Wright began to talk that
way soon after Mr. Taft left the Islands. Possibly Governor Wright
undeceived them too soon, and thereby made the Philippines more of
a troublesome issue in the presidential campaign of 1904. President
Roosevelt recognized the sterling worth of the man, by inviting
him to succeed Mr. Taft as Secretary of War in 1908. But President
Taft did not invite him to continue in that capacity after March 4,
1909. Gossip has it that when the incoming President Taft's letter
to the outgoing President Roosevelt's last Secretary of War, Governor
Wright, was handed to the addressee, and its conventional "hope to be
able to avail myself of your services later in some other capacity"
was read by him, the outgoing official quietly remarked: "Well, that
is a little more round-about than the one Jimmie Garfield [463] got,
but it's a dismissal just the same."

I have always thought that the reason Governor Wright did not go back
to the Philippines as Governor after 1905 was that he did not continue
to "jolly" the Filipinos, and abstain from ruthlessly crushing their
hopes of seeing independence during their lifetime, as Mr. Taft did
continuously during his stay out there. The inevitable tendency of
the Wright frank talk was from the beginning to discredit the Taft
pleasing and evasive nothings. Also, it was followed, as we have seen,
by quite a crop of serious disturbances of public order, and somebody
had to be "the goat."






CHAPTER XX

GOVERNOR IDE--1906

                                The Tariff is a local issue.

                                                  General W. S. Hancock.


After Governor Wright left the Islands finally on November 4, 1905,
Vice-Governor Henry C. Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2,
1906, when he was duly inaugurated as such. He resigned and left the
Islands finally in September thereafter.

All through 1905, Governor Curry, as Governor of Samar, which is the
third largest island of the archipelago, wrestled with the Pulajan
uprising there, aided, as has been stated in the previous chapter,
by the native troops, scouts, and constabulary, and also by the
regular army. But at the end of 1905 "the situation" was not yet
"well in hand." Since his election to Congress in 1912, Governor
Curry has told me that in 1905 many thousands of people of Samar
participated actively as part of the enemy's force in the field during
that period. By the spring of 1906 Governor Curry was getting a grip
on the situation, and in the latter part of March of that year, some
of the main outlaw chiefs agreed to surrender to him. The report of
Colonel Wallace C. Taylor, commanding the constabulary of the Third
District, which included Samar states [464]: "After several weeks of
negotiating, during which time the camp of the Pulahanes was visited
by Governor Curry, and the Pulahan officers visited the settlement
at Magtaon"--a settlement in south central Samar--"an understanding
was arrived at by which the Pulahanes were to surrender, March 24,
1906. Instead of surrendering as agreed, the Pulahanes, commanded by
Nasario Aguilar, made a treacherous attack on the constabulary garrison
on the day and hour appointed for the surrender." The constabulary
numbered some fifty men, the pulajans about 130. After the pulajans
opened fire they made a rush on the constabulary and a hand-to-hand
fight ensued. Colonel Taylor's report continues:


    After the first rush the fighting continued fiercely, and when
    the last of the pulahanes disappeared there remained but seven
    enlisted men of the constabulary able to fight. Seven more were
    lying about more or less seriously wounded and twenty-two were
    dead. Captain Jones received a bad spear thrust in the chest early
    in the fight, but fought on, regardless. Lieutenant Bowers received
    a gunshot wound through the left arm, which, however, did not put
    him out of the fight. Thirty-five dead pulahanes were found on the
    field and eight more have since been found some distance off. The
    number of wounded who escaped cannot be determined. The unarmed
    Americans present with Governor Curry escaped to the river and
    afterwards rejoined Captain Jones who armed them.


The explanation of this treachery, as given by Governor Curry, is
curious and interesting. The outlaws had intended in good faith to
surrender as a result of his negotiation with them, but at the last
moment there arrived to witness the surrender certain native officials
and other natives bitterly hated by the Pulajans and wholly mistrusted
by them. Their arrival caused the outlaws to suspect treachery
themselves and that was the cause of their change of plans. It was not
until the end of the year 1906 that the various energetic campaigns
which followed the Magtaon incident finally began to work more or
less complete restoration of public order by gradual elimination of
the enemy through killings, captures, and surrenders. An idea of the
seriousness and magnitude of these operations may be gathered without
going into the details, from the annual report for 1906 of General
Henry T. Allen commanding the Philippines Constabulary. This report,
dated August 31, 1906 [465], states:


    At present seventeen companies of scouts and four companies of
    American troops under Colonel Smith, 8th U. S. Infantry, are
    operating against the pulahanes, but with success that will be
    largely dependent upon time and attrition.


General Allen adds: "The entire 21st Regiment [of Infantry] is also in
Samar." These facts are here given because they relate to the period
covered by the certificate of the Philippine Commission of March 28,
1907, heretofore alluded to, and which will be more fully dealt with
hereinafter, which stated that "a condition of general and complete
peace" had prevailed throughout the archipelago for two years prior
to March 28, 1907. Without a brief exposition of all these matters,
it would be impossible to enable the reader to feel the pulse of
the Filipino people as it stood at the time of the election of their
assembly in 1907. The fact of our having been unable to discontinue
Filipino-killing altogether for any considerable period from 1899 to
the end of 1906 is too obviously relevant to the state of the public
mind in 1907 to need elaboration.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 [466] deals at some
length with disturbances which occurred in the island of Leyte (area
3000 square miles, population nearly 400,000), beginning in the middle
of June. It describes among other things a visit of Governor-General
Ide to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, made in consequence of said
disturbances, and conferences held by him there with Major-General
Wood, commanding all the United States forces in the Philippines,
Brigadier-General Lee, commanding the Department of the Visayas (which
included Leyte, headquarters, Iloilo), Colonel Borden, commanding
the United States forces in the island of Leyte, Colonel Taylor, the
chief of the constabulary of the District, etc. Certainly from this
formidable gathering of notables, it is clear that there was about to
take place in Leyte what our friends of the Lambs' Club in New York
would call "An all star performance." Leyte was four to five hundred
miles from Manila. Yet so serious was the disturbance that the highest
military and civil representatives of the American Government in the
archipelago deemed it necessary to meet in the island which was the
scene of the trouble with a view of handling it. Yet in the Report of
the Philippine Commission for 1906 one finds the usual rotund rhetoric
treating the disturbances as of no "political" significance--which
was only another way of claiming that they were not serious. It
is difficult to handle this aspect of the matter without imputing
to the civil authorities intent to deceive, but to leave such an
imputation unremoved would be to miss the whole significance of the
matter. As has already been made clear, when Judge Taft, Judge Ide,
and their colleagues of the Philippine Commission had left Washington
for Manila in 1900 Mr. McKinley had assured them he had no doubt that
the better element of the Philippine people, once they understood us,
would welcome our rule. As soon as they set foot in the Philippine
Islands they had at once begun to act upon the theory that there was
no real fundamental opposition to us on the part of the people of
the Philippines and had continued obstinately to act upon that theory
ever since. Certainly the attitude of the civil government toward the
disturbances in Leyte in 1906 is not surprising when the mind adverts
for a moment to the panorama of the five more or less sanguinary years
already fully described hereinbefore and then takes the following
bird's-eye glance at the official reports for those years.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1900, (page 17) had said:


    A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely
    willing to accept the establishment of a government under the
    supremacy of the United States.


The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1901 (page 7) had said:


    The collapse of the insurrection came in May.


The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1902 (page 3) had said:


    The insurrection as an organized attempt to subvert the authority
    of the United States in these islands is entirely at an end,


referring farther on to "the whole Christian Philippine population"
as "enjoying civil government." If the "enjoyment" thus described had
been genuine, continued, profound, and sincere, it would have been
another story. But the net attitude of the civil government toward
the general health of the body politic, relatively to public order,
reminds one of the cheerful gentleman who remarked of his invalid
friend, "He seems to be 'enjoying' poor health."

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1903 (page 25) says:


    The conditions with respect to tranquillity in the islands have
    greatly improved during the last year.


The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 (page 1) says:


    The great mass of the people, however, were domestic and peaceable.


The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1905 (part 1, page 59)
says:


    On the whole life and property have been as safe as in other
    civilized countries.


The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 (page 40) says:


    Viewing the entire situation the islands are in a peaceable and
    orderly condition aside from----


various disorders which fill some ten pages of the report.

The inflexible attitude of the Commission from the beginning, of
treating each successive disturbance of public order as a purely
"local issue," after General Hancock's method with the tariff,
is thus sufficiently apparent. They always refuse to see in
successive outbreaks in various parts of the Islands any evidence
of general and unanimous lack of appreciation for a benign alien
civil government. Therefore it was of course clearly a foregone
conclusion, in 1906, that Governor Ide, who had been in the Islands
all these years, was going to be wholly unable to see anything in the
disturbances in Leyte in the least tending to show that American rule
was unpopular. And yet it was a matter of common knowledge all over
the Visayan Islands that Jaime Veyra, then Governor of Leyte, elected
by the people, was one of the most obnoxious anti-Americans in the
archipelago. Both the army and constabulary were ordered out in Leyte
and a good deal of fighting occurred before order was restored. The
report of General Allen, commanding the constabulary for that year
[467] shows one engagement with the outlaws in Leyte participated
in by the constabulary and the 21st Regular Infantry, in which the
enemy numbered 450 and left forty-nine dead upon the field. All
this period is covered by the certificate of general and complete
peace of 1907, in the fall of which year a Philippine legislature
was elected. And those of the membership of that body not in favor
of Philippine independence were almost as few as the Socialist party
in the American House of Representatives, which, I believe, consists
of Representative Berger. True, the peace certificate does not ignore
the Leyte outbreak. It "forgets and forgives it," so to speak, as we
shall see.

Governor Ide left the Islands finally on September 20, 1906, having
resigned. Why he should have resigned, it is difficult to say. Take
it all in all, he made a splendid Governor-General, and ought to
have been allowed to remain. He knew the Islands from Alpha to Omega
and had been there six years. His going out of office to make way
for still another Governor-General was wholly uncalled for. So far
as the writer is informed, he was, when he left, still blessed with
good health. He had filled a very considerable place in the history
of his country most creditably. He had drawn up a fine code of laws
for the Islands known as the Ide code. He had made a great minister of
finance, successfully performing the perilous task of transferring the
currency of the country from a silver basis to a gold basis, and in so
doing had proven himself fully a match, in protecting the interests
of the Government, for the wiley local financiers representing the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the chartered bank of India, Australia,
and China, and other institutions run by experienced men of more or
less piratical tendencies. As Governor-General of the Islands, his
justice, firmness, and courtliness of manner combined to produce an
administration in keeping with the dignity of his great office. After
returning to the United States, he remained in private life for a time,
and was finally given a comparatively unimportant post as minister to
a second-class country, Spain, which post he still occupies (in 1912).

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar massacres of 1904, I landed
at Seattle, at the end of my last homeward-bound journey across the
Pacific, in April, 1905, one of the "natives" of Seattle asked me:
"Have those people over there ever got quiet yet?" The question itself
seemed an answer to the orthodox official attitude at Manila, which had
so long been elaborately denying, as to each successive local outbreak,
that such outbreak bore any relation to the original insurrection,
or was any wise illustrative of the general state of public feeling
in the Islands. At the time the question was asked, the answer was,
"Not entirely." Not until toward the end of 1906 did "Yes" become
a correct answer to the question. In other words, there were no
more serious outbreaks after 1906, nor was a state of general and
complete peace ever finally established until then. Since 1906 there
have been occasional despatches from Manila recounting small episodes
of bloodshed, several of which have had quite a martial ring. These
have related merely to the country of the Mohammedan Moros, who are
as wholly apart from the main problem as the American Indian to-day
is from our tariff and other like questions. The Moros are indeed
what Kipling calls "half savage and half child." They never did have
anything more to do with the Filipino insurrection against us than
the American Indian had to do with the Civil War.






CHAPTER XXI

GOVERNOR SMITH--1907-9

        Oh, but Honey, dis rabbit dess 'bleeged ter climb dis tree.

                                                            Uncle Remus.


"On September 20, 1906," says the Report of the Philippine Commission
for 1907, [468] "the resignation of the Hon. Henry Clay Ide as
Governor-General became effective, and on that date the Hon. James
F. Smith was inaugurated as Governor-General of the Philippine
Islands."

The year 1907 will be known most prominently to the future history of
our Far Eastern possession as the year of the opening of the Philippine
Assembly, which momentous event occurred on October 16th. But in the
departments both of Politics and Psychology it should be known as the
year of the Great Certificate. The Great Certificate was a certificate
signed by certain eminent gentlemen on March 28, 1907, which made the
preposterous affirmation that a condition of general and complete
peace had prevailed throughout the archipelago, except among the
non-Christian tribes, for the two years immediately preceding. Taken
in its historic setting, that certificate can by no possibility escape
responsibility, as "accessory after the fact" at least, to the pretence
that a similar condition had prevailed ever since President Roosevelt's
final war-whoop of July 4, 1902, published to the American troops in
the Islands on the day named. That war-whoop, it will be remembered,
was in the form of a presidential proclamation congratulating General
Chaffee and "the gallant officers and men under his command" on some
"two thousand combats, great and small," and declaring, in effect,
that Benevolent Assimilation was at last triumphantly vindicated,
and that opposition to American rule was at an end. The certificate of
March 28, 1907, appears at pages 47-8 of the Report of the Philippine
Commission for 1907, part 1. If we consider what is now going on in
the Islands as "modern" history, and the days of the early fighting as
"ancient" history, this certificate will serve as the connecting link
between the two. It furnishes the key-note to all that had happened
during the American occupation prior to 1907, and the key-note of
all that has happened since. Therefore, though somewhat long, it is
deemed indispensable to clearness to submit here in full the text of


    THE GREAT CERTIFICATE OF 1907

    Whereas the census of the Philippine Islands was completed and
    published on the twenty-seventh day of March, nineteen hundred and
    five, which said completion and publication of said census was,
    on the twenty-eighth day of March, nineteen hundred and five, duly
    published and proclaimed to the people by the governor-general of
    the Philippine Islands with the announcement that the President
    of the United States would direct the Philippine Commission to
    call a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular
    assembly, provided that a condition of general and complete peace
    with recognition of the authority of the United States should be
    certified by the Philippine Commission to have continued in the
    territory of the Philippine Islands for a period of two years
    after said completion and publication of said census; and

    Whereas since the completion and publication of said census there
    have been no serious disturbances of the public order save and
    except those caused by the noted outlaws and bandit chieftains,
    Felizardo and Montalon, and their followers in the provinces of
    Cavite and Batangas, and those caused in the provinces of Samar
    and Leyte by the non-Christian and fanatical pulahanes resident
    in the mountain districts of the said provinces and the barrios
    contiguous thereto; and

    Whereas the overwhelming majority of the people of said provinces
    of Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte have not taken part in said
    disturbances and have not aided or abetted the lawless acts of
    said bandits and pulahanes; and

    Whereas the great mass and body of the Filipino people have,
    during said period of two years, continued to be law-abiding,
    peaceful, and loyal to the United States, and have continued to
    recognize and do now recognize the authority and sovereignty of
    the United States in the territory of said Philippine Islands:
    Now, therefore, be it

    Resolved by the Philippine Commission in formal session duly
    assembled, That it, said Philippine Commission, do certify, and it
    does hereby certify, to the President of the United States that for
    a period of two years after the completion and publication of the
    census a condition of general and complete peace, with recognition
    of the authority of the United States, has continued to exist
    and now exists in the territory of said Philippine Islands not
    inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes; and be it further

    Resolved by said Philippine Commission, That the President of the
    United States be requested, and is hereby requested, to direct
    said Philippine Commission to call a general election for the
    choice of delegates to a popular assembly of the people of said
    territory in the Philippine Islands, which assembly shall be
    known as the Philippine Assembly.


Let us examine these amiable liberties thus taken with the facts of
history by men of irreproachable private character, briefly analyzing
their action. Such an examination and analysis are indispensable to
a clear understanding by a great free people whose proudest boast is
love of fair play, of whether the Filipino people, or any appreciable
fraction of them, have ever in the least consented, or do now in the
least consent, to our rule, as the small minority among us interested
in keeping the Islands, have systematically sought, all these years,
to have this nation believe. As the above certificate of 1907 was
the last hurdle that Benevolent Assimilation had to leap on the
Benevolent Hypocrisy course over which we had to gallop in order to
get from the freeing of Cuba to the subjugation of the Philippines,
let us glance back for a moment at the first hurdle or two, leapt
when Mr. Taft was in the Philippine saddle.

Judge Taft had said on November 30, 1900:


    A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely
    willing to accept the establishment of a government under the
    supremacy of the United States [469];


and, pursuant to that idea, he had set up his civil government on July
4, 1901. He never did thereafter admit that he was mistaken in his
original theory, but kept on trying to fit the facts to his theory,
hoping that after a while they would fit. He "clung to his policy
of disinterested benevolence with a tenacity born of conviction,"
to borrow a phrase from Governor-General Smith's inaugural address of
1907. But in this same inaugural address of Governor Smith of 1907,
you find, for the first time in all the Philippine state papers,
a frank admission of the actual conditions under which the civil
government of 1901 was in fact set up. Says he:


    While the smoke of battle still hung over the hills and valleys
    of the Philippines and every town and barrio in the islands was
    smoking hot with rebellion, she [the United States] replaced the
    military with a civil regime and on the smouldering embers of
    insurrection planted civil government. [470]


That confession, made with the bluntness of a most gallant soldier,
is as refreshing in its honesty as the Roosevelt war-whoop of
1902. There shall be no tiresome repetition here concerning the
original withholding of the facts from the American people in 1898-9,
but to place in juxtaposition Secretary of War Root's representations
to the American public in the year last named, and the actual facts
as stated earlier in the same year by General MacArthur, one of
our best fighting generals, during the thick of the early fighting,
in an interview already noticed in its proper chronological place,
will forever fix the genesis of the original lack of frankness as to
conditions in the Philippines which has naturally and inexorably made
frankness as to those conditions impossible ever since. As late as
October 7, 1899, Mr. Root--who had not then and has not since been
in the Philippines--had said in Chicago, in a speech at a dinner of
the Marquette Club:


    Well, against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting the
    Philippine nation? No. There is none. There are hundreds of
    islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes, speaking more than
    sixty different languages, and all but one are ready to accept
    American sovereignty.


As early as the beginning of April, 1899, just after the taking on
March 31st of the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General MacArthur,
who commanded our troops in the assault on that place, had said, in
an interview with a newspaper man afterwards verified by the General
before the Senate Committee of 1902 as substantially correct:


    When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that
    Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. * * * I did not like
    to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * * was opposed to
    us * * *. But after having come thus far, and having been brought
    much in contact with both insurrectos and amigos, [471] I have
    been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses
    are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads. [472]


The presidential election of 1900 had been fought out, in the midst of
considerable bitterness, on the idea that the Root view was correct
and the MacArthur view was altogether mistaken. So that after 1900,
the McKinley Administration was irrevocably committed to the Root
view. [473] The Philippine Government had, after 1900, diligently set
to work to live up to the Root view, and to fit the facts to the Root
view by prayer and hope, accompanied by asseveration. Hence in 1901 the
alleged joyous sobs of welcome with which the Filipino people are, in
effect, described in the report of the Philippine Commission for that
year as having received the "benign" civil government, said sobs or
other manifestations having spread, if the Commission's report is to
be taken at its face value, "like wild-fire." Hence also the attempt
of 1902 to minimize the insurrection of 1901-2, in Batangas and other
provinces of southern Luzon, conducted by what Governor Luke E. Wright,
in a speech delivered at Memphis in the latter part of 1902, called
"the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent." Hence the quiet placing of
the province of Surigao in the hands of the military in 1903 without
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the failure to order
out the army in Albay in 1903 and in Samar in 1904. Hence also the
prompt use of the army in Samar, Batangas, and Cavite in 1905, after
the presidential election was safely over. Hence also the seething
state of sedition which smouldered in the Visayan Islands in 1906,
punctuated by the outbreak in Leyte of that year.

The psychologic processes by which the distinguished gentlemen
who signed the Great Certificate of March 28, 1907, got their
own consent to sign it make the most profoundly interesting study,
relatively to the general welfare of the world, in all our Philippine
experiments so far. They are the final flowering of the plant Political
Expediency. They are the weeds of benevolent casuistry that become from
time to time unavoidable in a colonial garden tended by a republic
based on the consent of the governed and therefore by the law of its
own life unfitted to run any other kind of a government frankly. These
processes find their origin in the provisions of the Act of Congress
of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act. Three days
after President Roosevelt approved the Act, he issued his proclamation
of July 4, 1902, above noticed, declaring the insurrection at an
end. Section 6 of that Act provided:


    Whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands shall
    have ceased, and a condition of general and complete peace shall
    have been established therein, and the fact shall be certified to
    the President by the Philippine Commission, the President, upon
    being satisfied thereof, shall order a census of the Philippine
    Islands to be taken by said Philippine Commission.


This census was intended to be preliminary to granting the Filipinos
a legislature of their own, but as a legislature full of insurrectos
would of course stultify its American sponsors before all mankind,
it was announced in effect, in publishing the census programme, that
no legislature would be forthcoming if the Filipinos did not quit
insurrecting, and remain "good" for two years. If they did remain good
for two years after the census was finished, then they should have
their legislature. During the lull of "general and complete" peace
which, in the fall of 1902, followed the suppression of the Batangas
insurrection of 1901-2, and preceded the Ola insurrection of 1902-3 in
the hemp provinces of southern Luzon, the Commission made, on September
25, 1902, the certificate contemplated by the above Act of Congress,
and the taking of the census was accordingly ordered by the President
of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt, by a proclamation issued the
same day. [474] Section 7 of the aforesaid Act of Congress provided:


    Two years after the completion and publication of the census, in
    case such condition of general and complete peace with recognition
    of the authority of the United States shall have continued in
    the territory of said islands not inhabited by Moros or other
    non-Christian tribes, and such facts shall have been certified
    to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President
    upon being satisfied thereof shall direct said Commission to
    call, and the Commission shall call, a general election for the
    choice of delegates to a popular assembly of the people of said
    territory in the Philippine Islands, which shall be known as the
    Philippine Assembly.


On March 27, 1905, the President of the United States was duly
advised that the census had been completed, and on March 28th,
the presidential proclamation promising the Filipinos a legislature
two years later if in the meantime they did not insurrect any, was
duly published at Manila. It is true that there is no Philippine
state paper signed by anybody, either by the President of the United
States, or the Governor-General of the Philippines, or any one else,
certifying to a condition of "general and complete peace" between
the certificate to that effect made by the Philippine Commission on
September 25, 1902, above mentioned, which authorized commencing the
census (and was justified by the facts), and the presidential promise
of March 28, 1905, that if they would "be good" for two years more,
they should have a legislature. But the whole manifest implication
of the representations of fact sought to be conveyed by the action
both of the Washington and the Manila authorities at the date of the
presidential promise of March 28, 1905, is that a condition of general
and complete peace had obtained ever since the last certificate to that
effect, the certificate of September 25, 1902. Yet, as we saw in the
chapter covering the last year of Governor Wright's administration,
besides the Samar disturbances that lasted all through 1905, a big
insurrection was actually in full swing in Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna
provinces, on March 28, 1905, had then been in progress since before
the first of the year, and continued until the latter part of 1905,
the then Governor-General, Governor Wright, having, by proclamation
issued January 31, 1905, declared Cavite and Batangas to be in a
state of insurrection, ordered the military into those provinces, and
suspended the writ of habeas corpus. President Roosevelt's proclamation
of March 28, 1905, can by no possibility be construed as saying to
the Filipinos anything other than substantially this: "You have not
insurrected any since my proclamation of July 4, 1902. If you will be
good two years more, you shall have a legislature." What then was the
Philippine Commission to do at the end of those two years, peppered,
as they had been, with most annoying outbreaks in various provinces
not inhabited by "Moros or other non-Christian tribes." During the
presidential campaign of 1904 the Commission had committed themselves,
as we have seen, to the proposition that nothing serious was going
on at that time in Samar. So how could they take frank official
cognizance on paper of the reign of terror let loose there by their
delay in ordering out the army until after the presidential election,
a delay which, like a delay of fire-engines to arrive at the scene of
a fire, had permitted the Samar outbreak to gain such headway that it
took two years to finally put it down? Then there was the outbreak
of 1906 in Leyte, described in the last chapter, as to which even
the Commission had admitted in their annual report for that year [475]:


    Possibly its [Leyte's] immediate vicinity to Samar has had to do
    with the disturbed conditions.


In other words, possibly, a fire may spread from one field of dry
grass to another near by.

As to the Cavite-Batangas-Laguna insurrection of 1905, in an executive
order dated September 28, 1907, [476]--noticed in a previous chapter,
but too pertinent to be entirely omitted here--wherein are set forth
the reasons for withholding executive clemency from the condemned
leaders of that movement, Governor-General Smith describes in harrowing
terms "a reign of terror, devastation, and ruin in three of the most
beautiful provinces in the archipelago," wrought by the condemned
men, who he says "assumed the cloak of patriotism, and under the
titles of 'Defenders of the Country,' and 'Protectors of the People'
proceeded to inaugurate" said reign of terror. These men were most
of them former insurgent officers who had remained out after the
respectable generals had all surrendered. This Cavite-Batangas-Laguna
insurrection was the very sort of thing which the conditional promise
of a legislature made by Congress to the Filipino people in Sections 6
and 7 of the Act of July 1, 1902--the Philippine Government Act--had
stipulated should not happen. This is no mere dictum of my own. In
the case of Barcelon against Baker, 5 Philippine Reports, pp. 87 et
seq., already very briefly noticed in a previous chapter, the Supreme
Court of the Islands had, in effect, so held. Section 5 of the Act of
Congress of July 1, 1902, had provided that if any state of affairs
serious enough should arise, the Governor of the Philippines should
have authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus "when in cases
of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion the public safety may require
it." Sections 6 and 7 of the same Act had provided, on the other hand,
that if a condition of general and complete peace should prevail for
a stated period the Filipinos should have a legislature. In the case
of Barcelon against Baker the Supreme Court held that the situation
contemplated by Section 5 of the Act of Congress had arisen in the
provinces of Cavite and Batangas. That, of course, automatically, so
to speak, made the postponement of the Philippine Assembly a necessary
logical sequence, under the provisions of Sections 6 and 7. These
Sections 6 and 7 promised the Filipinos a legislature in the event
the conditions contemplated by Section 5 should not arise. Barcelon,
who was one of the (non-combatant) reconcentrados restrained of his
liberty at Batangas, claimed that his detention as such reconcentrado
by the defendant in the habeas corpus proceeding, the constabulary
officer, Colonel Baker, was unlawful, in that, he being charged with
no crime, such detention deprived him of his liberty without due
process of law. The Philippine Commission, however, had declared,
by virtue of the authority vested in it by Section 5 of the Act of
Congress aforesaid, that a state of insurrection existed in Cavite and
Batangas, and accordingly the Governor-General had suspended the writ
of habeas corpus and declared martial law in those provinces. The
Attorney-General representing the Philippine Commission before
the court rested the Government's case on the proposition that the
petitioner was not entitled to claim the ordinary "due process of
law" because "open insurrection against the constituted authorities"
existed in the provinces named. And the Supreme Court upheld his
contention. In so holding, they say, among other things (page 93),
in construing Section 5 of the Act of Congress we are considering:


    Inasmuch as the President, or Governor-General with the approval
    of the Philippine Commission, can suspend the privilege of the
    writ of habeas corpus only under the conditions mentioned in the
    said statute, it becomes their duty to make an investigation of
    the existing conditions in the archipelago, or any part thereof,
    to ascertain whether there actually exists a state of rebellion,
    insurrection, or invasion, and that the public safety requires the
    suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. When
    this investigation is concluded, and the President, or the
    Governor-General with the consent of the Philippine Commission,
    declares that there exists these conditions, and that the public
    safety requires the suspension of the privilege of the writ of
    habeas corpus, can the judicial department of the Government
    investigate the same facts and declare that no such conditions
    exist?


They answer "No!" The head note of the decision is as follows:


    The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus may be suspended in
    the Philippine Islands in the case of rebellion, insurrection,
    and invasion, when the public safety requires it, by the President
    of the United States, or by the Governor-General of the Philippine
    Islands with the approval of the Philippine Commission.


Thus the Supreme Court of the Islands squarely held that on the
fourth day of August, 1905 (the day the writ of habeas corpus
was made returnable), open insurrection existed against the
constituted authorities in the Islands, in the provinces named,
and had existed since the Executive Proclamation of January 31st,
previous, declaring a state of insurrection, and on that ground denied
the writ. Yet the Commission certified on March 28, 1907, that a state
of general and complete peace as contemplated by the Act of Congress
conditionally promising a legislature, had prevailed for the two
years preceding. In other words the Philippine Commission declared
a state of insurrection to exist in certain populous provinces, and
was upheld by the Supreme Court of the Islands in so doing, and later
certified to the continuance of a state of general and complete peace
covering the same period.

All the uncandid things--uncandid in failure to take the American
people into their confidence--that have been done by all the good men
we have sent to the Philippines from the beginning, have been justified
by those good men to their own consciences on the idea that, because
the end in view was truly benevolent, therefore the end justified the
means. As a matter of fact, American Benevolent Assimilation in the
Philippines has, in its practical operation, worked more of misery and
havoc, first through war, and since through legislation put or kept on
the statute books by the influence of special interests in the United
States with Congress, "than any which has darkened their unhappy past"
to use one of Mr. McKinley's early expressions deprecating doing for
the Philippines what we did for Cuba. [477]

But let us see just how much the Philippine Commission that signed the
peace certificate of March 28, 1907, swallowed, and how they swallowed
it. It will be observed that they sugar-coated their certificate with
a lot of whereases. The first of these recites President Roosevelt's
promise of March 28, 1905, that the Filipinos should have a legislature
two years thereafter "provided that a condition of general and
complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States
should be certified by the Philippine Commission to have continued in
the territory of the Philippine Islands for a period of two years"
after the proclamation. Whereas number two, it will be noted, goes
on to state that there have been "no serious disturbances of public
order save and except" those in Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte,
[478] the magnitude of which has been fully described in previous
chapters. Of the Cavite-Batangas insurrection, the only one they had
previously formally admitted to be an insurrection, they say it was
"caused by certain noted outlaws and bandit chieftains [naming them],
and their followers." Obviously this was hardly sufficient to show
that an insurrection they had once officially recognized as such
was not in fact such at all. So in order to justify a statement
that "a condition of general and complete peace" had continued in
these two great provinces of Cavite and Batangas, which they had
but shortly previously declared to be in a state of insurrection,
and been upheld by the Supreme Court in so doing, they resort to the
old Otis expedient of 1898-9, worked on the American people through
Mr. McKinley to show absence of lack of consent-of-the-governed. This
expedient, as we have seen in the earlier chapters of this book,
consisted in vague use of the word "majority." It had stood Judge
Taft in good stead in the campaign of 1900, because when he then
said that "the great majority of the people" were "entirely willing"
to accept American rule, there was no earthly way to disprove it
in time for the verdict of the American people to be influenced by
the unanimity of the Filipinos against a change of masters in lieu
of independence. It was the only possible expedient for an American
conscience, because every American naturally feels that unless he
can, by some sort of sophistry, persuade himself that "the majority"
of the people want a given thing, then the thing is a wrong thing to
force upon them. So the ethical hurdle the Commission had to leap in
order to sign the certificate of 1907 was cleared thus:


    The overwhelming majority of the people of said provinces have
    not taken part in said disturbances and have not aided and abetted
    the lawless acts of said bandits.


As a matter of fact, the report of the American Governor of Cavite--and
conditions were conceded to be identical in the two provinces of
Cavite and Batangas--shows that the reason it was so hard to suppress
the Cavite-Batangas troubles of 1905 was that the people would not
help the authorities to apprehend the outlaws. No doubt the King of
England would have signed a similar certificate as to the people of
the shires and counties in which Robin Hood, Little John, and Friar
Tuck, held high carnival. Of course I do not mean to libel the fair
fame of that fine freebooter Robin Hood and his companions by placing
the rascally leaders of the bands of outlaws now under consideration
in the same jolly and respectable class with those beloved friends of
the childhood of us all. But the Cavite-Batangas "patriots" of 1905
could never have given the authorities as much trouble as they did if
the people had not at least taken secret joy in discomfiture of the
American authorities. Until finally suppressed, all such movements
as these always grew exactly as a snow-ball does if you roll it on
snow. Says Governor Shanks, a Major of the 4th United States Infantry,
who was Governor of Cavite, in 1905 in his report for that year, [479]
in explaining the uprising under consideration, and the way it grew:
"The Filipino likes to be on the winning side." Certainly this is
not peculiar to the Filipino. Governor Shanks proceeds:


    The prestige acquired (by the uprising) at San Pedro Tunasan,
    Paranaque, Taal, and San Francisco de Malabon had great weight in
    creating active sympathy for ladrone bands and leaders. Something
    was needed to counterbalance the effect of their combined
    successes, and the appearance of regular troops was just the
    thing needed.


This explains how "the overwhelming majority" of which the certificate
of 1907 speaks was obtained in Cavite. It took six months to obtain
said "majority" at that. I suppose the campaigning of the American
regulars might be credited with obtaining the "majority," and the
reconcentration of brother Baker of the constabulary might be accorded
the additional credit of making the majority "overwhelming." If you
have, as election tellers, so to speak, a soldier with a bayonet on
one side, and a constabulary officer with a reconcentration camp
back of him on the other, you can get an "overwhelming majority"
for the continuance of American rule even in Cavite province.

Through men I commanded during the early campaigning, I have killed my
share of Filipinos in the time of war; and after the civil government
was set up I had occasion to hang a good many of them, under what
seemed to me a necessary application of the old Mosaic law, "An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life." But I thank
God I have never been a party to the insufferable pretence that they,
or any appreciable fraction of them, ever consented to our rule. This,
however, is the whole theory of the Philippine Commission's certificate
of March 28, 1907. It is curious how generously and supremely frank a
brave soldier will get when he forgets to be a politician. In one of
his state papers of 1907 Governor-General Smith [480] speaks of General
Trias, who had been Lieutenant-General of the insurgent army in the
days of the insurrection, and next in rank to Aguinaldo himself, as one
"whose love of country had been tested on many a well fought field
of honorable conflict." Contrast this tribute to the respectability
of the original Philippine war for independence against us with the
long list of stale falsehoods already reviewed in this volume, on the
faith of which, in the presidential campaign of 1900, the American
people were persuaded that to deny to the Filipinos what they had
accorded to Cuba was righteous! The leaders of the Cavite-Batangas
uprising of 1905 had been officers of the insurgent army, and that
was the secret of their hold upon the people of those provinces. It
is true that they must have been pretty sorry officers, and that they
were ladrones (brigands). They were cruel and unmitigated scoundrels
working for purely selfish and vainglorious ends. But it was the
cloak of patriotism, however, infamously misused, that gained them
such success as they attained in 1905. Says the American Governor of
Cavite province in his annual report for 1906 [481]:


    The province should be most carefully watched. I am convinced
    that ladrone leaders do not produce conditions, but that the
    conditions and attitude of the public produce ladrones.


So much for the Cavite-Batangas hurdle. And now as to the Samar and
Leyte hurdle.

The signers of the certificate of 1907 justify their certificate as to
Samar and Leyte on a very ingenious theory. The Act of Congress of July
1, 1902, already cited, which had provided for the taking of a census
preliminary to the call of an election for delegates to a legislature,
had recognized the crude ethnological status of the Moros and other
non-Christian tribes. These had never had anything whatever to do
with the insurrection against us. Therefore in making the continuance
of a state of general and complete peace for a prescribed period a
condition precedent to granting the Filipinos a legislature, the Act
of 1902 had limited that condition precedent to "the territory of said
Islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes." In fact
President Roosevelt's proclamation of September 25, 1902, already
noticed, ordering the taking of the census on the theory that a
state of general and complete peace then existed, explains that this
theory is entirely consistent with trouble among the Moros and other
non-Christian tribes because they, it says, quoting from a statement
of the Philippine Commission previously made to the President,
"never have taken any part in the insurrection." The Moros and other
non-Christian tribes were, so to speak, in no sense assets of the
Philippine insurrection. All the rest of the population was--that is,
if there was anything in the veteran General MacArthur's grim jest of
1900, prompted by Governor Taft's half-baked opinion to the contrary,
that "ethnological homogeneity" was the secret of the unanimity of the
opposition we met, and that somehow people "will stick to their own
kith and kin." When the Philippine Government Act of 1902 was drawn
nobody pretended for a moment that there were any non-Christian tribes
either in Samar or Leyte. The whole population of those Islands were
valuable assets of the insurrection. If any one doubts it, let him
ask the 9th Infantry. You will find in the Census of 1903 that there
are no non-Christian tribes credited either to Samar or Leyte. [482]
When the Philippine Government Act of 1902 was drafted, the exception
about Moros and other non-Christian tribes was intended to except
merely certain types of people as distinct from the great mass of the
Philippine population as islands are from the sea. The fact is, no
person connected with the Philippine Government either before or after
the certificate under consideration, ever thought of classifying the
ignorant country people of the uplands and hills of Samar or Leyte,
as "non-Christian tribes." The Philippine Census of 1903 does not
so classify them. The very volume of the Report of the Philippine
Commission for 1907 in which the certificate aforesaid appears,
does not. In that volume, [483] the report of the Executive Secretary
deals elaborately with the subject of non-Christian tribes. Professor
Worcester of the Philippine Commission has for the last twelve years
been the grand official digger-up of non-Christian tribes. He takes
as much delight at the discovery of a new non-Christian tribe in
some remote, newly penetrated mountain fastness, as the butterfly
catcher with the proverbial blue goggles does in the capture of a
new kind of butterfly. The Executive Secretary's report, out of
deference to the professor, omits no single achievement of his
with reference to his anthropological hobby. It treats, with an
enthusiasm that would delight Mrs. Jellyby herself, of "the progress
that was made during the fiscal year in the work of civilizing
non-Christian tribes scattered throughout the archipelago." It
gives an alphabetical list of all the provinces where there are
non-Christian tribes, and, under the name of each province it gives
notes as to the progress during the year with those tribes. Neither
Samar nor Leyte appear in that list of provinces. So that the Samar
"Pulajans," or "Red Breeches" fellows,--"fanatical" Pulajans, they
are called in the certificate--were "non-Christian tribes" for peace
certificate purposes only. One thing which makes it most difficult
of all for me to understand how these gentlemen got their consent
to sign that certificate is that each non-Christian tribe in the
Philippines has a language of its own, whereas the country people
of the uplands and mountains of Samar and Leyte who are labelled--or
libelled--"non-Christian tribes" in the certificate of 1907, were no
more different from the rest of the population of those islands than,
for instance, the ignorant mountain people of Virginia or Kentucky
are different, ethnologically, from the inhabitants of Richmond or
Louisville. In his report for 1908, [484] Governor-General Smith
himself makes this perfectly clear, where he describes the Samar
Pulajan, or mountaineer, thus:


    The Pulajan is not a robber or a thief by nature--quite the
    contrary. He is hard working, industrious, and even frugal. He
    had his little late [485] of hemp on the side of the mountain,
    and breaking out his picul [486] of hemp, he carried it hank by
    hank for miles and miles over almost impassable mountain trails
    to the nearest town or barrio. There he offered it for sale,
    and if he refused the price tendered, which was generally not
    more than half the value, he soon found himself arrested on a
    trumped-up charge, and unless he compromised by parting with his
    hemp he found himself, after paying his fine and lawyer's fees,
    without either hemp or money.


The non-Christian tribes, on the other hand, never have anything to
do with the civilized people. The Act of Congress of 1902, therefore,
had no sort of reference to the simple, ignorant, and ordinarily
docile mountain folk who tilled the soil, revered the priests, paid
their cedula or head tax like all the rest of the population of the
Islands, and carried their agricultural products from season to season,
their hemp and the like, to the coast towns to market. In other words,
inclusion of the Samar "Pulajans," or "Red Breeches" brigade, and the
Leyte bandits, in the peace certificate of 1907, as "non-Christian
tribes" was an afterthought, having no foundation either in logic
or fact. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation. This is clearly
apparent from President Roosevelt's message to Congress of December,
1905. [487] You do not find any buncombe about "non-Christian
tribes" in that message. In there reviewing the Samar and other
insurrections of 1905 in the Philippines, you find him dealing with
the real root of the evil with perfect honesty, though adopting the
view that the Filipino people were to blame therefor, because we
had placed too much power in the hands of an ignorant electorate,
which had elected rascally officials. "Cavite and Samar," he says,
"are instances of reposing too much confidence in the self-governing
power of a people." If we had let the Filipinos go ahead with their
little republic in 1898, instead of destroying it as we did, they
knew and would have utilized the true elements of strength they had,
viz., a very considerable body of educated, patriotic men having
the loyal confidence of the masses of the people. But we proceeded
to ram down their throats a preconceived theory that the only road
to self-government was for an alien people to step in and make the
ignorant masses the sine qua non. Yet if there was one point on which
Mr. McKinley had laid more stress than on any other, in his original
instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, that point was
the one consecrated in the following language of those instructions:


    In all the forms of government and administrative provisions which
    they are authorized to prescribe, the commission should bear in
    mind that the government which they are establishing is designed
    not for * * * the expression of our theoretical views, etc.


Of course the ignorant electorate we perpetrated on Samar as an
"expression of our theoretical views" proved that we had "gone too
fast" in conferring self-government, or, to quote Mr. Roosevelt,
had been "reposing too much confidence in the self-governing power
of a people," if to begin with the rankest material for constructing
a government that there was at hand was to offer a fair test of
capacity for self-government. But President Roosevelt's message,
above quoted, shows you that the "ignorant electorate" was merely an
ignorant electorate, and not a non-Christian tribe, as the Philippine
Commission later had the temerity to certify they were. Now the plain,
unvarnished, benevolent truth is just this: The Commission knew that
nobody in the United States, whether they were for retaining the
Islands or against retaining them, had any desire to postpone granting
a legislature to the Philippine people. So in their certificate they
simply included everybody who had given trouble in Samar and Leyte
as "non-Christian tribes." The only justification for this was that
they had in fact acted in a most un-Christianlike manner,--i.e., for
people who devotedly murmur prayers to patron saints in good standing
in the church calendar. In making their certificate, the Commission
simply ignored the various uprisings of the preceding two years. They
simply said, generously, "Oh, forget it." They knew nobody in the
United States begrudged the Filipinos their conditionally promised
legislature, or cared to postpone it. The leading Filipinos begged the
authorities to "forget" the various disturbances that had occurred
since the publication of the census, and there was a very general
desire in the Islands to let bygones be bygones, wipe the slate, and
begin again. Any other attitude would have meant that the legislature
would have to be postponed. Then the opposition in the United States
would want to know why, and by 1908 Philippine independence might
become an issue again. In the eyes of the Commission, the end, being
benevolent, justified stretching the language of the Act of 1902
as if it had been the blessed veil of charity itself--i.e., the end
justified the means. In fact it did--almost--justify the means. But not
quite. The moral quality of the Great Certificate of 1907 was not as
reprehensible as General Anderson's dealings with Aguinaldo, already
described, which, like the certificate, were a necessary part of the
benevolent hypocrisy of Benevolent Assimilation of an unconsenting
people. Yet General Anderson is an honorable man. It was not as bad
as General Greene's juggling Aguinaldo out of his trenches before
Manila in a friendly way, and failing to give him a receipt for said
trenches, as he had promised to do, because such a receipt would show
co-operation and "might look too much like an alliance." This also was
done on the idea that the end justified the means. Yet General Greene
is an honorable man. The signers of the great peace certificate of
1907 are all honorable men. But they signed that certificate, just the
same. "Judge not that ye be not judged." All I have to say is, I would
not have signed that certificate. I would have said: "No, gentlemen,
the end does not justify the means. The Philippine Assembly must be
postponed, if we are going to deal frankly with Congress and the folks
at home. The conditions Congress made precedent to the grant of an
assembly have not been met, and we each and all of us know it. We owe
more to our own country and to truth than we do to the Filipinos. The
Act of Congress of 1902 did not vest in the Philippine Commission
authority to pardon disturbances of public order. It imposed upon
the Commission an implied duty to report such disturbances, fully
and frankly. It is not true that there has been a continuing state of
general and complete peace in these Islands for the last two years,
and I for one will not certify that there has been."

The truth is, the attitude of the signers of the certificate was like
that of Uncle Remus, when interrupted by the little boy in one of his
stories. When Uncle Remus gets to the point in the rabbit story where
the rabbit thrillingly escapes from the jaws of death, i.e., from the
jaws of the dogs, by climbing a tree, the rapt listener interrupts:
"Why, Uncle Remus, a rabbit can't climb a tree." To which Uncle
Remus replies, with a reassuring wave of the hand, "Oh, but Honey,
dis rabbit dess 'bleeged ter climb dis tree."

Should any of my good friends still in the Philippines feel disposed to
censure such levity as the above, I can only say, as Kipling writes
from England to his Anglo-Indian friends in a foreword to one of
his books:


            I have told these tales of our life
              For a sheltered people's mirth,
            In jesting guise,--but ye are wise,
              And ye know what the jest is worth.


Moreover, my authority to speak frankly about these matters is also
aptly stated by the same great poet thus:


            I have eaten your bread and salt,
              I have drunk your water and wine,
            The deaths ye died I have watched beside
              And the lives that ye led were mine.

            Was there aught that I did not share
              In vigil or toil or ease,
            One joy or woe that I did not know,
              Dear friends across the seas?


The above reflections are not placed before the reader to show him
what a pity it is that the writer was not a member of the Philippine
Commission at the time of their certificate of 1907, or to show what
a fine thing for our common country it would be if he were made a
member of that Commission now. He is, personally, as disinterested
as if Manila were in the moon, for he cannot live in the tropics
any more. The effect of a year or so of residence there upon white
men invalided home for tropical dysentery and then returning to the
Islands is like the effect of water upon a starched shirt. However,
it is believed that the facts of official record collected in this
chapter up to this point are a demonstration of this proposition,
to wit: What the Philippine Government needs more than anything else
is that the minority party in the United States should be represented
on the Commission. By this I do not mean representation by what are
called, under Republican Administrations, "White House" Democrats,
nor what under a Democratic Administration, if one should ever occur,
would probably be called "Copperhead Republicans." I mean the genuine
article. A Democrat who has cast his fortunes with the Philippines
is no longer a Democrat relatively to the Philippines, because the
Democratic party wants to get rid of the Philippines and the Democrat
in the Philippines of course does not. How absurd it is to talk about
former Governors Wright and Smith, as "life-long Democrats," by way
of preliminary to using their opinions as "admissions." In the law
of evidence, an "admission" is a statement made against the interest
of the party making it.

The first election for representatives in the Philippine Assembly was
held on July 30, 1907, and on October 16th thereafter the Assembly
was formally opened by Secretary of War, William H. Taft. The various
"whereases" hereinabove reviewed, importing complete acquiescence in
American rule since President Roosevelt's Proclamation of July 4, 1902,
were first duly read, and then the Assembly was opened. Of course,
no man could have been elected to the Assembly without at least
pretending to be in favor of independence, and all but a corporal's
guard of them were outspoken in favor of the proposition. As the
present Governor-General Mr. Forbes, said, while Vice-Governor,
in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909:


    To deny the capacity of one's country for * * * self-government
    is essentially unpopular.


When he visited the Philippines to open their Assembly in 1907,
Mr. Taft had said nothing definite and final on the question of
promising independence since his departure from the Islands in
1903. His then benevolent unwillingness to tell them frankly he did not
think they had sense enough to run a government of their own, and that
they were unfit for self-government, has already been reviewed. For
two years after 1903 Governor Wright had made them pine for the return
of Mr. Taft. They longed to hear again some of the siren notes of
the celebrated speech "the Philippines for the Filipinos." They had
gotten very excited and very happy over that speech. Of course they
would not have gotten very excited over independence supposed to be
coming long after they should be dead and buried. During the two dark
frank years of Governor Wright's régime, they had frequently been
told that they were not fit for independence. So that when Secretary
of War Taft had visited the Islands in 1905 they all had been on the
qui vive for more statements vaguely implying an independence they
might hope to live to see. During the visit of 1905 the time of the
visiting Congressional party was consumed principally with tariff
hearings, and comparatively little was said on the subject uppermost
in the minds of all Filipinos. It is true that Mr. Taft said then he
was of the opinion that it would take a generation or longer to get
the country ready for self-government, but he said it in a tactful,
kindly way, and did not forever crush their hopes. So when he went
out to the Islands to open the assembly in 1907, the attitude of the
whole people in expectation of some definite utterances on the question
of a definite promise of independence at some future time, was just
the attitude of an audience in a theatre as to which one affirms
"you could hear a pin fall." In this regard Mr. Taft's utterances
were as follows [488]:


    I am aware that in view of the issues discussed at the election of
    this assembly I am expected to say something regarding the policy
    of the United States toward these islands. I cannot speak with
    the authority of one who may control that policy. The Philippine
    Islands are territory belonging to the United States, and by the
    Constitution, the branch of that government vested with the power
    and charged with the duty of making rules and regulations for their
    government is Congress. The policy to be pursued with respect
    to them is therefore ultimately for Congress to determine. * * *
    I have no authority to speak for Congress in respect to the
    ultimate disposition of the Islands.


After that there was some talk about "mutually beneficial trade
relations" and "improvement of the people both industrially and in
self-governing capacity." But with regard to the "process of political
preparation of the Filipino people" for self-government the Secretary
said that was a question no one could certainly answer; and so far as
he was concerned he thought it would take "considerable longer than a
generation." Somewhere in the early Philippine State papers there is
a quotation used by Mr. Taft from Shakespeare about "Keeping the word
of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope." The Filipinos have
eagerly read for the last twelve years every utterance of Mr. Taft's
that they could get hold of. If any of those embryonic statesmen of the
first Philippine Assembly, familiar with the various Taft utterances,
had looked up the context of the Shakespearian quotation above alluded
to, he would have found it to be as follows:


            And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd,
            That palter with us in a double sense:
            That keep the word of promise to our ear
            And break it to our hope. [489]


Since the announcement by Secretary of War Taft at the opening
of the Philippine Assembly in October, 1907, of the policy of
indefinite retention of the Islands with undeclared intention,
the Filipinos have of course clearly understood that if they were
ever to have independence they must look to Congress for it. But
they know Congress is not interested in them and that they have no
influence with it, and that the Hemp Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the
Sugar Trust, have. So that since 1907, both the American authorities
in the Philippines and the Filipinos have settled down, the former
suffused with benevolence--hardened however by paternalistic firmness,
the latter stoically, to the programme of indefinite retention with
undeclared intention. No conceivable programme could be devised more
ingeniously calculated to engender race hatred. The Filipino newspapers
call the present policy one of "permanent administration for inferior
and incapable races." The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the
Philippine Government Act, which is the "Constitution," so to speak,
we have given the Filipinos, accords "liberty of the press" in the
exact language of our own Constitution. The native press does not
fail to use this liberty to the limit. Naturally the American press
does not remain silent. So here are a pair of bellows ever fanning
the charcoals of discontent. And the masses of the Filipino people
read the Filipino papers. If they cannot read, their children can. In
one of the reports of one of the American constabulary officials in
the Philippines, there is an account of the influence of the native
press too graphic to be otherwise than accurate. He says one can often
see, in the country districts, a group of natives gathered about some
village Hampden, listening to his reading the latest diatribe against
the American Occupation. Never was there such folly in the annals of
statesmanship. In their native papers, the race situation of course
comes in for much comment. Now the most notorious and inflexible
fact of that race situation is that the colonial Anglo-Saxon does
not intermarry with "the yellow and brown" subject people, as the
Latin colonizing races do. It would be an over-statement of the case
to say that the Filipinos to-day had rather have the Spaniards back
as their overlords instead of us. In 1898, they "tasted the sweets
of liberty," to use an expression of one of their leaders, and I
am perfectly sure that to-day the desire of all those people for a
government of their own is so genuine and universal as that it amounts
to a very hopeful positive factor in the equation of their capacity for
self-government. But there is no doubt that many of the Filipinos after
all have a very warm place in their hearts for the Spanish people. How
could it be otherwise when so many of the Filipinos are sons and
grandsons of Spaniards? Much of like and dislike in life's journey is
determined pre-natally. On the other hand, the American women in the
Philippines maintain an attitude toward the natives quite like that of
their British sisters in Hong Kong toward the Chinese, and in Calcutta
toward the natives there. The social status of an American woman who
marries a native,--I myself have never heard of but one case--is like
that of a Pacific coast girl who marries a Jap. This is merely the
instinct of self-defence with which Nature provides the weaker sex,
just as she provides the porcupine with quills. But look at the other
side of the picture. When an American man marries a native woman,
he thereafter finds himself more in touch with his native "in-laws"
it is true, but correspondingly, and ever increasingly, out of touch
with his former associations. This is not as it should be. But it is
a most unpleasant and inexorable fact of the present situation. In
an address delivered at the Quill Club in Manila on January 25,
1909, Governor Smith, after reciting the various beneficent designs
contemplated by the government and the various public works consummated
(at the expense of the people of the Islands) deplored, in spite of
it all, what he termed "the growing gulf between the races." Said he:


    An era of ill feeling has started between Americans and Filipinos,
    and, I hesitate to say it, race hatred.


Cherchez la femme! You find her, on the one hand, in the American woman
whose attitude has been indicated, and you find her, on the other,
in the refined and virtuous native woman, who finds her American
husband's relations to his compatriots altered--queered--since his
marriage to her, no matter how faithful a wife and mother she may
be. This is the unspeakably cruel situation we have forced upon the
Filipino people--whom I really learned to respect, and became much
attached to, before I left the Islands--and President Taft knows it
as well as I do. Yet he does not take the American people into his
confidence. He simply worries along with the situation, wishing it
would get better, but knowing it will get worse. That this situation
is a permanent one is clearly shown by all the previous teachings
of racial history. In his Winning of the West, written in 1889,
speaking of the French settlers in the Ohio valley before 1776,
and the cordial social relations of the dominant race with the
natives--relations which have always obtained with all Latin races
under like circumstances--Mr. Roosevelt says (vol. i., page 41):


    They were not trammelled by the queer pride which makes a man
    of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife,
    though anxious enough to make her his concubine.


Men of English stock have changed but little in the matter of race
instinct since 1776. If we had a definite policy, declared by Congress,
promising independence, the American attitude in the Philippines toward
the Filipinos would at once change, from the present impossible one,
to our ordinary natural attitude of courtesy toward all foreigners,
regardless of their color.

On May 7, 1909, the Honorable James F. Smith took his departure from
the Philippine Islands forever and turned over the duties of his
office to the Honorable W. Cameron Forbes, as Acting President of the
Commission and Governor-General. As in the case of Governors Wright
and Ide, so in that of Governor Smith, no reason is apparent why the
Washington Government should have been willing to dispense with the
services of the incumbent. This was peculiarly true in the case of
General Smith. He was but fifty years of age when he left the Islands
in 1909. He has rendered more different kinds of distinguished public
service than any American who has ever been in the Philippine Islands
from the time Dewey's guns first thundered out over Manila Bay down to
this good hour. Going out with the first expedition in 1898 as Colonel
of the 1st California Regiment, he distinguished himself on more
than one battlefield in the early fighting and in recognition thereof
was made a brigadier-general. Subsequent to this he became Military
Governor of the island of Negros, that one of the six principal
Visayan Islands which gave less trouble during the insurrection and
after than any other--a circumstance doubtless not wholly unrelated
to General Smith's wise and tactful administration there. Later on
during the military régime he became Collector of Customs of the
archipelago. The revenues from customs are the principal source of
revenue of the Philippine Government and the sums of money handled
are enormous. The customs service, moreover, in most countries, and
especially in the Philippines, is more subject to the creeping in of
graft than any other. General Smith's administration of this post was
in keeping with everything else he did in the Islands. When the civil
government was founded by Judge Taft in 1901, he was appointed one of
the Justices of the Supreme Court and filled the duties of that office
most creditably. Thence he was promoted to the Philippine Commission,
which is, virtually, the cabinet of the Governor-General. Still later
he became Vice-Governor, and finally Governor, serving as such from
September, 1906, to May, 1909. Any other government on earth that has
over-seas colonies and recognizes the supreme importance of a maximum
of continuity of policy, would have kept Governor Smith as long
as it could have possibly induced him to stay, just as the British
kept Lord Cromer in Egypt. Governor Smith was succeeded by a young
man from Boston, who had come out to the Islands four years before,
and who, prior to that time, had never had any public service in the
United States of any kind, had never been in the Philippine Islands,
and probably had never seen a Filipino until he landed at Manila.

General Smith is now (1912) one of the Judges of the Court of Customs
Appeals at Washington.






CHAPTER XXII

GOVERNOR FORBES--1909-1912

            The trouble with this country to-day is that,
            under long domination by the protected interests,
            a partnership has grown up between them and the
            Government which the best men in the Republican
            party could not break up if they would.--Woodrow Wilson.


When Governor Forbes assumed the duties of Governor-General of the
Philippines, some ten years after the ratification of the Treaty
of Paris whereby we bought the Islands, he was the ninth supreme
representative of American authority we had had there since the
American occupation began. The following is the list:


    (1) Gen. Thomas M. Anderson       June  30, 1898-July 25, 1898
    (2) Gen. Wesley Merritt           July  25, 1898-Aug. 29, 1898
    (3) Gen. Elwell S. Otis           Aug.  29, 1898-May 5, 1900
    (4) Gen. Arthur MacArthur         May    5, 1900-July 4, 1901
    (5) Hon. William H. Taft          July   4, 1901-Dec. 23, 1903
    (6) Hon. Luke E. Wright           Dec.  23, 1903-Nov. 4, 1905
    (7) Hon. Henry C. Ide             Nov.   4, 1905-Sept. 20, 1906
    (8) Hon. James F. Smith           Sept. 20, 1906-May 7, 1909
    (9) Hon. W. Cameron Forbes        May    7, 1909- [490]


No one of these distinguished gentlemen has ever had any authority to
tell the Filipinos what we expect ultimately to do with them. They
have not known themselves. Is not this distinctly unfair both to
governors and governed?

Before Governor Forbes went to the Philippines he had been a largely
successful business man. He is a man of the very highest personal
character, and an indefatigable worker. He has done as well as the
conditions of the problem permit. But he is always between Scylla
and Charybdis. American capital in or contemplating investment in the
Islands is continually pressing to be permitted to go ahead and develop
the resources of the Islands. To keep the Islands from being exploited
Congress early limited grants of land to a maximum too small to attract
capital. So those who desire to build up the country, knowing they
cannot get the law changed, are forever seeking to invent ways to get
around the law. And, being firm in the orthodox Administration belief
that discussion of ultimate independence is purely academic, i.e.,
a matter of no concern to anybody now living, Governor Forbes is of
course in sympathy with Americans who wish to develop the resources of
the Islands. On the other hand, he knows that such a course will daily
and hourly make ultimate independence more certain never to come. So
do the Filipinos know this. Therefore they clamor ever louder and
louder against all American attempts to repeal the anti-exploiting
Acts of Congress by "liberal" interpretation. Many an American just
here is sure to ask himself, "Why all this 'clamor'? Do we not give
them good government? What just ground have they for complaint?" Yes,
we do give them very good government, so far as the Manila end of
the business is concerned, except that it is a far more expensive
government than any people on the earth would be willing to impose
on themselves. But their main staples are hemp, sugar, and tobacco,
and we raise the last two in this country. Their sugar and tobacco
were allowed free entry into the United States by the Paine Law of
1909 up to amounts limited in the law, but the Philippine people know
very well that American sugar and tobacco interests will either dwarf
the growth of their sugar and tobacco industries by refusing to allow
the limit raised--the limit of amounts admitted free of duty--or else
that our Sugar Trust and our Tobacco Trust will simply ultimately
eliminate them by absorption, just as the Standard Oil Company used
to do with small competitors. In this sort of prospect certainly even
the dullest intellect must recognize just ground for fearing--nay for
plainly foreseeing--practical industrial slavery through control by
foreign [491] corporations of economic conditions. So much for the
two staples in which the Philippines may some day become competitors
of ours. It took Mr. Taft nine years to persuade American sugar and
tobacco that they would not be in any immediate danger by letting
in a little Philippine sugar and tobacco free of duty. Then they
consented. Not until then did they promise not to shout "Down with
cheap Asiatic labor. We will not consent to compete with it." Their
mental reservation was, of course, and is, "if the Philippine sugar
and tobacco industries get too prosperous, we will either buy them,
or cripple them by defeating their next attempt to get legislation
increasing the amounts of Philippine sugar and tobacco admitted into
the United States free of duty." And the Filipinos know that this is
the fate that awaits two out of the three main sources of the wealth
of their country. Their third source of wealth, their main staple, is
the world-famous Manila hemp. This represents more than half the value
of their total annual exports. And as to it, "practical industrial
slavery through control by foreign corporations of economic conditions"
is to-day not a fear, but a fact. The International Harvester Company
has its agents at Manila. The said company or allied interests,
or both, are large importers of Manila hemp. The reports of all the
governors-general of the Philippines who have preceded Governor Forbes
tell, year after year, of the millions "handed over" to American hemp
importers through "the hemp joker" of the Act of Congress of 1902,
hereinafter explained, in the chapter on Congressional Legislation
(Chapter XXVI.). Why did these complaints--made with annual
regularity up to Governor Forbes's accession--cease thereafter? You
will find these complaints of his predecessors transcribed in the
chapter mentioned, because if I had re-stated them you might suspect
exaggeration. The "rake-off" of the American importers of Manila hemp
for 1910 was nearly $750,000, as fully explained in Chapter XXVI.

Governor Forbes will be in this country when this book is issued. I
think he owes it to the American people to explain why he does not
continue the efforts of his predecessors to halt the depredations
of the Hemp Trust. Why does he content himself in his last annual
report with a mild allusion to the fact that the condition of
the hemp industry is "not satisfactory"? I have said that Governor
Forbes is a man of high character, and take pleasure in repeating that
statement in this connection. The truth is we are running a political
kindergarten for adults in the Philippines, and those responsible
for the original blunder of taking them, and all their political
heirs and assigns since, have sought to evade admitting and setting
to work to rectify the blunder. Unmasked, this is what the policy of
Benevolent Assimilation now is. They allege an end, and so justify
all the ways and means. Benevolent Assimilation needs the support
of the International Harvester Company and of all other Big Business
interested directly or indirectly in Manila hemp. The end justifies
the means. Hence the silence. Philippine gubernatorial reticence is
always most reticent about that particular subject on which at the time
the American people are most peculiarly entitled to information. As
long as public order was the most pressing question, Philippine
gubernatorial reticence selected that branch of our colonial problem
either for especial silence or for superlatively casual allusion, as
we have already seen. So now with the economic distresses. Frankness
would obviously furnish too much good argument for winding up this
Oriental receivership of ours. The Philippine Government will never
tell its main current troubles until after they are over. But as
the present trouble--the economic depredations of powerful special
interests--must necessarily be fruitful of discontent which will
crop out some day to remind us that as we sow so shall we reap,
any one who helps expose the root of the trouble is doing a public
service. No Congressman who in silence would permit Big Business to
prey upon his constituents as Governor Forbes has, could long remain in
office. Taxation without representation may amount to depredation, and
yet never be corrected, when the powers that prey have the ear of the
court, and the victims cannot get the ear of the American people. So
the Hemp Trust continues to rob the Filipinos under the forms of law,
and the Mohonk Conference continues to kiss Benevolent Assimilation
on both cheeks. And Dr. Lyman Abbott periodically says Amen. I am not
speaking disrespectfully of Dr. Abbott. I am deploring the lack of
information of our people at home as to conditions in the Philippines.

It is a relief to turn from such matters to some of the real
substantial good we have done out there to which Governor Forbes
has heretofore publicly pointed with just pride. In an article
in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909, Governor Forbes (then
Vice-Governor) said, among other things:


    We have completed the separation of Church and State, buying out
    from the religious orders their large agricultural properties,
    which are now administered by the government for the benefit of
    the tenants.


This statement I cannot too cordially endorse. It would be grossly
unfair not to accord full measure of acclaim to Governor Taft for the
way he worked out the problem of the Friar Lands. He has been attacked
in some quarters in this regard, and most unjustly. Not being a
Catholic, and all my people being Protestants, I have no fear of being
suspected of special pleading in the matter. The working out of the
Friar Land problem by Governor Taft in the Philippines was a splendid
piece of constructive statesmanship. He was at his greatest and best
in that very transaction. The Treaty of Paris had guaranteed that all
vested rights should be respected, including those of ecclesiastical
bodies. The friars had long owned the lands in question. There can be
no particle of doubt on this point. The tenants on the land had all
long ago attorned to them, father and son, from time out of mind,
paying rent regularly. But by claiming jurisdiction over their
tenants' souls also, and getting that jurisdiction effectively
recognized, the thrifty friars used to raise the rent regularly,
quieting incipient protest with threats of eternal punishment,
or protracted stay in purgatory. The advent of our government let
loose a revolt against the authority of the friars generally, and,
their spiritual hold once loosened, this led the tenants to dispute
the land titles of their spiritual shepherds, who were also their
temporal landlords. Of course the titles had all been long recorded,
and looked after by the best legal talent the country afforded. As
long as you control the future of your tenant's soul, you can make him
pay his last copeck for rent. But as soon as that control is lost,
the man on whom the governing of the country thereafter devolves
has a certain prospect of a great agrarian revolution on his hands,
having in it many elements of substantial righteousness. Governor
Taft's capacious mind, prompted by his strongest instinct, love of
justice, conceived the idea of having the Philippine Government raise
the money to buy the Friar Lands, by issuing bonds, and then buying
the Friars out and re-selling the land to the tenants on long time,
on the instalment plan, the instalments to be so graduated as to be
equal to a moderate rental. Each tenant stayed right where he had
been all the time, in possession of the tract he had always tilled,
he and his father before him. To arrange all this it took an Act of
Congress authorizing the bond issue, and a visit to Rome to arrange
the bargain with the Pope. Some say His Holiness drove a hard bargain
with Governor Taft, or to put it another way, that Governor Taft paid
the Church people too much for the land. He did not. He may not have
counted pennies with them, but the lands were worth what he paid for
them. And the purchase protected the faith and honor of our government,
as pledged by the Treaty of Paris, and at the same time prevented an
agrarian revolution--which would have had a lot of elemental justice
on its side.

Another of the good works we have done in the Philippines, to which
Governor Forbes points in his magazine article above mentioned,
is thus noted by him:


    We have put the finances on a sound and sensible basis.


To this also I say Amen. The Forbes article then goes on to say
that the government of the Islands is self-supporting. This is
true, except the $14,000,000 a year it costs us to keep out there a
garrison of 12,000 American troops (supplemented by certain native
scouts--see chapter on "Cost of the Philippines," hereafter). This
garrison is conceded to be a mere handful, sufficient merely,
and intended merely--as a witty English woman has put it in a book
on the Philippines--"to knock the Filipino on the head in case he
wants his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it." In
other words, we only attempt to keep force enough there to quell any
outbreak that might occur. So far as possible invasion by any foreign
power is concerned, our $14,000,000 per annum is an absolutely dead
loss. Brigadier-General Clarence Edwards, U. S. A., commanding the
Bureau of Insular Affairs, said recently [492] before the Finance
Committee of the Senate:


    I would never think of the Philippines as a military problem for
    defence. If any nation wants them, it is merely a declaration
    of war.


What a shameful admission for a great nation to subscribe to,
relatively to people it pretends to be protecting! The programme of
the War Department is to abandon the Islands to their fate, for the
time being at least, in our next war, letting them remain a football
until the end of such war, when, as an independent republic they
could, and would, rally as one man to the defence of their country
against invasion, and would, with a little help from us, make life
unbearable for an invading force. As things stand, we are just as
impotent as Spain was out there in 1898, and it is utter folly to
forget what happened then.

But to return to Governor Forbes's article and to a pleasanter feature
of the situation. He says:


    We have established schools throughout the archipelago, teaching
    upward of half a million children.


This also is true, and greatly to our credit. But as the American
hemp trust mulcts the Philippine hemp output about a half million
dollars a year (as above suggested, and later, in another chapter,
more fully explained), it follows that each Filipino child pays the
hemp trust a dollar a year for the privilege of going to school.

And now let us consider the most supremely important part of Governor
Forbes's magazine article above quoted. The burden of the song of
the adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill (looking to
Philippine independence in 1921) [493] is that because there are
certain "wild tribes" scattered throughout the archipelago, in the
mountain fastnesses, therefore we should cling to the present policy of
indefinite retention with undeclared intention until the wild tribes
get civilized. Governor Forbes's article is an absolute, complete,
and final answer to the misinformed nonsense of the minority report
aforesaid. He says, apropos of public order:


    It is now safe to travel everywhere throughout the Islands without
    carrying a weapon, excepting only in some of the remote parts of
    the mountains, where lurk bands of wild tribes who might possibly
    mistake the object of a visit, and in the southern part of the
    great island of Mindanao which is inhabited by intractable Moros.


The foregoing unmasks, in all its contemptible falsehood, the pretence
that the presence of a few wild tribes in the Philippines is a reason
for withholding independence from 7,000,000 of Christian people in
order that a greedy little set of American importers of Manila hemp may
fatten thereon. True, hemp is not edible, but it is convertible into
edibles--and also into campaign funds. That the existence of these wild
tribes--the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at
the St. Louis Exposition of 1903-4--constitute infinitely less reason
for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American
Indian constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will
be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken
from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123):
[494]


        Island      Civilized       Wild        Total

        Luzon       3,575,001    223,506    3,798,507
        Panay         728,713     14,933      743,646
        Cebu          592,247                 592,247
        Bohol         243,148                 243,148
        Negros        439,559     21,217      460,776
        Leyte         357,641                 357,641
        Samar         222,002        688      222,690
        Mindanao      246,694    252,940      499,634


I think the above table makes clear the enormity of the injustice I am
now trying to crucify. Without stopping to use your pencil, you can
see that Mindanao, the island where the "intractable Moros" Governor
Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million people. Half
of these are civilized Christians, and the other half are the wild,
crudely Mohammedan Moro tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list,
you behold what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except
Mindanao), viz., Luzon and the six main Visayan Islands. If you will
turn back to pages 225 et seq., especially to page 228, where the
student of world politics was furnished with all he needs or will
ever care to know about the geography of the Philippine Islands,
you will there find all the rocks sticking out of the water and all
the little daubs you see on the map eliminated from the equation
as wholly unessential to a clear understanding of the problem of
governing the Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzon and
the six main Visayan Islands above, as constituting, for all practical
governmental purposes all the Philippine archipelago except the Moro
country, Mindanao (i.e., parts of it), and its adjacent islets;
Luzon and the Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people,
and of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at the above
table, constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled in the pockets of their
various mountain regions. Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame,
peaceable, and tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they
"might possibly mistake the object of a visit." The half million
"intractable Moros" of Mindanao, plus those in the adjacent islets,
make up another 300,000. These last, it is true, will need policing
for some time to come, but whether we do that policing by retaining
Mindanao, or whether we let the Filipinos do it, is a detail that has
no standing in court as a reason for continuing to deny independence
to the 7,000,000 of people of Luzon and the Visayan Islands because
they have some 300,000 backward people in the backwoods of their
mountains. Yet see how the ingenuity of inspired ignorance states the
case, by adding the 300,000 tame tribes of Luzon and the Visayas to
the 300,000 fierce Moro savages away down in Mindanao, near Borneo,
so as to get 600,000 "wild" people, and then alluding to the fact
that so far only 200,000 Filipinos are qualified to vote. Says the
report of the minority of the Committee on Insular Affairs on the
pending Jones bill (proposing independence in 1921):


    The wild and uncivilized inhabitants of the islands outnumber, 3
    to 1, those who would be qualified to vote under the pending bill
    [the Jones bill].


You see the minority report is counting women and children,
when it talks about the wild tribes, but not when it talks about
voters. According to universally accepted general averages, among
7,500,000 people you should find 1,500,000 adult males. No one doubts
that of these, by 1921, 500,000 will have become qualified voters. No
one can deny that any such country having 500,000 qualified voters, the
bulk of whom are good farmers, and the cream of whom are high-minded
educated gentlemen, and all of whom are intensely patriotic, will be in
good shape for promotion to independence. What wearies me about this
whole matter is that the minority report above mentioned is permitted
to get off such "rot," and the New York Times, the Army and Navy
Journal, and others, to applaud it, while the Administration sits by,
silent, and reaps the benefit of such stale, though not intentional,
falsehoods, without attempting to correct them, so that our people
may get at the real merits of the question. You see this silence
inures to the benefit of the interests that have cornered the Manila
hemp industry.

In the campaign of 1912 for the Republican nomination for the
Presidency, there was much mutual recrimination between Colonel
Roosevelt and Mr. Taft about which of them had been kindest to
the International Harvester Company. It seems to me it is "up to"
Governor Forbes, who in the Philippines has served under the present
President and his predecessor also, to explain why he has abandoned
the fight, so long waged by previous governors-general, to get what
former Governor-General James F. Smith calls "the [hemp] joker" of
the Act of Congress of 1902 concerning the Philippines, wiped from
the statute books of this country.






CHAPTER XXIII

"NON-CHRISTIAN" WORCESTER

            The cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard.

                          Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.


In the year 1911, the editor of one of the great metropolitan
papers told me that President Taft told him that the Honorable
Dean C. Worcester, the Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine
Government, was "the most valuable man we have on the Philippine
Commission." Certainly, reproduction of such an indorsement from
so exalted a source shows a wish to be fair, in one who considers
Professor Worcester the direst calamity that has befallen the
Filipinos since the American occupation, neither war, pestilence,
famine, reconcentration, nor tariff-wrought poverty excepted. During
all my stay in the Philippines I never did have any official relations
of any sort with the Professor, and only met him, casually, once,
in 1901. The personal impression left from the meeting was distinctly
that of an overbearing bully of the beggar-on-horseback type. Conscious
of liability to error, and preferring that the reader should judge for
himself, I give the main circumstances upon which this impression is
based. Soon after the central insular government was set up, in 1901,
Judge Taft and certain other members of the Philippine Commission,
the Professor among the number, came into my judicial district to
organize provincial governments. Their coming to each town where they
stopped was telegraphed in advance, and before they reached the town
where I then was holding court each one of the American colony of
the town was designated by common consent to look after a fraction
of the Taft party during their stay. The Professor fell to my lot. I
always was unlucky. However, their stay was only a few hours. While
they were there, I had occasion to observe that the Professor spoke
Spanish quite well and so remarked to him. The well-bred reply was:
"You'll find that I know a great many things you might not think I
knew." Whether this was merely "The insolence of office" cropping
out in a previously obscure young man suddenly elevated to high
station, or whether it was an evidence of the Commissioner's idea
of the relation of the Executive Department of a government to its
Judiciary, is a question. [495] At all events I think the incident
gives an insight into the man not irrelevant to what is hereinafter
submitted. I have met a number of other Americans since who had
received impressions similar to my own. And the Professor's whole
subsequent course in the Islands corroborates those impressions. I
have never talked to any American in the Philippines who had a good
word for him. Of course, Power, like Property, will always have
friends. So that even Professor Worcester may have some friends,
among his fellow-countrymen in those far-away Islands. But it has
already been made clear in a former chapter how entirely possible it
is for a man occupying high position in the government out there to
be very generally and cordially disliked by his own countrymen there
and actually not know it. Whether this is true of Professor Worcester,
or not, as a general proposition it is quite possible. One thing is
certain, namely, that he is very generally and very cordially detested
by the Filipinos. That this detestation is perfectly natural under
the circumstances, and entirely justifiable, and that it is a cruel
injustice to those people, as well as a monumental piece of folly,
to keep the Professor saddled upon them, it is now in order to show.

In Chapter VI (ante), we made the acquaintance of two young naval
officers. Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and Naval Cadet L. R. Sargent, who,
in the fall of 1898, while the fate of the Philippines hung in the
balance at Paris, and peace still reigned in the Islands between us
and the Filipinos, made a trip through the interior of Luzon, covering
some six hundred miles, and afterwards furnished Admiral Dewey with
a written report of their trip, which was later published as a Senate
document. Professor Worcester's greatest value to President Taft, and
also the thing out of which has grown, most unfortunately, what seems
to be a very cordial mutual hatred between him and the Filipinos,
is his activities in the matter of discovering, getting acquainted
with, classifying, tabulating, enumerating, and otherwise preparing
for salvation, the various non-Christian tribes. These tribes have
already been briefly dealt with in Chapter XXI. (ante), apropos of
that part of the Great Peace Certificate of 1907 which related to the
"Moros and other non-Christian tribes"--uncivilized tribes which,
being as distinct from the great mass of the Filipino people as
islets from the sea, had had no more to do with the insurrection
against us, than the Pawnees, Apaches, and Sioux Indians had to do
with our Civil War of 1861-5. They were also dealt with, somewhat,
in the chapter preceding this. Long before Professor Worcester was
permanently inflicted upon the Filipino people, one of the young
naval officers above mentioned, Mr. Sargent, published an article in
the Outlook for September 2, 1899, [496] based on this trip through
the interior of Luzon, made by authority of Admiral Dewey the year
before. In the course of his article Mr. Sargent says:


    Some years ago, at an exposition held at Barcelona, Spain,
    a man and woman were exhibited as representative types of the
    inhabitants of Luzon. The man wore a loin cloth, and the woman
    a scanty skirt. It was evident that they belonged to the lowest
    plane of savagery.


He adds:


    I think no deeper wound was ever inflicted upon the pride of the
    real Filipino people than that caused by this exhibition, the
    knowledge of which seems to have spread throughout the island. The
    man and woman, while actually natives of Luzon, were captives of
    a wild tribe of Igorrotes of the hills.


Professor Worcester was originally a professor of zoölogy, or something
of that sort, in a western university. In the early nineties he had
made a trip to the Philippines, confining himself then mostly to
creeping things and quadrupeds--lizards, alligators, pythons, unusual
wild beasts, and other forms of animal life of the kind much coveted as
specimens by museums and universities. In 1899, just after the Spanish
War, he got out a book on the Philippines, and as an American who had
been in the Philippines was then a rara avis, it came to pass that
the reptile-finder ultimately became a statesman. He was brought,
possibly by conscious worth, to the notice of President McKinley,
accompanied the Schurman Commission to the Islands, in 1899, and
the Taft Commission in 1900, and finally evolved into his present
eminence as Secretary of the Interior and official chief finder of
non-Christian tribes for the Philippine Government.

The best known of the wild tribes in the Philippines are the Igorrotes,
the dog-eating savages you saw at the St. Louis Exposition in 1903-4,
the same Mr. Sargent speaks of in his article in the Outlook. Of
course it was not a desire to misrepresent the situation, but only the
enthusiasm of a zoölogist, anthropologically inclined, and accustomed
to carry a kodak, which started the Professor to photographing the
dog-eating Igorrotes and specimens of other non-Christian tribes
soon after the Taft Commission reached the Philippines. But you
cannot get far in the earlier reports of the Taft Commission, which
was supposed to have been sent out to report back on the capacity of
the Filipinos for self-government, without crossing the trail of the
Professor's kodak--pictures of naked Igorrotes and the like. This,
however innocent, must have been of distinct political value in
1900 and 1904 in causing the heart of the missionary vote in the
United States to bleed for those "sixty different tribes having sixty
different languages" of which Secretary Root's campaign speeches made
so much. It must also have greatly awakened the philanthropic interest
of exporters of cotton goods to learn of those poor "savage millions"
wearing only a loin cloth, when they could be wearing yards of cotton
cloth. By the time the St. Louis Exposition came off, in 1903-4,
it was decided to have the various tribes represented there. So
specimens were sent of the Igorrote tribe, the Tagalos, the Visayans,
the Negrito tribe, and various other tribes. The Tagalos, the Visayans,
etc., being ordinary Filipinos, did not prove money-makers. But it was
great sport to watch the Igorrotes preparing their morning dog. So it
was the "non-Christian tribes" that paid. It was they that were most
advertised. It was the recollection of them that lingered longest
with the visitor to the Exposition, and there was always in his mind
thereafter an association of ideas between the Igorrotes and Filipino
capacity for self-government generally. Many representative Filipinos
visited the St. Louis Exposition, saw all this, and came home and told
about it. One very excellent Filipino gentleman, a friend of mine,
who was Governor of Samar during my administration of the district
which included that island, sent me one day in October, 1904, a
satirical note, enclosing a pamphlet he had just received called
Catalogue of Philippine Views at the St. Louis Exposition. He knew I
would understand, so he said in the note, that the pamphlet was sent
"in order that you may learn something of certain tribes still extant
in this country." Concerning all this, I can say of my own knowledge
exactly what Naval Cadet Sargent said concerning the lesser like
indignity of the one Igorrote couple exhibited at Barcelona while
the Filipinos were asking representation in the Spanish Cortes, viz.:


    I think no deeper wound was ever inflicted upon the pride of
    the real Filipino people than that caused by this exhibition,
    the knowledge of which seems to have spread throughout the islands.


You see our Census of 1903 gave the population of the Philippines
at about 7,600,000 of which 7,000,000 are put down as civilized
Christians; and of the remaining 600,000, about half are the
savage, or semi-civilized, crudely Mohammedan Moros, in Mindanao,
and the adjacent islets down near Borneo. The other 300,000 or so
uncivilized people scattered throughout the rest of the archipelago,
the "non-Christian tribes," which dwell in the mountain fastnesses,
remote from "the madding crowd," cut little more figure, if any,
in the general political equation, than the American Indian does
with us to-day. Take for instance the province of Nueva Vizcaya,
in the heart of north central Luzon. That was one of the provinces
of the First Judicial District I presided over in the Islands. I
think Nueva Vizcaya is Professor Worcester's "brag" province, in the
matter of non-Christian anthropological specimens, both regarding
their number and their variety. Yet while I was there, though we knew
those people were up in the hills, and that there were a good many
of them, the civilized people all told us that the hill-tribes never
bothered them. And on their advice I have ridden in safety, unarmed,
at night, accompanied only by the court stenographer, over the main
high-road running through the central plateau that constitutes the
bulk of Nueva Vizcaya province, said plateau being surrounded by a
great amphitheatre of hills, the habitat of the Worcester pets.

The non-Christian tribes in the Philippines have been more
widely advertised in America than anything else connected with
the Islands. That advertisement has done more harm to the cause
of Philippine independence by depreciating American conceptions
concerning Filipino capacity for self-government, than anything that
could be devised even by the cruel ingenuity of studied mendacity. And
Professor Worcester is the P. T. Barnum of the "non-Christian tribe"
industry. The Filipinos, though unacquainted with the career of
the famous menagerie proprietor last named, and his famous remark:
"The American people love to be humbugged," understand the malign
and far-reaching influence upon their future destiny of the work
of Professor Worcester, and his services to the present Philippine
policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention, through
humbugging the American people into the belief that the Islands must be
retained until the three hundred thousand or so Negritos, Igorrotes,
and other primitive wild peoples sprinkled throughout the archipelago
are "reconstructed." Is it any wonder that the Filipinos do not love
the Professor? To keep him saddled upon them as one of their rulers
is as tactful as it would be to send Senator Tillman on a diplomatic
mission to Liberia or Haiti.

Not long ago the famous magazine publisher Mr. S. S. McClure, who, I
think, is trying to make his life one of large and genuine usefulness
for good, said to me that if we gave the Filipinos self-government
we would shortly have another Haiti or Santo Domingo on our hands. He
must have seen some of Professor Worcester's pictures of Igorrotes and
Negritos scattered through public documents related to the question
of Filipino capacity for self-government. Mr. McClure has never,
I believe, been in the Islands; and the cruelly unjust impression he
had innocently received was precisely the impression systematically
developed all these years through the Worcester kodak.

In February, 1911, there appeared an article in the Sunset magazine for
that month entitled "The Philippines as I Saw them." The contributor
of the article is no less a personage than the Honorable James
F. Smith, former Governor-General of the Islands. At the top of the
article one reads the legend "Illustrated by Photographs through
the Courtesy of the Bureau of Insular Affairs." If you read this
legend understandingly, you can, in so doing, hear the click of the
Worcester kodak. General Smith's article is smeared all over with
such pictures. One is merrily entitled "Eighteen Igorrot Fledglings
Hatched by the American Bird of Freedom." Another is entitled "Subano
Man and woman, Mindanao." Another is a picture of an Ifugao home
in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, hereinabove mentioned. Ifugao is
the name of one of the wild tribes, one of the results of Professor
Worcester's anthropological excavations of the last few years. In
front of the Ifugao home stands the master of the house, clothed in a
breech-clout. Next in the menagerie in the article under consideration
you find a group of Ifugao children, then a Bagobo of Mindanao, then
some other specimen with a curious name, in which there is a woman
naked from the waist up and a man in a loin-cloth. Then follows a
picture of a Tingyan girl from Abra province. And, to cap the climax,
among the last of these pictures you find a Filipino couple pounding
rice. The rice pounders are ordinary Filipinos. The woman is decently
dressed; the man is clothed only from the waist down, having divested
himself of his upper garment, as is customary in order to work at hard
labor more comfortably in hot weather. I do not so much blame General
Smith for this libellous panorama of pictures, scattered though they
are through an article by him on "The Philippines as I Saw them." He
probably illustrated his article with what the Bureau of Insular
Affairs sent him, without giving much thought to the matter. But the
Bureau of Insular Affairs appears to neglect no occasion to parade the
Philippine archipelago's sprinkling of non-Christian tribes before
the American public, fully knowing that the hopes of the Filipinos
for independence must depend upon impressions received by the American
people concerning the degree of civilization they have reached.

For all these wanton indignities offered their pride and self-respect,
the Filipinos well know they are primarily indebted to Professor
Worcester and his non-Christian tribe bureau. The feud between the
Professor and the Filipino people--the bad blood has been growing so
long that the incident hereinafter related justifies its being called
a feud--has been peculiarly embittered by the missionary aspect of
the non-Christian industry. The great body of the Filipino people,
the whole six or seven millions of them, are Catholics--most of them
devout Catholics. Presumably, their desire for salvation by the method
handed down by their forefathers would not be affected by a change
from American political supervision to independence. Yet the darkest
thing ahead of Philippine independence prospects is the Protestant
missionary vote in the United States. Bishop Brent, Episcopal Bishop
of the Philippines, one of the noblest and most saintly characters
that ever lived, has devoted his life apparently to missionary work
in the Philippines, having twice declined a nomination as Bishop of
Washington (D.C.). The only field of endeavor open to Bishop Brent and
his devoted little band of co-workers is the non-Christian tribes. It
seems that the Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical authorities in
the Islands get along harmoniously, a kind of modus vivendi having
been arranged between them, by which the Protestants are not to do
any proselyting among the seven millions of Catholic Christians. So
this field of endeavor is the one Professor Worcester has been
industriously preparing during the last twelve years. Obviously,
every time Professor Worcester digs up a new non-Christian tribe
he increases the prospective harvest of the Protestants, thus
corralling more missionary vote at home for permanent retention of
the Philippines. Professor Worcester is quoted in a Manila paper as
saying, "I am under no delusion as to what may be accomplished for
the primitive wild people. It takes time to reconstruct them." This
remark is supposed to have been made in a speech before the Young Men's
Christian Association of Manila. Neither is Mr. Taft under any delusion
as to how valuable is religious support for the idea of retaining the
Philippines as a missionary field. The nature of the above allusion to
Bishop Brent should certainly be sufficient to show that the writer
yields to no one in affectionate reverence and respect for that rare
and noble character. But neither Bishop Brent nor any one else can
persuade him that it is wise to abandon the principle that Church
and State should be separate, in order that our government may go
into the missionary business. Since it has become apparent that the
Philippines will not pay, the Administration has relied solely on
missionary sentiment. In one of his public utterances Mr. Taft has
said in effect, "The programme of the Republican party with regard
to the Philippines is one which will make greatly for the spread of
Christian civilization throughout the Orient."

The foregoing reflections are not intended to raise an issue as to the
wisdom of foreign missions. They are simply intended to illustrate
how it is possible and natural for President Taft to consider
Professor Worcester "the most valuable man we have on the Philippine
Commission." The Professor's menagerie is a vote-getter. Also,
President Taft's whole Philippine policy being founded upon the theory
that "the great majority" of the Filipino people are in favor of
alien thraldom in lieu of independence, he tolerantly permits their
editors to "let off steam" through clamor for independence. This
privilege they do not fail to exercise to the limit. The attitude
of the Insular Government permits the native press much latitude of
"sauciness," in deference to the American idea about liberty of the
press. In the exercise of this privilege during the last few years
the native press has gone the limit. However, there was no way to
stop them, on the principle to which we had committed ourselves. The
thing was very mischievous, and became utterly intolerable. There was
a native paper called Renacimiento (Renaissance). This paper was long
permitted to say things more or less seditious in character which
no self-respecting government should have tolerated. This was done
pursuant to the original theory, obstinately adhered to up to date,
that there was no real substantial unwillingness to American rule. Of
course, if this were true, newspaper noise could do no harm. Therefore
it was permitted to continue. Finally, however, like a boy "taking a
dare," the Renacimiento published an article on Professor Worcester
which intimately and sympathetically voiced the general yearning of
the Filipino people to be rid of the Professor. In so doing, however,
the hapless editor overstepped the limits of American license, and
got into the toils of the law, by saying things about the Professor
that rendered the editor liable to prosecution for criminal libel. The
Professor promptly took advantage of this misstep, to the great joy of
the authorities, who had been previously much goaded by independence
clamor. The result was that the paper was put out of business and the
editor was put in jail. No doubt the editor ought to have been put in
jail, but his incarceration incidentally served to tone down Filipino
clamor for independence. Subsequent to this coup d'état, the Professor
did a little venting of feelings in his turn. He made a speech at
the Y. M. C. A. on October 10, 1910, which was a highly unchristian
speech to be gotten off in an edifice dedicated to the service
of Christ. The Manila papers give only extracts from the speech,
and I have never seen a copy of it. From the newspaper accounts,
it seems that the Professor was determined to, and did, relieve his
feelings about the Filipinos. The Manila Cable-News of October 11,
1910, quotes the Professor as referring to his pets, the non-Christian
tribes, as "ancestral enemies of the Christians." Thus for the first
time is developed an attitude of being champion of the uncivilized
pagan remnant, left from prehistoric times, against the Christians
of the Islands. The Cable-News also says that Professor Worcester
"laughed at the idea that the Islands belonged to the so-called
civilized people and held that if the archipelago belonged to any
one it certainly belonged to its original owners the Negritos." This
remark about the "so-called civilized people" was as tactful as
if President Taft should address a meeting of colored people in a
doubtful state and call them "niggers." Another of the Manila papers
gives an account of the speech from which it appears that the burly
Professor succeeded in amusing himself at least, if not his audience,
by suggestions as to the superior fighting qualities of the Moros over
the Filipinos, which suggestions were on the idea that the Moros would
lick the Filipinos if we should leave the country. (The Moros number
300,000, the Filipinos nearly 7,000,000.) The Professor's remarks
in this regard, according to the paper, were a distinct reflection
upon the courage of the Filipinos generally as a people. The effect
of Professor Worcester's speech before the Y. M. C. A. may be well
imagined. However the facts of history do not leave the imagination
unaided. The Philippine Assembly, representing the whole Filipino
people, and desiring to express the unanimous feeling of those people
with regard to the Worcester speech, unanimously passed, soon after
the speech was delivered, a set of resolutions whereof the following
is a translation:


    Resolved that the regret of the Assembly be recorded for the
    language attributed to the Honorable Dean C. Worcester, Secretary
    of the Interior of the Philippine Government in a discourse
    before the Young Men's Christian Association, October 10,
    1910. It is improper and censurable in a man who holds a public
    office and who has the confidence of the government. And as the
    statements made as facts are false, slanderous, and offensive to
    the Philippine people, their publication is a grave violation of
    the instructions given by President McKinley which required that
    public functionaries should respect the sensibilities, beliefs,
    and sentiments of the Philippine people, and should show them
    consideration. The words and the conduct of Mr. Worcester tend
    to sow distrust between the Americans and the Filipinos, whose
    aspirations and duties should not separate them but unite them
    in the pathway which leads to the progress and emancipation of
    the Philippine people. The influence of Mr. Worcester has caused
    injury to the feelings of the Filipinos, encouraged race hatred,
    and tended to frustrate the task undertaken by men of real good
    will to win the esteem, confidence, and respect of the Philippine
    people for the Americans.

    Resolved further that this House desires that these facts should
    be communicated to the President of the United States through
    the Governor of the Philippines and the Secretary of War.


Presumably these resolutions were forwarded "to the President
of the United States through the Governor of the Philippines and
the Secretary of War." But apparently they were pigeonholed when
they reached Washington. I stumbled on them in the Insular Affairs
Committee of the House of Representatives whither they had landed
through Mr. Slayden of Texas. The distinguished veteran Congressman
from Texas, being known as an enemy of all wrong things, was appealed
to by certain persons in the United States to bring the matter to
the attention of Congress. He did so by presenting to the House of
Representatives an American petition which embodied a copy of the
resolutions of the Philippine Assembly.

It thus becomes apparent that one of Professor Worcester's principal
elements of value is in bullying the Filipinos, and thereby smothering
manifestations of a desire for independence, the existence of which
desire is denied by President Taft's Administration. The more the
Filipinos cry for independence the greater seems the sin of holding
them in subjection. So that Professor Worcester is very valuable in
silencing independence clamor and thereby creating an appearance of
consent of the governed, when there is no consent of the governed
whatsoever.

In describing the discontent in distant provinces under brutal
pro-consuls, which contributed largely to the final disintegration
of the Roman Empire, Gibbon says:


    The cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard.


The total failure of the above temperate, dignified, and vibrant
protest of the Philippine Assembly to reach the ears of the American
people is but another reminder that history repeats itself.






CHAPTER XXIV

THE PHILIPPINE CIVIL SERVICE

        Is our Occupation of the Philippines to be temporary,
        like our occupation of Cuba after the Spanish War, or
        "temporary" like the British Occupation of Egypt since
        1882? The Unsettled Question.

        The policy to be pursued is for Congress to determine.
        I have no authority to speak for Congress in respect
        to the ultimate disposition of the Islands.

              Secretary of War Wm. H. Taft to Philippine Assembly, 1907.


The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government
Act, is entitled "An Act temporarily to provide" a government for the
Philippine Islands. The young American who goes out to the Philippines
to take a position with the Insular Government there has usually
read his share of Kipling, and his imagination likes to analogize
his prospective employment to the British Indian Civil Service. The
latter, however, offers a career. But what does the former offer? Take
the prospects of the rank and file, as set forth by Mr. J. R. Arnold,
of the Executive Bureau of the Philippine Government, in an article
published in the North American Review for February, 1912. Suppose a
young man goes out to the Philippines at a salary of $1200. Mr. Arnold
discusses fully and frankly the cost of living in the Islands, and
how much higher board, lodging, etc., are out there than in the United
States. He states that board and lodging will cost $15 to $20 a month
more than here. So that, so far, a salary of $1200 in the Philippines
would seem equivalent to a salary of say approximately $950 in the
United States--say in Washington. Also he calls attention to the
fact that the government will pay your way out, but you must get
back the best way you can. He does not say so, but the walking is not
good all the way from Manila to Washington. Seriously, according to
the authority from whom we are quoting, it costs $225 to $300 to get
back. So if you come back at the end of a three years' stay--you must
contract to stay at least that long--you must have laid by, taking
his maximum return fare as the more prudent figure to reckon on, one
hundred dollars a year to buy your return ticket. Mr. Arnold does not
say so, but it is a fact, that various little expenses will creep in
that are sure to amount, even with the most rigidly frugal, to $50
per annum that you would never have spent in the United States. You
are hardly respectable in the Philippines if you do not have a
muchacho. Muchacho, in Spanish, means the same as garçon in French,
or valet in English. But muchachos are as thick as cigarettes in the
Philippines. And you can hire one for about $5 a month. To resolve not
to have a muchacho in the Philippines would be like resolving at home
never to have your shoes shined, or your clothes pressed. It would be
contrary to the universal custom of the country, and would therefore be
"impossible." You have not been long in the Philippines before you get
tired of telling applicants for the position of muchacho that you do
not want one, and, benumbed by the universal custom, you accept the
last applicant. You must figure on a muchacho as one of your "fixed
charges." Count then an extra $50 annual necessary expense that you
would not have at home. If you do not succumb to the muchacho custom,
you will get rid of the $50 in other ways fairly classifiable as
necessary current expenses. Thus, if you take from your $1200, worth
$950 in Manila, as above stated, the $100 per annum necessary to be
laid by against your home-coming, and the other $50 last suggested,
your salary of $1200 per annum in Manila becomes equivalent to one of
$800 at home, so far as regards what you are likely to save by strict
habits of economy. In other words, to figure how you are going to come
out in the long run, if you go out as a $1200 man, while your social
position will be precisely that of a man commanding the same salary
in a government position in Washington, you must knock off a third of
the $1200. This is not the way Mr. Arnold states the case exactly. I
am simply taking his facts, supplemented by what little I have added,
and stating them in a way which will perhaps illustrate the case
better to some people. Mr. Arnold says you are apt to get up as high
as $1500 and finally even to $1800 in three to five years. Suppose
you do have that luck. Still, if, as has been made plain above, you
must consider $1200 in Manila as equal to only $800 in Washington
(so far as regards what you are going to be able to save each year),
by the same token you must consider $1500 in Manila as being equal
to only $1000 in Washington, and $1800 as only $1200.

The utmost limit of achievement in the Philippine Government service,
the only one of the higher positions not subject to political caprice,
the only one regarded out there as a "life position"--and this excepts
neither the Governorship of the Islands nor the Commissionerships--is
the position of Justice of the Supreme Court. The salary is $10,000
per annum, American money. But there is not an American judge on that
bench who would not be glad at any moment to accept a $5000 position
as a United States District Judge at home. All of them whom I know
are most happily married. But I believe their wives would quit them
if they refused such an offer from the President of the United States,
or else get so unhappy about it that they would accept and come home.

While we have now considered the case from bottom to top, we did not
originally figure on the young American going out to the Philippines
otherwise than single. In this behalf Mr. Arnold himself says:


    I do not think it can be fairly called other than risky for
    an American to attempt to practise love in a cottage in the
    Philippines.


Says the late Arthur W. Fergusson--who gave his life to the Philippine
Civil Service--in his annual report for 1905, as Executive Secretary:


    The one great stumbling-block, and which no legislative body
    can eradicate, is the fact that very few Americans intend to
    make the Philippines their permanent home, or even stay here
    for any extended period. This is doubtless due to the location
    of the islands, their isolation from centres of civilization
    and culture, the enervating climate, lack of entertainment and
    desirable companionship, and distance from the homeland. Every
    clerk, no matter what his ideals or aspirations, realizes after
    coming here that he must at some time in the future return to
    the United States and begin all over again. After spending a
    year or more in the islands, the realization that the sooner the
    change is made the better, becomes more acute. This condition
    causes, doubtless, the class of men who are not adventurous or
    fond of visiting strange climes to think twice before accepting
    an appointment for service in these islands, and generally to
    remain away, and a great majority of those who do come here to
    leave the service again after a very short period of duty. [497]


Then Mr. Fergusson comes to the obvious but apparently unattainable
remedy, which he says is


    to make a Philippine appointment a permanent means of livelihood
    by providing an effective system of transfers to the Federal
    service after a reasonable period of service here. * * * Under
    the present regulations influence must be brought to bear at
    Washington in order that requisition may be made by the Chief of
    some bureau there for the services of a clerk desiring to transfer.


You see, if a Washington Bureau, say the Coast and Geodetic Survey,
or the Geological Survey, sends a man out to the Islands, he is never
for a moment separated from the Federal Civil Service or the Federal
Government's pay-roll. The same is true of civilian employees of the
army. But the man in the Insular Service, when he wants to get back
home, is little better off than if he were in the employ of the Cuban
Government, or the British Indian Government, or that of the Dutch
East Indies. Mr. Fergusson also says:


    It is believed to be useless to try to influence men to come out
    here unless there is something permanent offered to them at the
    expiration of a reasonable term of service. * * * The average
    European is content to live and die "east of Suez"; the average
    American is not. * * * I am firmly convinced that a permanent
    service under present conditions is entirely out of the question.


How can you have "a permanent service" unless you have a definite
declared policy? Why not declare the purpose of our Government with
the regard to the Islands?

In his annual report for 1906 [498] Mr. Fergusson says:


    Our relations to the islands are such that the education and
    specialization of a distinct body of high class men purposely
    for this service as is done in England for the Indian service,
    will probably be always a practical impossibility.


He then goes on to reiterate his annual plea for a law providing for
transfer as a matter of right, not of influence, from the Philippine
Civil Service to the Federal Civil Service in the United States,
and tells of a very capable official of his bureau who got a chance
during the year just closed to transfer from the Philippines to a
$1400 government position in the United States, and was glad to get
it, although $1400 was "considerably less than half what he received
here." Mr. Fergusson quickly gives the key to all this in what he calls
"the haunting fear of having to return to the States in debilitated
health and out of touch with existent conditions, only to face the
necessity of seeking a new position." He adds:


    That this is not a mere theory is proven by the number of army
    (civilian) employees who contentedly remain year after year.


In 1907, Mr. Fergusson reports on the same subject [499]: "Matters
do not seem to be improving," and that the Director of the Insular
Civil Service informs him that "during the fiscal year there were five
hundred voluntary separations from the service by Americans, of whom
one hundred were college graduates." He adds: "When the expense of
getting and bringing out new men, and of training them to their new
work is considered, the wastefulness of the present system is evident."

You do not find any quotations from any of the Fergusson disclosures
in Mr. Arnold's North American Review article. He would probably have
lost his job, if he had quoted them. Yet the evils pointed out by
Mr. Fergusson come from one permanent source, the uncertainty of the
future of every American out there, due to the failure of Congress
to declare the purpose of the Government.

On January 30, 1908, Arthur W. Fergusson died in the service of the
Philippine Government. No general law putting that service on the basis
he pleaded for to the day of his death has ever yet been passed. Since
his death, his tactful successor appears to have abandoned further
pleading, and concluded to worry along with the permanently lame
conditions inherent in the uncertainty as to whether we are to keep
the Islands permanently or not, rather than embarrass President Taft
by discouraging young Americans from going to the Islands.

The report of the Governor-General of the Philippines for 1907,
Governor Smith, says [500]:


    American officials and employees have rarely made up their minds
    to cast their fortunes definitely with the Philippines or to make
    governmental service in the tropics a career. Many of those who
    in the beginning were so minded, due to ill health or the longing
    to return to friends or relatives, changed front and preferred to
    return to the home land, there to enjoy life at half the salary
    in the environment to which they were accustomed. * * * That
    which operates probably more than anything else to induce good men
    drawing good salaries to abandon the service * * * is the knowledge
    that they have nothing to look forward to when broken health or
    old age shall have rendered them valueless to the government.


If Congress should ever care to do anything to improve the Philippine
Civil Service and the status of Americans entering the same, certainly
the one supremely obvious thing to do is to make transfer back to
the civil service in the United States after a term of duty in the
Islands a matter of right.






CHAPTER XXV

COST OF THE PHILIPPINES

                If 't were well to do right, 't were better still
                if 't were more profitable.

                                                           Cynic Maxims.


General Otis's annual report for 1899, [501] dated August 31st, gives
the number of Americans killed in battle in the Philippines, from
the beginning of the American occupation to that date, as 380. This
includes those wounded who afterwards died of such wounds. His report
for 1900, [502] covering the period from his 1899 report to May 5,
1900, gives the number of Americans killed in battle from August 31,
1899, to May 1, 1900, as 258. General MacArthur succeeded General
Otis in command of the American forces in the Philippines on May 5,
1900. General MacArthur's annual report for 1901, [503] gives the
number of Americans killed in battle between May 5, 1900, and June 30,
1901, as 245. Thus the total number of Americans killed in battle up
to the time the Civil Government was set up in 1901, was 883. The
military reports do not always give the insurgents killed during
the periods they cover. But on June 4, 1900, as we saw in a previous
chapter, General MacArthur reported the number of Filipinos killed
up to that time, so far as our records showed, to be something over
10,000. General MacArthur's report, above quoted, giving our killed
for the period it covers (May 5, 1900, to June 30, 1901), at 245,
gives the insurgent killed for the same period as 3854. If we add this
3854 to the 10,000 killed up to about where May merged into June in
1900, we have 13,854 Filipinos killed up to the time Judge Taft was
inaugurated as Governor, in 1901. There was no record, of course,
obtainable or attempted, by the Eighth Army Corps, of Filipinos who
were wounded and not captured and who subsequently died. It is quite
safe to assume that such fatalities must have swelled the enemy's list
up to the time of the setting up of the Civil Government far above
16,000 killed. Thus, as has heretofore been stated, the ratio of the
enemy's loss to our loss was, literally, at least 16 to 1, up to the
time the civil government was set up. General MacArthur's report for
1900 [504] would seem to bear out the above ratio. He there gives the
number of our killed, from November 1, 1899, to September 1, 1900,
including the wounded who afterwards died of such wounds, at 268, and
the Filipinos killed, "as far as of record," 3227. While these last
figures make our killed for the period they relate to, considerably
over 200, and the enemy's killed but a very small figure over 3200,
still, making allowances for the enemy's wounded that died afterwards,
of which of course we have no record, the 16 to 1 ratio would seem to
give a fairly accurate probable estimate of the relative loss of life.

These figures are explained by the facts, already noticed hereinbefore,
that most of our people knew how to shoot and the Filipinos did
not. The great part of their army were raw recruits who did not
understand the use of two sights on a rifle, and frequently relied
solely on the one at the muzzle, not even lifting up the sight near
the lock which when not in use lies flat along the gun-barrel, with
the result that they almost invariably got the range too high and
shot over our heads.

Because the military reports overlap each other in many instances,
it is not possible to state accurately how many men the Eighth Army
Corps lost by disease, but our loss chargeable to this account was
not far from our fatalities on the battlefield. [505]

It is not possible to even approximate the enemy's loss other than
on the battlefield. The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey
Philippine Atlas gives the table estimating the population of the
various provinces of the Philippine archipelago prior to the American
occupation. This estimate gives the population of Batangas province
at 312,192. The American Census of the Philippines of 1903 gives
the population of Batangas province at 257,715. [506] This would
present a difference in the population of Batangas prior to 1898 and
its population after the war of 54,477. The provincial secretary of
Batangas province made a report to Governor Taft on December 18, 1901
[507] on the condition of the province generally. This report, as it
appears in the Senate Document, is a translation from the Spanish. The
portion which relates to the reduction of the population of Batangas
province reads as follows:


    The mortality, caused no longer by the war, but by disease,
    such as malaria and dysentery, has reduced to a little over
    200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years
    the province had.


Of course these appalling figures [508] must be taken with a grain
of salt. In the first place, the man who furnished them was merely
reproducing the general impression of his neighbors as to the
diminution of the population of the province. He does not pretend
to be dealing with official statistics. On the other hand, all of
the yearly reports of the various native provincial officers are,
as a general rule, pathetically optimistic. They all seem to think
it their duty to present a hopeful view of the situation. In fact if
you read these reports one after the other, the various signers seem
to vie with one another in optimism as if their tenure of office
depended upon it. So that, balancing probabilities, it would seem
unlikely that the provincial secretary of Batangas would have stated
more than what he at least believed to represent actual conditions,
and the results of the war. A comparison of the Atlas population
tables above mentioned with the census tables of 1903 shows no very
startling difference in the population of any of the other provinces
of the archipelago before and after the war except Batangas. It is
also notorious that Batangas suffered by the war more than any other
province in the Philippine Islands. However, a glance at the table
of population of the various provinces of the Census of 1903 [509]
shows you fifty provinces with a total of 7,635,426 people. While
we will never know whether Batangas did or did not lose one hundred
thousand as a result of the war and its consequences, still, if it did,
the other forty-nine provinces above mentioned must have lost as many
more, that is to say, must have lost another hundred thousand. So that
while it is all a matter of surmise, with nothing more certain to go on
than the foregoing, it would really seem by no means absurd to assume
the Filipino loss of life, other than on the battlefield, caused by the
war, and the famine, pestilence, and other disease consequent thereon,
at not far from 200,000 people. In more than one province, the people
died like flies, especially the women and children, as a result of
conditions incident to and consequent upon the war. This will not
seem an over-statement to men who have lived much among people that
do not know much about how to take care of themselves in the midst
of great calamities, people who will eat meat of animals carried off
by disease, in time of famine; who will drink water contaminated by
what may for euphony be called sewage; and who are unprovided with
any save traditional home remedies against cholera, small-pox, etc.

As to the cost of the Philippines in money, it used to be said
in the early days that we paid $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000
insurrection. Just what the Islands have cost us up to date in money
it is utterly impossible to figure out with any degree of certainty,
except that a safe minimum may be arrived at. Said the distinguished
Congressman from Texas, Honorable James L. Slayden, in a speech which
appears in the Congressional Record of February 25, 1908 (pp. 2532
et seq.):


    On this point, and in reply to a resolution of the Senate in
    1902, the Secretary of War reported that the cost of the army
    in the Philippines from June 30, 1898, to July 1, 1902, had been
    $169,853,512.00. To this let us add $114,515,643.00, the admitted
    cost of the army in the Philippines from May 1, 1902, to June 30,
    1907, and we will have a grand total of $284,369,155.00. That
    does not take into account the additional cost of the navy.


Nor, be it noted, does it count the $20,000,000 we paid Spain for
the Islands, which item, is, however included in another part of
Mr. Slayden's speech.

The only other estimate of what the Islands have cost, made in the
last few years, which seems to be specially worthy of consideration,
is one which appeared in the New York Evening Post of March 6,
1907. This estimate was prepared by one of the best trained and
most conservative newspaper men in the United States, Mr. Edward
G. Lowry, then Washington correspondent of the Evening Post, and
since 1911, its managing editor. The total which Mr. Lowry arrives
at is $308,369,155, up to that time. There have been various absurd
estimates made recklessly without knowledge, but Mr. Lowry's estimate
is very carefully studied out, and presented in detail in the newspaper
referred to. From the testimony of Mr. Slayden and Mr. Lowry, given
as a result of their inquiries into the matter, it would thus seem
that the Islands must have cost us by the end of 1907 something like
$300,000,000. The Insular Government is now self-sustaining, except
as to military affairs.

The cost per annum of the Philippine (native) scouts, of which there
are 4000, is paid out of the United States Treasury, and amounts
to $2,000,000 per annum. [510] The number of American troops in the
islands for the last few years has been about 12,000. Those who are
wedded to the present Philippine policy of indefinite retention
with undeclared intention, insist that our military expenses in
the Philippines, in respect to the regular army out there, are not
fairly chargeable as a part of the current expenses of the Philippine
occupation. This argument must be admitted to have some force as far
as the navy is concerned, but as to the army it is clearly without
merit. Under the Act of Congress reorganizing the army of the United
States after the Spanish War, provision was made for a skeleton army
of about 60,000 men capable of expansion to something like 100,000
in time of war. The method of expansion thus contemplated was to have
companies of, say, for illustration, sixty men, in time of peace, which
companies could be recruited up to a war footing of one hundred men,
in time of war. The suggestion that the cost of the part of the regular
army which we have to keep in the Philippines is not chargeable to
the Philippines because those same troops would have to be somewhere
in the United States if they were not where they are, is not well
taken. If we did not need 12,000 men continually in the Philippines,
the army could be at once reduced by that much without affecting its
present organization. If we had no troops in the Philippines this would
not mean the absolute elimination from the army of enough regiments
to represent twelve thousand men. It would not eliminate any existing
organization. It would simply mean contraction of the number of men in
the several companies of the several regiments of the army toward a
peace basis to the extent of a total of twelve thousand men, more or
less. The War Department has long figured on the cost of an American
soldier in the Philippines per annum including his pay, allowances,
and transportation out and back, at $1000 per annum. The cost of
12,000 soldiers at $1000 per annum is $12,000,000, per annum. The
conclusion would, therefore, seem inevitable that the extra military
current expense chargeable to our occupation of the Philippines is
$12,000,000, per annum, outside the Philippine scouts, or, a total
of $14,000,000. Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000,
that is no reason why we should continue to run a kindergarten for
adults out there, and let the Monroe Doctrine run to seed. "Something"
is not "bound to turn up." The Philippine Islands will not prove a
blessing in disguise. In every war with a nation having discontented
colonial subjects, the enemy will always strike the colony first,
and hope for aid from the inhabitants thereof.

Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, we are a nation
of nearly 100,000,000 people. So they have cost us, all told, in
the neighborhood of only about $3 a piece. And we subjugated them by
mistake, after freeing a less capable people, the Cubans.

The Panama Canal is to be finished in 1913. This means a splendid,
but free-for-all contest, for the trade of South America. In South
America we will meet a tremendous pro-German sentiment, and a by no
means inconsiderable anti-"Yankee" sentiment. The bigger Germany's
army and navy grows, the more she will loom up as the one great
menace to the peace of the world, and the one avowed enemy of the
Monroe Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit de corps,
based on the instinct of self-defence. We must win the good will of
South America, and we cannot do it so long as we insist, in another
part of the world, upon the righteousness of the principle of one
Christian people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly to
keep them from having revolutions, and really in the hope of ultimate
profit. To free the Filipinos should be the first step we take after
the Panama Canal is completed toward getting ourselves foot-loose
entirely, with a view of getting everything from the Canadian border
to the Argentine wheat fields and beyond, solidly and sincerely
for the Monroe Doctrine. In that direction lies our only sensible
and reasonable hope that the canal will get for us the trade and
friendship of South America. With such tremendous issues at stake,
what does it matter to the richest nation on earth what the Philippines
cost? What does it matter, anyhow, how much it costs to do right?






CHAPTER XXVI

CONGRESSIONAL LEGISLATION

        Taxation without representation is good cause for revolt.

                                                American Speech of 1776.


As a colony of Spain the Philippines enjoyed certain special
privileges in the way of trade with the "mother country." When at the
beginning of our military occupation in 1898 General Otis detailed
an army officer to take charge of the Customs House, he continued
for the time being the Spanish tariff laws concerning imports and
exports. On September 17, 1901, the Philippine Commission passed
a tariff act [511] fixing the duties on imports into the Islands
and also continuing to a considerable extent the system of duties
on Philippine exports inherited from the Spanish régime. Among the
products of the Philippine Islands on which the Act of September 17,
1901, imposed an export tax were the following:


    Hemp, 75c. per 100 kilos [512]; sugar, 5c. per 100 kilos;
    manufactured tobacco, $1.50 per 100 kilos; raw tobacco, $1.50
    down to 75c. per 100 kilos. [513]


On March 8, 1902, the United States Congress passed an Act,
"temporarily to provide revenue for the Philippine Islands and for
other purposes." The Act of 1902 re-enacted the Commission's tariff
law for the Philippines of September 17, 1901, with one change,
hereinafter to be discussed, as to its export tax features. As
to the tariffs to be collected at our custom-houses on Philippine
products shipped to the United States, the Act of 1902 reduced the
rates fixed by the Dingley tariff to seventy-five per cent. of said
rates. That was all Congress did in the way of lowering our tariff
wall to Philippine products until 1909, when the Payne-Aldrich tariff
bill became a law. This twenty-five per cent. reduction was no better
than no reduction whatever would have been.

Governor Taft pleaded very earnestly with Congress, at the time
of the passage of the Philippine Tariff Act of March 8, 1902, for a
substantial reduction of the Dingley tariff rate on sugar and tobacco,
so as to give his "constituents"--his Filipinos--something in lieu
of the markets they had had under Spain. But our sugar and tobacco
interests defeated his efforts, because they feared what they termed
"competition with cheap Asiatic labor."

The Act of Congress of March 8, 1902, repealed the export duties
imposed by the Act of the Philippine Commission of September 17,
1901, as to exports to the United States, leaving unrepealed,
however, the export duty on Philippine products shipped to foreign
countries. Section 2 of said Act of 1902 provided, as to exports
from the Philippines to the United States, that the rates of duty
upon products of the Philippine Archipelago coming into the United
States, should be less any duty or tax levied, collected, and paid
thereon (under the Act of the Philippine Commission of September
17, 1901, aforesaid) upon the shipment thereof from the Philippine
Archipelago. This sounds liberal enough. It is, as far as it goes. But
what those familiar with the hemp infamy of the Act of 1902 call
"the joker" in it, is as follows:


    All articles, the growth and product of the Philippine Islands,
    admitted into the ports of the United States free of duty
    under the provisions of this act, and coming directly from said
    islands to the United States, for use and consumption therein,
    shall be hereafter exempt from any export duties imposed in the
    Philippine Islands.


This also sounds liberal, on first reading, but its object was, and
its effect has been, to enable the American Hemp Trust to corner
and control the Manila hemp industry. There is but one article of
Philippine export which any one in the United States is interested
in, that was admitted into the United States free of duty under the
Dingley Act. [514] That article is hemp. The object of the law was
to favor Americans interested in exporting hemp from Manila to the
United States as against Europeans exporting it to England and other
foreign countries. This does not look, on its face, either unpatriotic
or un-Christian. It is not unpatriotic or un-Christian, ordinarily,
to favor your own people, as against their foreign competitors. The
moral quality of such favoritism, however, must depend on who is to
pay for it. Under the Act of 1902, the Manila authorities have always
collected an export tax on hemp coming to the United States, just as
they do on hemp going from Manila to foreign countries, exactly as
if the law abolishing the export tax on hemp coming to the United
States had never been passed. Later, on proof that the hemp was in
fact carried to the United States and used and consumed therein, they
refund the export tax. This is on the idea that they cannot tell where
the hemp is going to until they know where it went to, nor where it
is going to be "used and consumed" until they know where it was in
fact finally "used and consumed." Of course the small farmer is in
no position to follow his bale of hemp into the markets of the world
and show, if it happens to go to the United States, that it did in
fact go there and that it was there "used and consumed," and, finally
obtaining the proof of this, submit it to the Manila Government and
get his little export tax on his bale of hemp refunded. Only the big
buyer's agents at Manila are in a position to do this. So the hemp
crop is bought and moved under conditions which are the same as if
all hemp were subject to an export tax. And only the big fish get
the benefit. For instance, the International Harvester Company has
its hemp buyers at Manila. And as to the part of the Philippine hemp
crop it handles, it can, of course, follow the hemp to its ultimate
consumption in the United States, make the proof, and get the refund.

The wealth of the Philippines is practically entirely
agricultural. Neither mining nor manufactures cut any appreciable
figure. Hemp, sugar, tobacco, and copra [515] are the chief staples
and main exports, and of the first of these Secretary of War Taft
says in one of his reports: [516]


    The chief export in value and quantity from the Philippines is
    Manila hemp, it amounting to between 60 and 65 per cent. of the
    total exports.


Let us see just how far, according to the annual reports of our
own agents in the Philippines--those charged by us with governing
them,--this piece of legislation gotten through by "special privilege"
has depressed the Manila hemp industry, the chief source of wealth of
the Islands. And before we even get to the main trouble, let us permit
the Insular Government to "place on the screen," as a preliminary
"view," a glance at what the instinct of self-preservation of American
sugar and tobacco interests, fearing competition from "cheap Asiatic
labor," have deemed it necessary to do to the Philippine sugar and
tobacco industries, through the Dingley tariff. The annual report of
the Philippine Commission for 1904, before it gets to the subject of
hemp, draws a most gloomy picture of how we killed the markets for
sugar and tobacco the Islands had under Spain, and gave them none
instead. They speak of "the languishing state of these industries"
(p. 26), and describe a state of affairs that sounds more like Egypt
under Pharaoh than anything else, including a cattle disease that
carried off ninety per cent. of the beasts of burden of the country,
and wholesale destruction of crops by locusts. [517] What they have to
say of the annual tribute levied by the American Hemp Trust, through
Congress, on the Manila hemp industry, should not be re-stated,
but quoted. They say: [518]


    We desire to call attention to the injustice effected upon the
    revenues of the islands by section 2 of the Act of Congress
    approved March 8, 1902, which provides that the Philippine
    Government shall refund all export duties imposed upon articles
    exported from the islands into and consumed in the United
    States. Under the provisions of this section there has been
    collected in the Philippine Islands, since its enactment down to
    the close of the fiscal year 1904, the sum of $1,060,460.20 United
    States currency, which is refundable. These refundable duties
    are principally upon hemp exportations to the United States,
    and are in effect a gift of that amount to the manufacturers of
    the United States who use hemp in their operations.


They add:


    It is manifestly a discrimination in favor of our manufacturers
    as against those of foreign countries. No good reason is perceived
    why this bounty to American manufacturers should be extracted from
    the treasury of the Philippine Islands, and it is respectfully
    submitted that the law authorizing it should be repealed.


The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1905, after the
usual complaint about being made a political football by Benevolent
Assimilation on the one side, and Louisiana and our sugar-beet
States on the other, and the usual annual and true description of
the consequent poverty, says concerning hemp:


    We have several times in our reports called attention to the
    practical workings of that portion of the Act of Congress approved
    March 8, 1902, which provides for the refund of duties paid
    on articles exported from the Philippine Islands to the United
    States and consumed therein, and have as repeatedly recommended
    its repeal. It is a direct burden upon the people of the Philippine
    Islands, because it takes from the insular treasury export duties
    collected from the people and gives them to manufacturers of hemp
    products in the United States. These manufacturers were already
    prosperous before this bounty was given them and it seems hardly
    consistent with our expressions of purpose to build up and develop
    the Philippine Islands when we are thus enriching a few of our
    own people at their expense. [519]


By the end of the fiscal year 1905 (June 30), the American importers of
Manila hemp--of whom the International Harvester Company and its allied
interests are the most influential--had, under the operation of the
rebate system based on the Act of 1902, milked the Philippine people to
the tune of about $1,000,000. Says the Philippine Commission's annual
report for 1905, immediately after the passage last above quoted:


    The amount of duties refunded under this act to manufacturers in
    the United States during the three years ending June 30, 1905,
    is $1,057,251.12. Many of the departments of the government are
    much hampered in their operations because of the lack of funds,
    notably the bureau of education, and were the sum thus taken
    available for educational purposes, to say nothing of any other,
    the government would be enabled to give instruction to thousands
    of Filipino children whom they are now unable to reach and who
    must remain steeped in ignorance because of the lack of funds to
    provide such instruction.


Said the Manila Chamber of Commerce to the Taft Congressional party in
August, 1905: "The country is in a state of financial collapse." [520]

Says the Philippine Commission's report for 1906 (pt. 1, p. 68):


    The Commission has repeatedly called attention in its reports
    to the action of Congress providing for a refund of duties paid
    on articles exported from the Islands to the United States and
    consumed therein. The reasons that led the Commission heretofore to
    recommend the repeal of that provision are still operative. Since
    the passage of that act on March 8, 1902, the amount of duties
    collected and paid into the Philippine treasury and handed over
    to manufacturers in the United States down to June 30, 1906,
    is $1,471,208.47. This money has been taken out of the poverty
    of the insular treasury to be delivered directly into the hands
    of manufacturers of cordage and other users of Philippine hemp in
    the United States for their enrichment. The cordage interests are
    prosperous and do not need this help; the Philippine Islands are
    poor. Legislation which takes money directly from the Philippine
    treasury and passes it over to a particular industry in the United
    States is not founded on sound principles of political economy
    or of justice to the Filipinos. We renew our recommendation for
    the repeal of this provision.


You also find in the Commission's report for 1906 the usual
annual protests against the Dingley tariff on Philippine sugar and
tobacco. Said the Honorable Henry C. Ide in an article in the New York
Independent for November 22, 1906, written shortly after he retired
from the office of Governor-General of the Philippines and returned
to the United States: "By annexation we killed the Spanish market for
Philippine sugar and tobacco, and our tariff shuts these products
from the United States market, and to-day both these [industries]
are practically prostrated." In their annual report for 1907,
the Philippine Commission say with regard to the American corner on
Philippine hemp: [521] "The price of hemp has fallen from an average of
twenty pesos ($10 American money) per picul [522] to thirteen pesos
per picul." It thus appears that by judicious manipulation of the
hemp market at Manila, through the leverage of the refund system,
based on collection and subsequent refunding of the export tax on
hemp coming to the United States, the Manila agents of the American
hemp manufacturers had, as early as 1907, beat the price of hemp down
to not far above half of what it had been formerly. To-day (1912)
the Filipino hemp farmer gets for his hemp just one half what he got
just ten years ago. During all this period of economic depression,
the public utterances and State papers both of President Roosevelt
and Mr. Taft are full of such preposterous stuff as the following:


    No great civilized power has ever managed with such wisdom and
    disinterestedness the affairs of a people committed by the accident
    of war to its hands. [523]


This is what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft were publicly pretending to
believe. But at practically the same time, during as dark a year,
economically, as the American occupation has seen, 1907, let us see
what they were privately admitting to their intimate friends.

In the North American Review for January 18, 1907, in an article
contributed to that Review by the author of this volume, our
treatment of the Philippine people, through our Congress, was briefly
discussed. The article chanced to attract the attention of Mr. Andrew
Carnegie, who gave a considerable sum of money to have it reprinted and
distributed. Some correspondence followed between us, in the course
of which Mr. Carnegie stated that he had been at the White House
shortly before writing me, and described what happened as follows:


    When at supper with the President [Mr. Roosevelt] recently,
    pointing to Judge Taft [then Secretary of War], who sat opposite,
    he [President Roosevelt] said: "Here are the two men in all the
    world most anxious to get out of the Philippines."


In another letter Mr. Carnegie described this same incident, this other
letter's version of President Roosevelt's supper-table remark being:


    Here are the two men in America most anxious to get rid of them
    [the Philippines]. [524]


Now why all this public boasting about our "disinterestedness,"
when, if he had been a Filipino, Colonel Roosevelt would probably
have hunted up all the American speeches of 1776 about taxation
without representation, and played hide-and-seek with the public
prosecutor at Manila, to see how far he could violate the sedition
statute without getting in jail? And why this private admission
to his friend Mr. Carnegie, which neither he nor Mr. Taft has ever
publicly made? Why did he not send a message to Congress showing up
the hemp rebate system? Simply because to do so would lose support
for the Administration, would alienate powerful interests from the
fatuous policy of Benevolent Assimilation bequeathed to Mr. Roosevelt
by Mr. McKinley. His party was irrevocably committed to indefinite
retention of the Islands. It was like Lot's wife. It could not turn
back. So the protected and subsidized interests were permitted to
continue to prey upon the Philippine people. Tariff evils were never
President Roosevelt's specialty. Nor has war against intrenched
privilege of any sort ever been Mr. Taft's specialty. Mr. Taft went
out to the Philippines in 1907 to open the Philippine Assembly. In
1908 he came back and made a report to President Roosevelt which is
as bland as his Winona declaration that the Payne-Aldrich bill is
"the best tariff bill the Republican party ever passed." It makes
the American reader's heart swell with pious pride at what he is
doing for his "little brown brother," in the matter of vaccination,
sewers, school-books, and the like. President Roosevelt sent this
report to Congress, accompanied by a message, from which we have
already quoted. In that same message he said:


    I question whether there is a brighter page in the annals of
    international dealing between the strong and the weak than the
    page which tells of our doings in the Philippines.


Apparently, Messrs. Roosevelt and Taft thought, in 1907, that granting
the Filipinos a little debating society solemnly called a legislative
body, but wholly without any real power, was ample compensation for
deserted tobacco and cane plantations and for the price of hemp being
beat down below the cost of production by manipulation through an Act
of Congress passed for the benefit of American hemp manufacturers. If
we had had a Cleveland in the White House about that time, he would
have written an essay on taxation without representation, with the
hemp infamy of this Philippine Tariff Act of 1902 as a text, and sent
it to Congress as a message demanding the repeal of the Act. But the
good-will of the Hemp Trust is an asset for the policy of Benevolent
Assimilation. The Filipino cannot vote, and the cordage manufacturer in
the United States can. No conceivable state of economic desolation to
which we might reduce the people of the Philippine Islands being other
than a blessing in disguise compared with permitting them to attend
to their own affairs after their own quaint and mutually considerate
fashion, the Hemp Trust's rope, tied into a slip-knot by the Act of
1902, must not be removed from their throats. By judicious manipulation
of sufficient hemp rope, you can corral much support for Benevolent
Assimilation. Therefore, to this good hour, the substance of the hemp
part of the Philippine Tariff Act of March 8, 1902, remains upon the
statute books of the United States, to the shame of the nation.

At last, under the Payne tariff law of 1909, Mr. Taft's long and
patient quiet work with Congressional committees prevailed upon
Congress and the interests to admit Philippine sugar and tobacco to
this country free of duty, up to amounts limited in the Act. [525]
Since then you find the reports of our American officials in the
Philippines palpitating with gratitude to Congress. As a matter
of fact all Congress had said to the Filipinos by its action may be
summed up about thus: "The sugar and tobacco interests of this country
have at last realized that such little of the sugar and tobacco you
raise as may stray over to this side of the world will not be in the
least likely to hurt them. Therefore they have graciously decided,
in their benignity, to permit you to live, provided you do not get
too prosperous." But this very same Payne bill continued the export
tax features of the Act of 1902. Section 13 of the Payne bill is
as follows:


    Section 13. That upon the exportation to any foreign country from
    the Philippine Islands, or the shipment thereof to the United
    States or any of its possessions, of the following articles
    there shall be levied, collected, and paid thereon the following
    export duties: Provided, however, that all articles the growth
    and product of the Philippine Islands coming directly from said
    islands, to the United States or any of its possessions for use
    and consumption therein shall be exempt from any export duties
    imposed in the Philippine Islands:

    352. Abaca (hemp), gross weight, 100 kilos, 75 cents.
    353. Sugar, gross weight, 100 kilos, 5 cents.
    354. Copra, gross weight, 100 kilos, 10 cents.
    355. Tobacco, gross weight:

    (a) Manufactured or unmanufactured, except as otherwise provided,
    100 kilos, $1.30.

    (b) Stems, clippings, and other wastes of tobacco, 100 kilos,
    50 cents.


Let us briefly glance at the net results of this law, and its
predecessor, the Act of 1902, the export features of which it
re-enacted. It is important that every fair-minded American who can
possibly spare the time should take such a glance at what Congress has
done to the Philippine hemp industry, because of the obvious bearing
that such taxation without representation will probably have on the
attitude of the Philippine people whenever we get into a war with a
foreign power. Certainly the legislation Congress has perpetrated upon
them, at the behest of special interests in the United States, has not
soothed the original desire of those people to be free and independent.

At page 27 of the report of the Philippine Collector of Customs for
1910, a table is given showing the export duties subject to refund
collected under the Act of Congress of March 8, 1902, and deposited
in the Philippine treasury to the credit of the Insular Government
at the end of each fiscal year (June 30), as follows:


                    1902        $  71,064.69
                    1903          527,228.10
                    1904          462,433.83
                    1905          486,475.56
                    1906          433,991.79
                    1907          433,458.58
                    1908          370,513.36
                    1909          598,917.69
                               -------------
                               $3,384,083.60


The following table, taken from this same annual report of the
Collector of Customs of the Philippines for 1910 (p. 22) shows the
size (weight in kilograms), and value, of the annual Philippine hemp
crop from 1899 to 1910, both inclusive. It gives in one set of columns
the total exported to all countries, and in the other the part which
comes to the United States:


              To All Countries.         To United States.
                 Kilos        Value       Kilos        Value

        1899   59,840,368  $ 6,185,293  23,066,248  $ 2,436,169
        1900   76,708,936   11,393,883  25,763,728    3,446,141
        1901  112,215,168   14,453,110  18,157,952    2,402,867
        1902  109,968,792   15,841,316  45,526,960    7,261,459
        1903  132,241,594   21,701,575  71,654,416   12,314,312
        1904  131,817,872   21,794,960  61,886,592   10,631,591
        1905  130,621,024   22,146,241  73,351,136   12,954,515
        1906  112,165,384   19,446,769  62,045,088   11,168,226
        1907  114,701,320   21,085,081  58,388,504   11,326,864
        1908  115,829,080   17,311,808  48,813,720    7,684,000
        1909  149,991,866   15,883,577  79,210,362    8,534,288
        1910  170,788,629   17,404,922  99,305,102   10,399,397


If you have the time and inclination, you can easily figure out the
annual "rake-off" of the American hemp importers from the above
table. For instance, take the last year, 1910: 99,305,102 kilos
at 75 cents per 100 kilos is $744,788.26, which is more than 4%
of $17,404,922, the total value of the hemp crop of the archipelago
for that year. Add this $744,788.26 to the $3,384,183.60 shown by the
above table of refundable duties collected from 1902 to 1909 inclusive,
and you have over $4,000,000 rebates accruing to American importers
of Manila hemp from 1902 to 1910 inclusive.

In his remarks on Section 13 of the Payne Law of 1909 (above set
forth), in the House of Representatives, May 13, 1909, [526] Hon. Oscar
W. Underwood said, in part:


    When you put a tax on your people for engaging in export trade,
    to that extent you lessen their ability to successfully meet
    their foreign competitor and reduce the territory in which they
    can successfully dispose of their surplus products abroad. Our
    forefathers in writing the Constitution of the United States,
    recognizing the false principle on which an export tax was based,
    put it in the fundamental law of our land that the United States
    Government should not lay export taxes. If we enact this law,
    we write into the statute book for the Philippine Islands,
    legislation which is little short of barbarous, legislation that
    no government in the civilized world except Turkey, and Persia,
    and other second-class nations countenance to-day.


But the hemp interests won out and the section was adopted. In an
argument for the repeal of the export tax, delivered in the House of
Representatives August 19, 1911, the Philippine delegate, Hon. Manuel
L. Quezon, said:


    There is one section in the Philippine tariff law, approved
    August 5, 1909, which is seriously injuring the proper commercial
    development of the islands.


Of course the earnestness with which Mr. Quezon pleaded his cause may
be imagined from the circumstance that, as he says, he is continually
advised by letters from his people, and verily believes that if the
export tax is not taken off soon the Philippine hemp industry will be
entirely destroyed, and the hemp farmers will have to take to raising
something else in lieu of hemp, because the present prices hardly
permit them to live. In the course of his speech Mr. Quezon offered
the following truly eloquent and absolutely unanswerable argument:


    Although it has been decided by the Supreme Court of the United
    States that the provisions of the Constitution are not in force in
    the Philippines, I have serious doubts as to whether said decision
    also meant that this Government has the power to enact laws for
    the islands which are expressly prohibited by the Constitution
    in the United States.


It is through the courtesy of Mr. Quezon that such light as I may
have been able to throw on the subject has been obtained. He has
shown me letters from the Philippine Chamber of Commerce at Manila
and other commercial organizations prophesying ruin to the Manila
hemp industry in the event the export tax should continue. One of
these letters is addressed to the two Philippine Commissioners in
Congress, Mr. Legarda and Mr. Quezon. It informs them of the hopes of
the Filipinos at Manila that they, Messrs. Legarda and Quezon, may be
successful in their campaign to get the law repealed and that many
of them (the Filipinos at Manila) feel hopeful of results in that
regard. Speaking for their fellow countrymen at Manila, they say,
"The optimists are of the opinion that the matter being in such good
hands as yours will be carried to a successful conclusion." Then they
give the darker side of the picture thus:


    But the representatives at this capital of the famous syndicate,
    the International Harvester Company, are of the opinion that we
    will be able to accomplish nothing, and theirs is an opinion to
    which great weight should be attached, because the vast interests
    which that concern represents can set in motion powerful influences
    to keep the present law as it is, since it concerns their interest
    to do so.


Mr. Quezon has also shown me a letter written to him, March 30, 1911,
by his and my warm personal friend, Hon. James F. Smith, formerly
Governor-General of the Philippines, now (1912) Judge of the Court of
Customs Appeals at Washington, D. C., in which letter General Smith
says, concerning the operation of that part of the export tax act of
March 8, 1902 (continued by the Payne Tariff Law of 1909) by which
American manufacturers are relieved from the payment of the export
tax on Manila hemp:


    In effect this really and truly amounts to the payment by the
    Philippine Government and the Filipino people of a large subsidy
    to American manufacturers of hemp. More than that, this concession
    to the American manufacturer, by enabling him to undersell his
    British competitor, gives him an undue control of the situation
    and has put him in a position, to some extent, to control prices
    for the raw product.


It seems to me that the American people had better look to their
own liberties, when they remember that in the campaign for the
Republican nomination in 1912, the Roosevelt Headquarters gave out
that pending the Roosevelt dictation of Mr. Taft's nomination in
1908, the International Harvester Company furnished a floor of its
Chicago building to the Taft people, this interesting fact being
part of the leakage from the Roosevelt-Taft quarrel caused by the
Roosevelt charge that Mr. Taft was unfit for re-election because he
"meant well feebly"; and when it is recalled, on the other hand, that
in the Roosevelt campaign of 1912 for the presidential nomination for
a third term, Mr. George W. Perkins, [527] the very personification
of undue corporation influence with the Government, assumed the rôle
of Warwick for an ex-President who, when President, had repudiated
the advice of his counsel, Governor Harmon, that a railroad company
[528] be prosecuted for taking rebates because the vice-president of
the company was his personal friend. [529] But let us return to the
Philippine rebates, and their corner-stone, the export tax, Section
13 of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff.

In the case of Fairbanks vs. United States, 181 U. S. Supreme Court
Reports, page 290, a case in which the court was asked to declare a
certain Act of Congress unconstitutional and void, because it imposed
what was virtually an export tax, the opinion of the court cites
the absolute inhibition against such a tax imposed by our Federal
Constitution, and says concerning the wise theory on which this
fundamental tenet of our government rests:


    The requirement of the Constitution is that exports should be
    free from any governmental burden.


The decision then goes on to elaborate on what it terms "that freedom
from governmental burden in the matter of exports which it was the
intention of our Constitution to protect and preserve." Finally,
the court uses an expression which is certainly a stinging rebuke to
any law-making power that permits the selfish greed of a little set
of importers to get a law passed imposing for their special benefit
a paralyzing export tax on the chief staple of a helpless colony:


    The power to tax is the power to destroy.


But Mr. Quezon has no vote in Congress and his voice was not heard,
at least not heeded.

The summation of the whole matter is this: Both the Philippine
people and the American people are, and long have been, suffering
from unjust taxation through laws for which special selfish financial
interests in the United States, exercising grossly undue influence on
governmental action, are responsible. Neither will ever get relief
until the government of this nation is wrested from the control
of the money-hogs and restored to the people. Until that is done,
selfish greed will continue to sow sedition in the Philippines,
and socialism in the United States.






CHAPTER XXVII

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

                        The rights of man cannot be changed. It is
                        the government which attempts to change them
                        that must change.--Webster.


It was the homely common sense of Mr. Lincoln that first reminded
us most vividly how like to the sins of an individual are those of a
nation. To the Southern man who admires Mr. Lincoln as one of the great
figures of all time, he seems like a great physician, who, with malice
toward none and with charity for all, kept vigil for four years at the
bedside of a sick nation through all the long agony of its efforts to
throw off from its system the inherited curse of slavery. Of course,
human slavery was a relic of barbarism. But in fixing the Rights of
Man, the founders of the Republic actually overlooked the fact that a
negro was a human being. So that, vast property rights having accrued
pursuant to that mistake, the march of progress had to wipe them out,
no matter whom it hurt financially. The enormity of the iniquity of
human slavery did not dawn suddenly and exclusively upon William Lloyd
Garrison. He is not the sole, original inventor and patentee of the
idea. Lord Macaulay's father was doing the same sort of agitating in
England about the same time. Westminster Abbey has its monument to
the elder Macaulay, just as Commonwealth Avenue has its monument to
the elder Garrison. Simultaneous like stirrings occurred elsewhere
throughout Christendom. But, of course, in America, arguments for
the emancipation of the slave first took root most readily in a
thrifty section of our liberty-loving country which had nothing to
lose by abolition.

John Quincy Adams once said that our government was "an experiment
upon the heart of man." It is because this government of the people
by the people for the people was a deliberate and thoughtful attempt
upon the part of its founders to apply the Golden Rule as a doctrine
of international and inter-individual law, that we believe our form
of government is the last hope of mankind. It is, as we conceive
it, the voice of humanity raised in protest against the proposition
that might makes right. It is, as we conceive it, a government which
entered the lists of the nations as the champion of the human mind,
in the great struggle of Mind for the mastery over Matter, the
world-old struggle between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Our
government, like everything else, must follow the law of its being,
or die. Its first great sin in violation of the Rights of Man was due
to heredity. We inherited the institution of slavery, the governmental
exception to the rule that all men are created with equal right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was a sin against
human liberty, one of the "unalienable" Rights of Man, upon which
the Republic purported to be builded. The consequences of that sin
are still with us; but, except for the occasional bloody-shirt waver,
whose intellectual resources are not sufficient to provide him with a
live issue, we are meeting those consequences, as a nation, bravely,
and with the mutual forbearance born of the fact that none are wholly
free from responsibility for present difficulties.

Our second great national sin was a yielding to the temptation of
the environment which arose, unforeseen, after a splendid war waged
for the Rights of Man against Spain in Cuba. The Philippine war was
waged to subjugate the Filipino people, because Mr. McKinley believed
it would be financially profitable to us to own the islands, and in
the face of the fact that the only thing he knew officially about
the Filipino people was that Admiral Dewey thought them superior
to the Cubans and more capable of self-government. The war in the
Philippines was, therefore, a war against the Rights of Man. Nowhere
in any state paper has any American statesman, soldier, or sailor,
had the temerity to invoke the name of God in connection with the
retention of the Philippine Islands. Nowhere in any American state
paper connected with the Philippines is there any reference to "a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind." The sin of our Philippine
policy is that it is a denial of the right of a people to pursue
happiness in their own way instead of in somebody else's way. It is a
denial of the very principles in maintenance of which we went to war
against Spain to free Cuba, as we had previously gone to war against
England to free ourselves.

Now the reason the nation blundered into taking the Philippines was
that it believed the Filipinos to be, not a people, but a jumble
of savage tribes. But the reason the men who controlled the action
of the government at the time took the Philippines was because they
believed they would pay. Nevertheless, there was a sufficient number
of our fellow-citizens--controlled, some by altruistic motives and
some by sordid motives--to cause the nation to follow the lead of
those then in control. If the men then in control had taken the people
into their confidence, the blunder would never have been made. If the
correspondence between Mr. McKinley and the Paris Peace Commission
in the fall of 1898, from which the injunction of secrecy was not
removed until 1901, had been given out at the time, the treaty would
never have been ratified except after some such declaration as to
the Philippines as was made concerning Cuba, some reaffirmance of
allegiance to faith in our cardinal tenet--the right of every people
to pursue happiness in their own way, free from alien domination. The
Bacon resolution of 1899, which was along this line, was defeated only
by the deciding vote of the presiding officer, the Vice-President of
the United States. The passage of that resolution would have prevented
the Philippine Insurrection. Had it passed, the Filipinos would no more
have had occasion to think of insurrection than the Cubans did. It was
Mr. McKinley alone who decided to take the Philippines. Congress was
not called together in extra session. The people were not consulted,
except from the rear-end of an observation car.

Most people, whether they be lawyers or not, are more or less
acquainted with the doctrine of what is called in law a "bona
fide purchaser without notice." No man can claim to be a bona fide
purchaser without notice, when he knows enough about the subject
matter of his purchase to put him on reasonable notice of the
existence of facts which, had he taken the trouble to verify them,
would have caused him to halt and not purchase. The correspondence
in 1898, made public in 1901, withheld by Mr. McKinley until after
his second election in 1900, is sufficient to have made any honest
man ask himself some such question as this: "After all, is it not
quite possible that those people can run a decent government of
their own? Admiral Dewey says they are superior to the Cubans." But
Mr. McKinley did not pursue this inquiry, as it was his duty to
do. He took the islands because he believed they would pay, knowing
nothing in particular about the Filipinos, except what he had learned
from Admiral Dewey's brief comment, yet hoping in spite of it that
they would turn out sufficiently unfit for self-government for the
event to vindicate the purchase. To demonstrate that the Filipinos
were wholly unfit for the treatment accorded the Cubans was the only
possible justification of the initial departure from the traditions of
the Republic and from the principles which were its corner-stone. And
he made the departure because the business "interests" of the country
then believed--erroneously they all now admit--that it would pay. He
decided to treat eternal principles as "worn-out formulæ." Senator Hoar
once declined an invitation extended by his own city of Worcester,
to deliver a eulogy on Mr. McKinley, because of his Philippine
policy. True, he tempers the asperity of this action thus: "It was
not because I was behind any other man in admiration or personal
affection for that lofty and beautiful character. But * * * if a great
Catholic prelate were to die, his eulogy should not be pronounced
by a Protestant." [530] But all Senator Hoar's speeches against the
McKinley Philippine policy were as emphatic as Luther's ninety-five
theses. He was in possession at the time, along with the rest of the
Senate, of the correspondence with the Paris Peace Commission made
public after the presidential election of 1900.

Ever since Mr. McKinley took the Philippines, it has been the awkward
but inexorable duty of the defenders of that good man's fame to
deprecate Filipino capacity for self-government. President Taft's
chief life-work since this century began has been to take care
of his martyred predecessor's fame, by proving that Mr. McKinley
guessed right in 1898 when he bought the Philippines and trusted
to luck to be able to make out, in spite of what Admiral Dewey had
said, a case sufficiently derogatory to Filipino intelligence to
justify the purchase and subjugation of the islands at the very
time we were freeing Cuba. Obviously, then, the more utterly unfit
for self-government in the present or the near future Mr. Taft can
make the Filipinos out, the nearer he gets to vindicating the memory
of Mr. McKinley, that is, with men of his own, (Mr. Taft's) high
character. He insists on treating as children a people who got up a
well-armed army of thirty-odd thousand men in three or four months
and held at bay, for two years and a half, some 125,000 husky American
soldiers, over five times as many as it took to drive Spain from the
Western hemisphere. Physical force is the basis of all government
among men. If President Taft had anything of the soldier instinct
of his immediate predecessor, he would not sniff demagoguery in the
proposition that military efficiency is a better guaranty of capacity
for self-government than all the school-books in the world, and that
proven passionate willingness to die for freedom from alien domination
is the best guaranty conceivable against internecine strife. It was
a tremendous struggle with his own conscience that Mr. McKinley went
through with before he decided to repudiate the principles on which we
took Cuba in order, for a money consideration euphemistically called
"trade expansion," to take the Philippines. He had advices before him
at the time making it reasonably certain that this meant trouble with
the Filipinos, i.e., bloodshed in the Philippines, the extent of which
none could foresee, and about which he was of course apprehensive. In
the matter of instructing our Paris Peace Commissioners to insist on
Spain's ceding us the Philippines, Mr. McKinley took no moral ground
tenable like a rock, such as truly great men take in great crises of
their country's history. He did not attempt to lead the people. He
simply decided that it would be a popular thing to do to take the
islands. Fresh from a war entered upon to emancipate the Cubans from
alien domination, he took a step which both Admiral Dewey and General
Merritt warned him beforehand would probably mean war--to subjugate,
against their will, a people superior to the Cubans. And in taking
this step, he took into his confidence, neither the people who paid
for the war, nor the soldiers who fought it. To deny that his motives
were benevolent would be simply stupid. But he followed the mob which
shouted from the rear-end of his observation car and repeated by cable
to the Paris Peace Commission, what the mob yelled. Ever since the
supposed Philippine Klondyke whispered in President McKinley's ear
"Eat of the imperial fruits of a colonial policy," the archives of
this government--the reports of the State, War, and Navy Departments,
and the Congressional Documents--have reeked with the inevitable
consequences of our fall from our high estate. No man can serve two
masters. Philanthropy for pecuniary profit is a paradox. Duplicity
ever follows deviation from principle. In our dealings in 1898 with
Aguinaldo you find vacillation on the part of military commanders who
personally did not know what fear was, and embarrassed hypocrisy in
dealing with him on the part of men wearing the shoulder-straps of the
American army, athwart the frankness of whose gaze no such shadow had
ever fallen before. You find systematic concealment of our intentions
in dealing with the insurgents, for fear they would insurge before the
Treaty was signed, and thus cause such a revulsion of feeling in our
country against the purchase of theirs as to defeat the ratification
of the treaty. After that, you find a systematic minimizing of
the opposition to our rule, reinforced by subtle depreciation of
Filipino intelligence, and backed up by a "peace-at-any-price" policy,
periodically punctuated by the horrors of war without its dignity. The
denial of Filipino opposition to our rule, which opposition means
merely a natural longing for freedom from alien rule, has gradually
been abandoned. Nobody now clings to that stale fiction. Also, a long
course of chastening, through reconcentration and kindred severities
subsequent to the official announcement of a state of general peace,
has at last gotten the situation as to public order well in hand. The
only question for those who affect that "decent respect to the opinions
of mankind" which the men of 1776 had in mind is, "Are the Filipinos
a people?" President Taft was originally with Senator Hoar on the
Philippine question. At least he was an "anti-expansionist." In all
the heat of subsequent controversy he has never made bold to deny
the general proposition of the unalienable right of every people to
liberty and the pursuit of happiness in their own way. His position
is that the Filipino people must be made an exception to the rule
because they are not a people. This is the strongest I can state his
proposition for him. It is very difficult to state even with apparent
plausibility, anything which denies the right of every community of
people to immunity from alien domination. The case must be an extreme
one. The issue which the writer raises with the President's policy
is that the Filipinos are a people.

I know of no graver responsibility that an American statesman can
take upon himself before the bar of history than to deny the right
of any given people to self-government. Certainly any man who denies
that right at least assumes the burden of proof that they are unfit
to attend to their own affairs. Mr. McKinley assumed it without
pretending to know anything much about the Filipinos, the motive being
that the Islands would be profitable to us. When Mr. Taft went to the
Philippines in 1900, he went, not to investigate the correctness of
Mr. McKinley's assumption, which was implied in the purchase, but to
champion it; not to give advice concerning the righteousness of having
taken over the Philippines, but to bolster up the policy. He assumed
the burden of proof before he knew anything about the facts. The
burden has been on him ever since. Any subordinate who helps him
to bear that burden, finds favor in his eyes. But the burden is
greater than he can bear. The proof fails. The proof shows that the
Filipino people ought to be allowed to pursue happiness in their
own way instead of being made to pursue it in Mr. Taft's way. Once
you pretend that our true object in the Philippines is the "pursuit
of happiness" for them, The Taft policy is condemned by the facts;
and that is why I am opposed to it. The record shows this. He admits
it. But he insists, with a sigh, that in some other generation they
will be happy. Meantime, we are drifting toward our next war carrying
in tow 8,000,000 of human beings who, if neutralized and let alone
would not be disturbed by our next war, but whose destinies now must
be dependent upon the outcome of such war, however little they may
be concerned in the issues which bring it about.

The shifty opportunism which once actually held out to the Filipinos
the hope of some day becoming a State of the United States of America,
has long since lapsed into the silence of shame, because no American
ever honestly believed that the American people would ever countenance
any such preposterous proposition. And so a free republic based on
representative government is face to face with the proposition of
having a "crown colony" on its hands which wishes to be, and could
soon be made fit to be, a free republic also.

If a federal republic cannot live half slave and half free, can it
live with millions of the governed denied a voice in the federal
government confessedly forever?






CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ROAD TO AUTONOMY

                                Oh be ye not dismayed
                                Though ye stumbled and ye strayed.

                                         Kipling--A Song of the English.


He who points out a wrong without being prepared to suggest a remedy
presumes upon the patience of his neighbor without good and sufficient
cause. Up to this point the wrong has been unfolded, with such ability
as was vouchsafed the narrator, "from Genesis to Revelations," so to
speak; also his own attitude as an eye-witness, and its evolution from
the Mosaic doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
to the more Christian doctrines of the New Testament. Let us now
consider the remedy.

In the course of our travels with the army in the earlier chapters of
this book, we first followed its northern advance, from Manila over
the great central plain drained by the Rio Grande and crossed by the
railroad connecting Manila Bay with Lingayen Gulf; its further advance
from the northern borders of the plain over the mountains of Central
Luzon; and its march from the central mountains to the northern sea,
at the extreme northern end of the archipelago. We thus saw in detail
the military conquest and occupation of that part of Luzon lying
north of the Pasig River. Before leaving that part of the subject, the
way the provinces thus occupied were grouped into military districts
was indicated. Following the lines of the military occupation, it was
shown that Northern Luzon was naturally and conveniently susceptible of
division into four groups of provinces, which groups might ultimately
be evolved into self-governing commonwealths--States of a Philippine
Federal Union, as follows:


    Name of State     Area (sq. m.)    Population

    Ilocos [531]          6,500           650,000
    Cagayan [532]        12,000           300,000
    Pangasinan [533]      4,500           625,000
    Pampamga [534]        5,000           650,000
                         ------         ---------
    Total                28,000         2,225,000


It will be remembered that after our narrative had followed the
occupation of Northern Luzon by the American forces to practical
completion, we turned to that part of Luzon lying south of Manila,
and followed the military occupation as it was gradually extended
from the Pasig River to the extreme point of Southern Luzon. Before
closing the review of that military panorama, suggestions were made
for an ultimate grouping of the provinces of Southern Luzon into two
governmental units intended to be ultimately evolved into states. Those
suggestions contemplated grouping the provinces of the lake region
bordering on the Laguna de Bay and the adjacent provinces, into a
territory designated for convenience as Cavite. [535] This territory
was to include all of Southern Luzon except the hemp peninsula,
which lies to the south of the Lake country. It was also suggested
in the same connection that the three provinces of the hemp peninsula
might form a convenient ultimate State of Camarines. In other words,
two states can be made out of Southern Luzon as follows:


    Name of State    Area (sq. m.)      Population

    Cavite              8,500              700,000
    Camarines           7,000              600,000
                       ------            ---------
    Total              15,500            1,300,000


To recapitulate: All of Luzon except Manila and the vicinity
can at once be divided into the six groups of provinces above
mentioned--"territories," having what we are accustomed in the United
States to call a "territorial form of government," and intended to
be made states later. Luzon is about the size of Cuba (a little over
40,000 sq. miles), is twice as thickly populated (nearly 4,000,000 to
Cuba's 2,000,000), and is not cursed with a negro question, as Cuba is.

The above totals, be it remembered, are only round numbers, but
they get us "out of the woods" so to speak, and away from a lot of
unpronounceable names. They show you how to handle Luzon as if it were
about the size of Ohio--which it is. And, as has already been made
clear in the earlier part of this volume, Luzon "is" the Philippines,
in a very suggestive sense of the phrase, since it contains half the
land area of the archipelago (outside of the Mohammedan island of
Mindanao), and half the total population of the whole archipelago,
besides being eight or ten times as large as any other island of the
group except Mindanao; and it also contains the city which is the
capital and chief port of the archipelago, and has been the seat of
government for over three hundred years--Manila. And Manila is eight
or ten times as large as any other town in the archipelago.

After the occupation of Luzon, General Otis's extension of our
occupation to the Visayan islands was reviewed, and in that connection
it was pointed out that each of the six largest of those islands to
wit, Panay, Negros, Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Bohol, might be ultimately
evolved into six states. [536]

The smaller islands lying between Luzon and Mindanao could easily be
disposed of governmentally by being attached to the jurisdiction of
one of the said six islands.

There is to-day no reason why a dozen Americans could not be at
once appointed governors of the twelve prospective autonomous
commonwealths above indicated, just as the President of the United
States has in the past appointed governors for New Mexico, Arizona,
and other territories of the United States which have subsequently
been admitted to the Union. If the Congress of the United States should
promise the Filipinos independence, to be granted as soon as American
authority in the Islands should so recommend, the dozen territorial
governments intended to be evolved into states of an ultimate federal
union could soon be whipped into shape where they could take care of
themselves to the extent that our state governments to-day take care
of themselves. American representatives of American authority in the
Islands, sent out to work out such a programme, might be instructed
to watch these twelve territorial governments, granting to each the
right to elect a governor in lieu of the appointed governor as soon
as in their judgment a given territory was worthy of it. I have no
doubt that such recommendations would follow successively as to all
of said prospective states inside of four or five years. Whether this
plan is wise or not, it certainly is not, as far as I am concerned,
"half baked." Some five years ago, in the North American Review,
[537] I suggested that Luzon could be so organized within less than
ten years by American territorial governors selected for the work,
naming the Honorable George Curry of New Mexico, formerly Governor of
the territory of New Mexico, and now a member of Congress therefrom,
as an ideal man to organize one such territory. It is true that there
are not eleven other men as well qualified for the work as Governor
Curry. In fact he is probably better qualified for the work than
any man living. The language used as to Governor Curry in the North
American Review article referred to was as follows:


    If the inhabitants of these regions were told by a man whom they
    liked and would believe, as they would Curry, that they were to
    have autonomous governments like one of the Western Territories
    of the United States, at the very earliest possible moment,
    and urged to get ready for it, they could and would, under his
    guidance. We would get a co-operation from those people we do not
    now get and never will get, so long as we keep them in uncertainty
    as to what we are going to do with them. If next year we should
    formally disclaim intention to retain the islands permanently, and
    set to work to create autonomous Territories destined ultimately
    to be States of a Federated Philippine Republic, whenever fit,
    we would soon see the way out of this tangle, and behold the
    beginning of the end of it.


Whenever the twelve territorial governments should be gotten into
smooth working order under elected native governors, the Philippine
archipelago would then be nearly ready for independence, so far as
its internal affairs are concerned. The danger of their being annexed
on the first pretext by some one of the great land-grabbing powers
should be met by our guaranteeing them their independence, as we
do Cuba, until they could be protected by neutralization treaties,
such as protect Belgium and Switzerland to-day, as explained in
the chapter which follows this. Powers not specifically granted
to the several states-in-embryo should of course, until the final
grant of independence, be reserved to the central government at
Manila. Manila and Rizal province would be available at almost any
time as a thirteenth state. So that when the twelve states above
suggested had shown themselves capable of local self-government,
Manila and Rizal province might be added to make the final one of
thirteen original states of a Philippine Republic.

Any American who has seen a Filipino pueblo transformed, as if by
magic, from listless apathy to a state of buzzing and busy enthusiasm
suggestive of a bee-hive, by preparations for some church fiesta,
or for the coming of some dignitary from Manila, has seen something
analogous to what would happen if the Filipino body politic should
suddenly be electrified by a promise of independence under some such
programme as the above. A generous rivalry would at once ensue all
over the archipelago in each of the twelve prospective states. Each
would seek to be the first to be recommended by American authority as
ready for statehood. I do not believe the annals of national experience
contain any analogy where every member of a given community has rallied
to a common cause more completely than the whole Filipino people would
rally to such a prospective programme of independence. The unanimity
would be as absolute as the kind we saw among the American people at
the outbreak of the Spanish War, when Congress one fine morning placed
fifty millions of dollars at the disposal of President McKinley by
a unanimous vote.

I especially invite attention to the fact that the above programme
throws away nothing that has been done by us in the Islands in the
last twelve years in the way of organization. It simply takes it and
builds upon it. Congress should not attempt to work out the details
from this end of the line. We should send men out there from here to
work them out, with local co-operation from the leading Filipinos. Men
animated by the idea of working out a programme under which the living
may hope to see the independence of their country, should be sent out
to take the place of the men now there who are irrevocably committed
to the programme of indefinite retention with undeclared intention,
which holds out no hope to the living. It is not wise to arrange
the details of the programme by act of Congress without a year or
two of study of the situation by such men on the ground. An act of
Congress which goes into details before getting the recommendations
of such men will inevitably set up a lot of straw men easy for the
other side to knock down. All you need is a program, sanctioned by
Congress, containing a promise of independence, and men sent out to
the islands to work out the program. They would report back from time
to time, and the Congress by whose authority they went out would have
no hesitation in being guided by their recommendations. If unpatriotic
greed for office among the Filipinos, or other opposition animated by
evil motives, should block the game, your Americans so sent out would
have to recommend the calling of a halt. This ever-present shadow
in the background would in turn throw the shadow of ostracism over
all demagogues.

Meantime the Filipinos should be given a Senate, or upper house,
in which, the thirteen prospective "states" should be represented by
two men, the bill therefor to be framed out there, and sent back here
to Congress for approval. This would give them under the plan here
suggested, as soon as the Americans sent out should so recommend,
a Senate of twenty-six members. At present, if the native Assembly,
or lower house, does not pass the annual appropriations necessary
to run the government, the appropriation act of the preceding year
again becomes law. At present, the upper house is the Philippine
Commission. By withholding its consent, it can prevent any legislation
whatsoever. So, at present, the Assembly is little more than a debating
society. All questions as to appropriations, veto of legislation, and
other details, in the event the Filipinos are given a Senate also,
should be left to be fixed in the bill recommended by the men sent
out to work out the program of promise.

On March 20, 1912, Honorable W. A. Jones, the distinguished veteran
Congressman from Virginia, who is Chairman of the Committee on Insular
Affairs, introduced in the House of Representatives a bill entitled
"A bill to establish a qualified independence for the Philippines, and
to fix the date when such qualified independence shall become absolute
and complete." The greater part of what precedes this paragraph of
this chapter was written prior to March 20, 1912. Mr. Jones's bill
works out the details of the independence problem in a manner somewhat
different from the plan I suggest, but that does not make me any the
less heartily in favor of the principle which his bill embodies. The
supreme virtue of the Jones bill is that it promises Independence at
a fixed date, July 4, 1921. It ends the cruel uncertainty, so unjust
to both the Filipinos and to the Americans in the Philippines, that
is contained in the present program of indefinite retention with
undeclared intention. Five years ago, in the North American Review
for January 18, and June 21, 1907, the writer hereof expressed the
belief that an earlier date was feasible, thus:


    If three strong and able men, familiar with insular conditions,
    and still young enough to undertake the task [538] were told by
    a President of the United States, by authority of the Congress,
    "Go out there and set up a respectable native government in
    ten years, and then come away," they could and would do it,
    and that government would be a success; and one of the greatest
    moral victories in the annals of free government would have
    been written by the gentlemen concerned upon the pages of their
    country's history.


As Mr. Jones's bill allows four years more of time, I believe it to
be absolutely safe.

Governor Curry, the Congressman from New Mexico hereinabove mentioned,
who spent eight years in the Philippines, agrees with the fundamental
principle of the Jones bill, that as to making a definite promise of
Independence within a few years, and does not consider 1921 too early.

Under the present law, the Philippine Assembly has some eighty
members, each supposed to represent 90,000 people, more or less. This
tallies, roughly, with the census total of population, which is
7,600,000. [539] Under the existing law in the Philippines, the
qualifications for voting are really of two kinds, though nominally
of three kinds. There is a property qualification, and there is
an educational qualification. In any case, in order to vote, the
individual must be twenty-one years old, and must have lived for six
months in the place where he offers to vote. The property qualification
requires that the would-be voter own at least $250 worth of property,
or pay a tax to the amount of $15. The explanation of how a man may
not own $250 worth of property and yet pay $15 taxes is that under the
old Spanish system, which we partially adopted, a man might pay such
cedula or poll-tax as he preferred, according to a graduated scale,
certain civic rights being accorded to those voluntarily paying the
higher poll-tax which were denied to those paying less. The educational
qualification requires the would-be voter to speak, read, and write
either English or Spanish, or else to have held certain enumerated
small municipal offices under the Spaniards--before the American
occupation. Mr. Jones's bill proposes to add the speaking, reading,
and writing of the native dialect of a given locality [540] to the
educational qualification. This would double, or perhaps triple,
the electorate, and would, in my judgment, be wise. Thousands upon
thousands of natives who only speak a little Spanish can both speak,
read, and write their native Tagalo, Ilocano, or Visayan, as the
case may be. The total of those qualified to vote for members of the
Assembly in 1907 was only about 100,000. At a later election, that
number was doubled. If there are 7,500,000 people in the archipelago,
one fifth of these should represent the adult male population, say
1,500,000. Under Mr. Jones's bill, the electorate would probably
increase to half a million long before the date he proposes for
independence, July 4, 1921. But all such details as qualification for
voting might, it seems to me, be left to people on the ground, their
recommendations controlling. Under a promise of independence by 1921,
a very fair electorate of at least one third, possibly one half, of
the adult male population, could be built up. As the majority report
on the Jones Bill, dated April 26, 1912, says:


    For nearly ten years the average public-school enrolment has not
    been less than 500,000. [541]


I believe that the Moros should be left as they are for the
present. The time for solving that problem has not yet been
reached. Mr. Jones himself evidently bases his idea of allowing the
Moro country representation in the Philippine Congress, or legislature
provided by his bill, on the probability that enough Christian people
will vote, down there, to make up an electorate that would not be
"impossible," i.e., absurd. For instance, he tells me that a great
many people have moved into Mindanao from the northern islands for
commercial reasons, and, if I recollect correctly, that Zamboanga,
the most beautiful little port in Mindanao, which hardly had 10,000
people when I was there, now has possibly 50,000. But the Moro
question need not stand in the way of setting up an independent
government in the Philippines in 1921, as proposed by his bill. You
have material for thirteen original states, representing a population
of nearly seven million Christian people, in Luzon and the six main
Visayan Islands. Why delay the creation of this republic on account
of 250,000 semi-civilized, crudely Mohammedan Moros in Mindanao--a
separate island lying off to the south of the proposed republic? [542]
A happy solution of the matter would be to send Mr. Jones out there as
Governor-General and let him work out the problem on the ground. He
has had a long and distinguished career in the public service,
twenty-two years in Congress. His public record and speeches on the
Philippine question from the beginning would make him to the Filipinos
the very incarnation of a bona fide intention on our part to give
them their independence at the earliest practical moment, that is,
at some time which the living might hope to see. When Governor Taft
and Mr. Root drew the Philippine Government Act of 1902, the former
had already been president of the Philippine Commission for two
years, had been all over the archipelago, and knew it well. Suppose
the Taft policy should be substituted by the more progressive Jones
policy. Mr. Jones, or whoever is to change the policy, ought to have
as much acquaintance with the subject, acquired on the ground, as
Mr. Taft had when he formulated his policy of indefinite retention
with undeclared intention. The nucleus of the Taft policy was stated
by Governor Taft to the Senate Committee in 1902, as follows [543]:


    My own judgment is that the best policy, if a policy is to be
    declared at all, is to declare the intention of the United States
    to hold the islands indefinitely, until the people shall show
    themselves fit for self-government, under a gradually increasing
    popular government, when their relation to the United States,
    either of statehood, or of quasi-independence, like the colony
    of Australia or Canada, can be declared after mutual conference.


The policy which Mr. Jones has favored for the last twelve years is
almost as well known to the Filipinos as are the views of Mr. Taft
himself.

In conclusion, the writer desires to say, with especial emphasis,
that the suggestions outlining the plan which forms the bulk of this
chapter are presented in a spirit of entire deference to the views
of any one else who may have considered this great subject carefully,
especially to the views of Mr. Jones, whose bill is so entirely right
in principle. The one supreme need of the situation is a definite
legislative declaration which shall make clear to all concerned--to the
Filipino demagogue and the American grafter, as well as to the great
body of the good people of both races out there--that the governing
of a remote and alien people is to have no permanent place in the
purposes of our national life; and that we do bona fide intend to
give the Filipinos their independence at a date in the future which
will interest the living, by extending to the living the hope to see
the independence of their country. And the Jones Bill does that.






CHAPTER XXIX

THE WAY OUT

                Respect for the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland
                has now taken such lodgment in the conscience of
                Europe that its violation would inevitably provoke
                a storm of indignation.

                             M. de Martens in the Revue des Deux Mondes.


On March 25, 1912, Honorable W. A. Jones, of Virginia, Chairman of the
House Committee on Insular Affairs, introduced a resolution (H. J. 278)
proposing the neutralization of the Philippines, to accompany his
Philippine Independence Bill discussed in the preceding chapter. Such
a resolution, accompanying such a bill, both introduced by one of the
majority leaders in the House of Representatives, lifts the question
of Philippine neutralization out of the region of the "academic,"
and brings it forward as a thing which must, sooner or later, command
the serious consideration both of Congress and the country. There
have been many such resolutions before that of Mr. Jones. But they
are all the same in principle. All contemplate our guaranteeing the
Filipinos their independence until the treaties they propose shall
be consummated. In 1911, there were at least nine such resolutions
proposing neutralization of the Philippines, introduced by the
following named gentlemen, the first a Republican, the rest Democrats:

Mr. McCall, of Massachusetts; Mr. Cline, of Indiana; Mr. Sabath,
of Illinois; Mr. Garner, of Texas; Mr. Peters, of Massachusetts;
Mr. Martin, of Colorado; Mr. Burgess, of Texas; Mr. Oldfield, of
Arkansas; and Mr. Ferris, of Oklahoma.

Because the neutralization plan to provide against the Philippines
being annexed by some other Power in case we ever give them their
independence would, if successfully worked out, reduce by that much
the possible area of war, and be a distinct step in the direction of
universal peace, it is certainly worthy of careful consideration by
the enlightened judgment of the Congress and the world.

Mr. McCall is the father of the neutralization idea, so far as
the House of Representatives is concerned, application of it to
the Philippines having been first suggested at the Universal Peace
Conference of 1904, by Mr. Erving Winslow, of Boston. Mr. McCall has
been introducing his neutralization resolution at every Congress for
a number of Congresses past.

The McCall Resolution (H. J. Res. 107) is the oldest, and perhaps the
simplest, of the various pending resolutions for the neutralization
of the Philippines, and is typical of all. It reads:


    JOINT RESOLUTION

    Declaring the purpose of the United States to recognize
    the independence of the Filipino people as soon as a stable
    government can be established, and requesting the President to
    open negotiations for the neutralization of the Philippine Islands.

    Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United
    States of America in Congress assembled:

    That in accordance with the principles upon which its government
    is founded and which were again asserted by it at the outbreak of
    the war with Spain, the United States declares that the Filipino
    people of right ought to be free and independent, and announces
    its purpose to recognize their independence as soon as a stable
    government, republican in form, can be established by them, and
    thereupon to transfer to such government all its rights in the
    Philippine Islands upon terms which shall be reasonable and just,
    and to leave the sovereignty and control of their country to the
    Filipino people.

    Resolved, That the President of the United States be, and he hereby
    is, requested to open negotiations with such foreign Powers as in
    his opinion should be parties to the compact for the neutralization
    of the Philippine Islands by international agreement.


If the McCall Resolution, or any one of the kindred resolutions,
were passed, and complied with by the President of the United States,
and accepted by the other Powers, and the Filipinos were helped to
organize territorial governments such as Arizona and New Mexico were
before they became States, several such territories could form the
nucleus about which to begin to build at once, as indicated in the
chapter on "The Road to Autonomy." A number of such territories could
be made at once as completely autonomous as the governments of the
territories of Arizona and New Mexico were before their admission to
our Union. With those examples to emulate, together with the tingling
of the general blood that would follow a promise of independence and
a national life of their own, similar territorial governments could
be successively organized, as indicated in the preceding chapter,
throughout the archipelago. These could, in less than ten years, be
fitted for admission to a federal union of autonomous territories,
with the string of our sovereignty still tied to it, and an American
Governor-General still over the whole, as now. And when the last island
knocked for admission and was admitted, the string could be cut, and
the Federal Union of Territories admitted, through our good offices, to
the sisterhood of nations, as an independent Philippine republic. They
would not bother the rest of the world any more than Belgium and
Switzerland do, which are likewise protected by neutralization.

The idea of international neutralization is not without pride of
ancestry or hope of posterity. It was born out of the downfall of
Napoleon I. The Treaty of Paris of 1815 declared that


    the neutrality and inviolability of Switzerland, as well as its
    independence of outside influences, are in conformity with the
    true interests of European politics.


The Congress of Vienna, held afterwards in the same year, at
which there were present, besides the various monarchs, such men as
Wellington, Talleyrand, and Metternich, solemnly and finally reiterated
that declaration. Would not "the neutrality and inviolability" of
the Philippines be gladly acceded to by the great Powers as being
"in conformity with the true interests of European politics," and
Asiatic politics as well?

Says M. De Martens, in an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes for
November 15, 1903:


    Respect for the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland has now taken
    such lodgment in the conscience of the civilized nations of Europe
    that its violation would inevitably provoke a storm of indignation.


At present, the Philippines are a potential apple of discord thrown
into the Balance of Power in the Pacific. The present policy of
indefinite retention by us, with undeclared intention, leaves everybody
guessing, including ourselves. Now is the accepted time, while the
horizon of the future is absolutely cloudless, to ask Japan to sign
a treaty agreeing not to annex the Philippine Islands after we give
them their independence. By her answer she will show her hand. The
overcrowded monarchies do not pretend any special scruples about
annexing anything annexable. Germany very frankly insists that she
became a great Power too late to get her rightful share of the earth's
surface, and that she must expand somewhither. And only the virile
menace of the Monroe Doctrine has so far stayed her heavy hand from
seizing some portion of South America. But probably none of the Powers
would object to converting the Philippines into permanently neutral
territory, by the same kind of an agreement that protects Switzerland.

The Treaty of London of 1831, relative to Belgium and Holland,
declares:


    Within the limits indicated, Belgium shall form an independent
    and perpetually neutral state. She shall be required to observe
    this same neutrality toward all the other states.


The signatories to this treaty were Great Britain, France, Austria,
Prussia, and Russia. Forty years after it was made, during the
Franco-Prussian war, when Belgium's neutrality was threatened by
manifestations of intention on the part both of France and of Prussia
to occupy some of her territory, England served notice on both parties
to the conflict that if either violated the territorial integrity of
Belgium, she, England, would join forces with the other. And the treaty
was observed. The specific way in which observance of it was compassed
was this: Great Britain made representations to both France and Germany
which resulted in two identical conventions, signed in August, 1870,
at Paris and Berlin, whereby any act of aggression by either against
Belgium was to be followed by England's joining forces with the other
against the aggressor. So long as human nature does not change very
materially, "the green-eyed monster" will remain a powerful factor in
human affairs. The mutual jealousy of the Powers will always be the
saving grace, in troubled times, of neutralization treaties signed in
time of profound peace. If "Balance of Power" considerations in Europe
have protected the Turkish Empire from annexation or dismemberment all
these years, without a neutralization treaty, why will not the mutual
jealousy of the Powers insure the signing and faithful observance of
a treaty tending to preserve the Balance of Power in the Pacific? Who
would object?

The Panama Canal is to be opened in 1913. We want South America to
be a real friend to the Monroe Doctrine, which she certainly is not
enthusiastic about now, and will never be while we remain wedded
to the McKinley Doctrine of Benevolent Assimilation of unconsenting
people--people anxious to develop, under God, along their own lines. In
1906, while Secretary of State of the United States, Mr. Root made
a tour of South America. He told those people down there, at Rio
Janeiro, by way of quieting their fears lest we may some day be moved
to "improve" their condition also, through benevolent assimilation
and vigorous application of the "uplift" treatment:


    We wish for * * * no territory except our own. We deem the
    independence and equal rights of the smallest and weakest member
    of the family of nations entitled to as much respect as those of
    the greatest empire, and we deem the observance of that respect the
    chief guaranty of the weak against the oppression of the strong.


That Rio Janeiro speech of Mr. Root's is as noble a masterpiece of
real eloquence, its setting and all considered, as any utterance of
any statesman of modern times. Among other things, he said:


    No student of our times can fail to see that not America alone
    but the whole civilized world is swinging away from its old
    governmental moorings and intrusting the fate of its civilization
    to the capacity of the popular mass to govern. By this pathway
    mankind is to travel, whithersoever it leads. Upon the success
    of this, our great undertaking, the hope of humanity depends.


As Secretary of War, "civilizing with a Krag," Mr. Root reminds one
of Cortez and Pizarro. As Secretary of State, he permits us to believe
that all the great men are not dead yet.

If, in making that Rio Janeiro speech, Mr. Root laid to his soul
the flattering unction that the minds of his hearers did not revert
dubiously to his previous grim missionary work in the Philippines,
where the percentage of literacy is superior to that of more than one
Latin-American republic, he is very much mistaken. If he is laboring
under any such delusion, let him read a book written since then by
a distinguished South American publicist, called El Porvenir de La
Americana Latina ("The Future of Latin America"). If he does not read
Spanish, he can divine the contents of the book from the cartoon which
adorns the title-page. The cartoon represents the American eagle,
flag in claw, standing on the map of North America, looking toward
South America as if ready for flight, its beak bent over Panama,
the shadow of its wings already darkening the northern portions of
the sister continent to the south of us. To get the trade of South
America, in the mighty struggle for commercial supremacy which is to
follow the opening of the Panama Canal, we must win the confidence of
South America. We will never do it until we do the right thing by the
Filipinos. Concerning the Philippines, South America reflects that
we annexed the first supposedly rich non-contiguous Spanish country
we ever had a chance to annex that we had not previously solemnly
vowed we would not annex. We must choose between the Monroe Doctrine
of mutually respectful Fraternal Relation, which contemplates some
twenty-one mutually trustful republics in the Western Hemisphere, all
a unit against alien colonization here, and the McKinley Doctrine of
grossly patronizing Benevolent Assimilation, which contemplates some
8,000,000 of people in the Eastern Hemisphere, all a unit against
alien colonization there--a people, moreover, whose friendship we
have cultivated with the Gatling gun and the gallows, and watered
with tariff and other legislation enacted without knowledge and used
without shame.

We should stop running a kindergarten for adults in Asia, and get back
to the Monroe Doctrine. There are only two hemispheres to a sphere,
and our manifest destiny lies in the Western one. We do not want the
earth. Our mission as a nation is to conserve the republican form
of government, and the consent-of-the-governed principle, and to
promote the general peace of mankind by insuring it in our half of
the earth. The first thing to do to set this country right again is
to get rid of the Philippines, and give them a square deal, pursuant
to the spirit of the neutralization resolutions now pending before
Congress. All these resolutions contain the one supreme need of the
hour, an honest declaration of intention. The longer we fight shy
of that, the less likely we are ever to give the Filipinos their
independence, and the deeper we get into the mire of mistaken
philanthropy and covert exploitation.

We should resume our original programme of blazing out the path and
making clear the way up which any nation of the earth may follow when
it will. That path lies along the line of actually attempting as a
nation a practical demonstration of the Power of Righteousness, or,
in other words, the existence of an Omnipotent Omniscient Benevolent
Good (whether you spell it with one o or with two is not important)
shaping, guiding, and directing human affairs, such demonstration
to be made through the concerted action of a self-governing people
under a written Constitution based on equality of opportunity and
the Golden Rule.

As a people we are very young yet. It is not yet written in the Book
of Time how long this nation will survive. So far, our government is
only an experiment. But, as John Quincy Adams once said, it and its
Constitution are "an experiment upon the human heart," to see whether
or not the Golden Rule will work in government among men.






NOTES


[1] The date contemplated by the pending Philippine Independence
Bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in March, 1912,
by Hon. W. A. Jones, Chairman of the Committee on Insular Affairs.

[2] Congressional Record, December 6, 1897, p. 3.

[3] Split Rock.

[4] Senate Document 62, p. 381.

[5] See pages 341 et seq., Senate Document 62, part 1, 55th Cong.,
3d Sess., 1898-9.

[6] Senate Document 62, p. 346.

[7] Ib., 349.

[8] The natives in and about Singapore are Mohammedans, forbidden by
their religion to use alcoholic beverages.

[9] Senate Document 62, p. 354.

[10] Senate Document 62, p. 356.

[11] Hearings on Philippine affairs, Senate Document 331, part 3,
57th Cong., 1st Sess., 1901-2, proceedings of June 26-8, 1902.

[12] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2927.

[13] The Senate Document has it backwards "left Mirs Bay for Hong
Kong," clearly an error.

[14] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2932.

[15] Cong. Record, April 17, 1900, p. 4287.

[16] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2928.

[17] Ib.

[18] S. D. 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 6.

[19] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2937.

[20] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2934.

[21] Ib., p. 2967.

[22] See pp. 2928 and 2956, S. D. 331, part 3.

[23] S. D. 331, pt.3, p. 2965.

[24] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2939.

[25] Ib., p. 2936.

[26] Ib., p. 2940.

[27] See letter of H. Irving Hancock, American war correspondent in
the field, dated Manila, May 3, 1899, published New York Criterion,
June 17, 1899. This Hancock interview with General MacArthur was
quoted in debate on the floor of the Senate on April 17, 1900 (see
Cong. Rec. of that date), and was corroborated by General MacArthur
himself as substantially correct in that officer's testimony before
the Senate in 1902, S. D. 331, pt. 2, 57th Congress, 1st Session,
p. 1942, in answer to questions put by Senator Culberson.

[28] Rev. Clay Macaulay, who afterwards made that statement in a
letter to the Boston Transcript.

[29] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2939.

[30] S. D. 208, part 2, 56th Congress, 1st Sess., pp. 7, 8.

[31] Cong. Record, December, 1897.

[32] See Cong. Record, April 11, 1898, pp. 3699 et seq.

[33] Cong. Record, April 13, 1898, pp. 3701 et seq.

[34] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 103.

[35] S. D. 62, p. 327.

[36] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, App., p. 100. Dispatch May 20, 1898.

[37] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i, pt. 4, p. 13.

[38] S. D. 331, pt. 3, p. 2930.

[39] Report Schurman Commission, vol. i., p. 172.

[40] S. D. 62, p. 337.

[41] S. D. 331, pt. 3, 1902, p. 2951.

[42] S. D. 331, p. 2955.

[43] Ib., p. 2954.

[44] S. D. 62, pp. 328-9.

[45] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 103.

[46] Ib., p. 102.

[47] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 102.

[48] S. D. 62, p. 362.

[49] Ib., pp. 360-1.

[50] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 106.

[51] S. D. 62, p. 354.

[52] S. D. 62, p. 329.

[53] Ib., p. 432.

[54] Alas, that rare man, Frank Millet, perished in the Titanic
disaster of April, 1912, since the above was written.

[55] Expedition to the Philippines.

[56] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 111.

[57] See p. 2934, S. D. 331, pt. 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess.

[58] See p. 2934, S. D. 331, pt. 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess.

[59] S. D. 62, p. 383.

[60] See Admiral Dewey's testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902,
S. D. 331, pp. 2942, 2957.

[61] See National Geographic Magazine, August, 1905.

[62] Congressional Record, December 5, 1898.

[63] See p. 2938, S. D. 331 (1902).

[64] Congressional Record, December 5, 1898, p. 5.

[65] Senate Document 169, 55th Cong., 3d Sess. (1898).

[66] Ib.

[67] Hon. Frank A. Vanderlip, August, 1898 Century Magazine.

[68] See p. 85, S. D. 208, 1900.

[69] See General Orders No. 101, series 1898, Adjutant-General's
Office, Washington, July 18, 1898, a copy of which accompanied the
President's message to Congress of December, 1898, and may be seen
at p. 783, House Document No. 1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9.

[70] For a copy of this proclamation, see p. 86, S. D. 208, 56th Cong.,
1st Sess.

[71] S. D. 208, p. 8.

[72] S. D. 331, p. 2976, Hearings before Senate Committee, 1902.

[73] S. D. 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 16.

[74] Correspondence, War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 720.

[75] For Admiral Dewey's cable report of this, see Navy Dept. Report,
1898, Appendix, p. 110. For particulars, given by him subsequently,
see S. D. 331, 1902, p. 2942.

[76] S. D. 331, pt. 3, 1902, p. 2942, and thereabouts.

[77] S. D. 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 4.

[78] S. D. 208, p. 4.

[79] Anderson only had about 2500 troops then.

[80] See Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 110; S. D. 331, 1902,
p. 2942.

[81] Senate Document 208, 1900, p. 8.

[82] Ib., pp. 12-13.

[83] S. D. 208, 1900, p. 9.

[84] Ib., p. 8.

[85] See page 40 of General Merritt's Report, War Dept. Report, 1898,
vol. i., part 2.

[86] S. D. 208, 1900, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 11.

[87] Ib., p. 10.

[88] The writer is certainly one of these, and while calling in
question the wisdom and righteousness of our Philippine policy,
he cannot refrain from avowing just here a feeling of individual
obligation to Mr. Root for his exquisite tribute to the personal
equation of Mr. McKinley, delivered at the National Republican
Convention of 1904, which was, in part, as follows: "How wise and
skilful he was. How modest and self-effacing. How deep his insight
into the human heart. How swift the intuitions of his sympathy. How
compelling the charm of his gracious presence. He was so unselfish,
so genuine a lover of his kind. And he was the kindest and tenderest
friend who ever grasped another's hand. Alas, that his virtues did
plead in vain against his cruel fate."

[89] See Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 117.

[90] S. D. 208, 1900, p. 13.

[91] For the Merritt proclamation, see S. D. 208, p. 86.

[92] In 1906.

[93] S. D. 208, 1900, p. 13.

[94] Ib., p. 40.

[95] Report First Philippine Commission, vol. i., p. 172.

[96] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4. Otis report, p. 13.

[97] S. D. 331, 1902, p. 2941.

[98] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 788.

[99] May 19th-July 9th; see General Anderson's report to the
Adjutant-General of the army of July 9, 1898, S. D. 208, p. 6.

[100] See Major J. F. Bell's report to Merritt of August 29, 1898,
S. D. 62, p. 379.

[101] Clerks.

[102] See S. D. 208, pp. 101-2.

[103] Senate Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 34.

[104] S. D. 208, p. 99.

[105] Admiral Dewey to Senate Committee, 1902, S. D. 331, 1902,
p. 2940.

[106] 7,635,426. See Philippine Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 15.

[107] 3,798,507. See Philippine Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 125.

[108] See Senate Document 62, 1898, p. 379.

[109] Albay, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, and Sorsogon.

[110] Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Isabela, Cagayan.

[111] S. D. 62, p. 380.

[112] Diary of Major Simeon Villa, p. 1898, Senate Document 331,
pt. 3, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 1902.

[113] See Merritt's Report for 1898, War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i.,
pt. 2, p. 40.

[114] Expedition to the Philippines, p. 61.

[115] "With 10,000 men, we would have had to guard 13,300 Spanish
prisoners, and to fight 14,000 Filipinos," says General Anderson,
North American Review for February, 1900.

[116] Senate Document 208, p. 86.

[117] Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Peace Commissioners, Senate
Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p. 6.

[118] See General Greene's Report, W. D. R., 1898, vol. i., pt. 2,
p. 72, where Mr. Millet's conduct in the assault on the city receives
special mention.

[119] War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 73.

[120] See War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 58.

[121] Congressional Record, December 5, 1898, p. 5.

[122] War Dept. Report, 1898, vol. i., pt. 2, p. 57.

[123] Ib., vol. i., pt. 4, p. 190.

[124] See his Report, War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 3.

[125] On August 20th. War Dept. Report,1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 345.

[126] Ib., p. 5.

[127] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. 1., pt. 4, pp. 346-7.

[128] Ib. p. 335.

[129] Senate Document 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 34.

[130] S. D. 208, pt. ii., pp. 7, 8.

[131] Otis's Report, p. 10.

[132] Navy Dept. Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 101.

[133] To say nothing of the "chariot and four, and a band of a hundred
pieces, and everything in the grandest style," of which Admiral Dewey
told the Senate Committee in 1902 (S. D. 331, 1902, p. 2972).

[134] See p. 7, S. D. 148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess.

[135] Expedition to the Philippines, p. 255.

[136] "Putting the road and accessories into the same state as they
were on February 4, 1899," was the language in which Mr. Higgins
formulated his demand in a letter to General Otis on Jan. 25, 1900. See
War Dept. Record, 1900, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 516.

[137] North American Review, January 18, 1907, p. 140.

[138] The six main Visayan Islands. Mohammedan Mindanao is always
dealt with in this book as a separate and distinct problem.

[139] Senate Document 196, 56th Cong., 1st. Sess., p. 14.

[140] Here the author's commanding officer, Major Batson, was shot
a year and a day later while directing with his usual clear-headed
intrepidity the fire of a part of his battalion to protect the crossing
of the rest of it over the Aringay River, we being at the time in hot
pursuit of Aguinaldo, whose rear-guard made a stand in the trenches
on the other side of the river.

[141] Senate Document 62, pt. 1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9, p. 283.

[142] Hon. Frank A. Vanderlip, then Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury, now (1912) President of the National City Bank, New York,
in the Century Magazine, August, 1898.

[143] S. D. 148, p. 15.

[144] Navy Department Report for 1898, Appendix, p. 122.

[145] Senate Document 148, p. 19.

[146] Chairman of the Spanish Commission.

[147] Meaning evidently payment of some of Spain's debts with money
she could probably get from us for the asking, as a matter of sympathy
for the fellow who is "down and out."

[148] Mr. McKinley had before that sent word significantly that he
was not unmindful of the distressing financial embarrassments of Spain.

[149] Otis's Report for 1899, p. 43.

[150] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i, pt. 4, p. 3.

[151] Ib., pt. 2, p. 75.

[152] Senate Document 62, p. 379.

[153] Published at page 7 of Senate Document 208, pt. 2, 56th Congress,
1st Session (1900).

[154] Called in Spanish "Visayas," or Bisayas. Visayas is an
adjective derived from the name of the Bay of Biscay, "b" and "v"
being interchangeable in Spanish.

[155] For a fuller description of the archipelago, see Chapter XII.

[156] Vol. ii., p. 315.

[157] This proclamation has been printed many times, in various
government publications, e.g., War Department Report, 1899, vol. i.,
pt. 4, pp. 355-6; Senate Document 208, 56th Congress, 1st Session
(1900), pp. 82-3, etc.

[158] Senate Document 62, pt. 1, 55th Congress, 3d Session, p. 272.

[159] The "self-doubting" lay in the doubt of the Administration as
to whether its programme of conquest would or would not be ratified
by the Senate. The "pusillanimity" lay, wholly unbeknown to Washington
of course, in the estimate of us it produced among the Filipinos.

[160] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 62.

[161] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 64.

[162] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 79.

[163] Ib., p. 67.

[164] "I sent you the President's proclamation, not for publication,
but for your information," wrote Otis to Miller after the latter had
let the cat out of the bag. Senate Document 208, p. 58.

[165] Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 54.

[166] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 66.

[167] Ibid.

[168] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 59.

[169] Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. (1900), pp. 54-5.

[170] Colonel Enoch H. Crowder, General Otis's Judge Advocate, was
"the brains of" the Otis government. But the difference between General
Otis and Aguinaldo was that Aguinaldo always had the good sense to
follow Mabini's advice, while Otis did not always follow Crowder's.

[171] Senate Document 208, p. 56.

[172] S. D. 208, p. 58.

[173] See Congressional Record, January 18, 1899, p. 734.

[174] Senate Document 208, p. 59.

[175] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 66.

[176] Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p. 58, letter
to General Miller.

[177] A campaign synonym for forced marching. It has no known
etymology, but to the initiated it suggests torrential downpouring
of rain and bedraggled mud-spattered columns of troops.

[178] Senate Document 208, pt. 2, p. 7.

[179] Otis Report, p. 80.

[180] The American "Tommy Atkins."

[181] Otis Report, 1899 War Dept. Rpt., 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 81.

[182] See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 2709 et seq.

[183] Congressional Record, January 11, 1899, p. 735.

[184] Ib., January 18, 1899, p. 733.

[185] The vote on the Bacon resolution was a tie, 29 to 29, and
the Vice-President of the United States then cast the deciding vote
against it. Cong. Rec., Feby. 14, 1899, p. 1845.

[186] See Present-Day Problems, by Wm. H. Taft, p. 9; Dodd, Mead, &
Co., N. Y., 1908.

[187] Congressional Record, February 14, 1899, p. 1846 (55th Cong.,
3d Sess.).

[188] See General Hughes's testimony before Senate Committee, 1902,
Senate Document 331, p. 508.

[189] See Annual Report of the Secretary of War to the President for
1899, pp. 7 et seq.

[190] This is no mere attempt at rhetorical decoration. Said General
MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902 concerning Aguinaldo:
"He was the incarnation of the feelings of the Filipinos." Senate
Document 331, 1902, p. 1926.

[191] Senate Document 331, 1902, pp. 2927 et seq.

[192] Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 23.

[193] Senate Document 62, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898-9, p. 383.

[194] See end of Chapter IV. ante.

[195] Otis Report for 1899, p. 66.

[196] Report, p. 99.

[197] Ib., p. 100.

[198] Ib., p. 150.

[199] Raw recruits.

[200] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 375.

[201] There were thirteen States represented by at least one
organization. These were the First Californias, Second Oregons, First
Colorados, First Nebraskas, Tenth Pennsylvanias, Major Young's Utah
Battery, the First Idahos, Thirteenth Minnesotas, the North Dakota
Artillery, the Twentieth Kansas, and the Tennessees, Montanas,
and Wyomings.

[202] The regular regiments represented were the 14th, 8th, and
23d Infantry and 4th Cavalry. There were also some batteries of the
Third Regular Artillery, and a number of Engineers, Hospital Corps,
and Signal Corps people.

[203] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 440.

[204] Hearings on affairs in Philippine Islands, 1902.

[205] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 109.

[206] Senate Document 331, p. 1890.

[207] Senate Document 331, pp. 1890 et seq.

[208] Ib., p. 1436.

[209] Senate Document 331, p. 1448.

[210] Ib., pt. 2, p. 1447.

[211] The "water cure" (a cure for reticence) consisted in placing
a bamboo reed in the victim's mouth and pouring water down his
throat thus painfully distending his stomach and crowding all his
viscera. Allowed to void this after a time, he would, under threat
of repetition, give the desired information.

[212] Since the above was written, the officer in question has joined
the Great Majority. It was that fearless, faithful, and kindly man,
General Fred. D. Grant, who died in April, 1912.

[213] The lieutenant is no longer in the army, but he resigned
voluntarily long after the incident related in the text, and for
reasons wholly foreign to said incident.

[214] Of course my host's name was not Jones, but Jones will do.

[215] Spanish for man.

[216] A Philippine campaign expression for losing one's nerve and
wanting to quit.

[217] Otis's Report, p. 133.

[218] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 35. In this handsome
commendation General Lawton also included Maj. Charles G. Starr,
one of the best all-round soldiers I ever knew.

[219] See Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii.,
pp. 1068 et seq.

[220] Otis's Report, p. 115.

[221] An interesting account of this experience is given by General
Funston himself in the October, 1911, number of Scribner's Magazine,
in an article entitled "From Malolos to San Fernando."

[222] Otis's Report, p. 136.

[223] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 138.

[224] Except, of course, the capture of Aguinaldo by General Funston
nearly two years later.

[225] See General Lawton's Report on the Zapote River fight, War
Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 282.

[226] See Harper's History of the War in the Philippines, p. 214,
where the name of the gentleman is spelled "Kanly."

[227] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, Otis Despatches
of November 27th, vol. ii., p. 846.

[228] House Document 85, 55th Cong., 3d Sess.

[229] The words quoted are from President McKinley's message to
Congress of December, 1899.

[230] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1002.

[231] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1020.

[232] Meaning, of course, in time not to embarrass President McKinley's
prospective candidacy for re-election in 1900, in a campaign in
which all knew the acquisition of the Philippines was sure to be the
paramount issue.

[233] War Dept. Report, 1899, vol. i., part 4, p. 122.

[234] Strictly speaking, only twenty-three regiments were sent out
from the United States. Under the Act of March 2, 1899, providing the
volunteer army of 35,000 men for the Philippines, twenty-four regiments
of infantry and one of cavalry were organized. The infantry regiments
were numbered Twenty-six to Forty-nine, both inclusive, the numbering
taking up where the numbering of the regular infantry regiments then
ended, with the Twenty-fifth. The cavalry regiment was called the
Eleventh Cavalry, the regular cavalry regimental enumeration ending at
that time with the Tenth. The Eleventh Cavalry and the Thirty-sixth
Infantry were organized, officered, and largely recruited from men
of the State Volunteers sent out in '98, who, in consideration of
liberal inducements offered by the Government, consented to remain.

[235] The population of the city of Manila according to the Philippine
Census of 1903, vol. ii., p. 16; was 219,928. The three next largest
towns are: Laoag, in the province of Ilocos Norte, about 270 miles
north of Manila, near the northwest corner of Luzon, population 19,699;
Iloilo, capital of the island of Panay and chief city and port of the
Visayan Islands, some 300 miles south of Manila, population 19,054;
and Cebu, capital and chief port of the island of Cebu, a day's
voyage from Iloilo, population 18,330. See Philippine Census of 1903,
vol. ii., p. 38.

[236] 115,026 is the exact figure. See Philippine Census, vol. i.,
p. 57.

[237] The exact figure for Luzon is 40,969, and that for Mindanao,
36,292. Ib.

[238] Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 56.

[239] Ibid.

[240] Table of Areas, Census, 1903, vol. i., p. 263.

[241] Table of Populations, ib., vol. ii., p. 126.

[242] Total of these six in large type 20,418 square miles, say
roughly 20,500.

[243] Total of these last three in smaller type 9114 square miles.

[244] There is a large sugar estate on Mindoro, supposed to contain
over 60,000 acres or, say, ninety odd square miles, which in 1911
figured in a congressional investigation of certain charges against
Professor Worcester, a member of the Philippine Commission, but this
is wholly separate from the original problem of public order.

[245] The exact figure is 36,292. Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 263.

[246] 499,634, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 126.

[247] The semi-civilized Moros of Mindanao live mostly in the interior,
and have a crude form of Mohammedanism. The civilized Christian
Filipinos of Mindanao live mostly on the littoral.

[248] This was said in no mere speech. Speeches are often
misquoted. It was a letter signed by the foremost man of this age,
Mr. Roosevelt, written September 15, 1900, accepting the nomination
for the Vice-Presidency. (See Proceedings of the Republican National
Committee, 1900, p. 86.) Yet it represented then one of the many
current misapprehensions about the Filipinos which moved this great
nation to destroy a young republic set up in a spirit of intelligent
and generous emulation of our own.

[249] One of the sultans, or head-men, was believed in 1899, to have
tried on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca made before we took
the Philippines, by some dickering at Singapore or near there in
the Straits Settlements, to sell out for a consideration to Great
Britain, so as to be under the protection and in the pay of British
North Borneo.

[250] The fraction used is based on 500,000 (the population of
Mindanao), being that fraction of 7,500,000 (which last is, roughly
speaking, the total population of the archipelago). The census figures
being 499,634 and 7,635,426 respectively, as heretofore stated.

[251] 7,635,426. Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 15.

[252] 3,798,507. Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 125.

[253] 223,506 is the total of the uncivilized tribes still extant
in Luzon, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 125, but they live in the
mountains and you might live in the Philippines a long lifetime
without ever seeing a sample of them, unless you happen to be an
energetic ethnologist fond of mountain climbing.

[254] Philippine Census of 1903, vol. i., p. 57.

[255] The area of Cuba is about 44,000 square miles.

[256] Except Ohio, the States of Pennsylvania and Tennessee are nearer
the size of Luzon than any others of the Union, the former containing
about 45,000 square miles and the latter about 42,000.

[257] This comparison does not pretend to be mathematically exact. New
Jersey's area is nearer 8000 than 7000 square miles. For further
illustration by comparison, it may be noted in this connection that
the area of Massachusetts is over 8000 square miles (8315) and that of
Vermont between 9000 and 10,000 (9565). As Costa Rica has only 368,780
inhabitants (Statesman's Year Book), the province of Pangasinan alone
contains more people than the republic of Costa Rica. The average of
intelligence and industry of the masses in both is doubtless about
the same, with the probabilities in favor of Pangasinan.

[258] Table of Areas, Philippine Census of 1903, vol. i., p. 58.

[259] Table of Populations, ib., vol. ii., p. 123.

[260] In alluding, in complimentary terms, to this officer's
gallant conduct on that occasion, Harper's History of the War in the
Philippines spells the name "Hustin," as it had previously misspelled
the name of the star actor among the younger officers who participated
in the Zapote River fight "Kanly." "Such is fame." The gentleman's
right name is Mustin. He is now a lieutenant-commander, well known
in the navy to-day, as the inventor of the "Mustin gun-sight."

[261] There is a notable unanimity, among the men in the army of about
Major March's age and rank, in the opinion that he is a man of very
extraordinary ability. This unanimity is so generous and genuine that
I deem it a duty as well as a pleasure to emphasize it here.

[262] See Otis's Report covering September 1, 1899, to May 5, 1900,
War Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 261.

[263] The 12th, part of the 25th, and the 32d Infantry being used to
guard the railroad and for other purposes.

[264] Calumpit will be remembered as the place where in the previous
spring Colonel Funston and his Kansans performed the daring and
successful manoeuvre of crossing the Bagbag River under fire.

[265] Senate Document 331, pt. 2 (1902), p. 1926.

[266] This ratio is no jest. It is a statistical fact, figured out
from one of the War Department Reports.

[267] War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 59.

[268] Report of Secretary of War, 1899, p. 12.

[269] Campaign Spanish for "look for." Generals Lawton and Young had
cut loose from their base of supplies and their command was trusting
for subsistence to living upon the country.

[270] See translation of diary of Major Simeon Villa, Senate Document
331, pt. 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess. (1902), p. 1988. It was in this
Aringay fight that one of the narrowest escapes from death in battle
ever officially authenticated occurred. Lieutenant Dennis P. Quinlan,
now a captain of the 5th U. S. Cavalry, was struck just over the heart
by an insurgent bullet (probably more or less spent) while crossing the
river in the face of a hot fire, the bullet being deflected by a plug
of tobacco carried in the breast pocket of the regulation campaign
blue shirt he was wearing, which pocket, any one acquainted with
that shirt will remember, is at the left breast just over the heart
(War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 6, pp. 166, 279). He was
knocked over, but soon recovered and went on. The flesh of the left
breast over the heart was bruised black and blue. He was recommended
for a medal of honor on account of the incident (War Department Report,
1900, vol. i., pt. 7, p. 136).

[271] If these figures are not exact, they are approximately
correct. We always called it three hundred miles from Manila to the
northern end of Luzon via Vigan and the lighthouse at Cape Bojeador.

[272] For instance, there was what used to be known to the 8th Corps
as "Col. Jim Parker's night attack at Vigan," which occurred early in
December, 1899, soon after that place was occupied, the insurgents
coming into the town in large numbers, at night under command of
General Tiñio, through a tunnel so it was said, and being driven
out only after desperate close quarters' fighting from about two
o'clock in the morning until after broad daylight, leaving the streets
and plaza of Vigan much cumbered with their dead. Again, later on,
there was the sudden order, swiftly executed, in obedience to which
Lieutenant Grayson V. Heidt with a part of a troop of the 3d Cavalry,
rode from Laoag to Batac to the rescue of a besieged garrison at the
latter place, arriving in time to prevent a small Custer massacre,
the garrison having gotten short of ammunition, and having just managed
to telegraph for reinforcements a few moments before the enemy cut the
telegraph wire. Then, there was Lieutenant Hannay, of the 22d Infantry,
who being at the front, received an order from General Lawton to come
back to build a bridge. The order made him sick, the surgeon reported
him sick, the messenger returned with that message, and then Hannay
promptly got well, and stayed at the front. And so on, ad infinitum.

[273] The Visayan Islands--the half-dozen islands between Luzon and
Mindanao already mentioned, as the only ones worth mentioning for
our purposes, together with the various smaller islands, islets,
and rocks "visible at high water."

[274] "During April, in the First District, comprising the provinces
of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Union, Abra, Lepanto, Benguet, and Bontoc,
Brigadier General S. B. M. Young, commanding, the insurgents manifested
considerable activity and endeavored to take the offensive against
the scattered detachments in the district. The insurgents were in
every instance defeated, and lost more than 500 men killed." War
Dept. Report 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 196.

[275] The language quoted is that employed by Robert Collins,
Associated Press Correspondent, in connection with the Round Robin
incident of nine months previous, described in the concluding part
of the chapter preceding this.

[276] Hereinafter more fully set forth.

[277] For the Table of Areas, see Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 58.

[278] For the Table of Populations, see Philippine Census, vol. ii.,
p. 123.

[279] Under the Spaniards, these were two provinces. They were combined
by us.

[280] A province in Latin countries corresponds more nearly to what
we call a county than to anything else familiar to our system of
political divisions.

[281] For the details of this march, see War Department Report, 1900,
vol. i., pt. 4, p. 309. Captain Batchelor had neither orders nor
permission to do what he did. When he cut loose from the command he
belonged to, he took very long chances on finding subsistence for
his men in the unknown country he had set out to conquer, to say
nothing of the highly probable chances of annihilation of his whole
command. When an officer commanding troops does this in time of war,
he does so at his peril, and signal success is his only salvation.

[282] Area tables, Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 58.

[283] Population tables, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123.

[284] Though Nueva Vizcaya is not in the Cagayan valley, but on a
plateau of the great divide, still, its streams all flow into the
Cagayan valley, and that term will be used in this book, as it is
colloquially in the Philippines, to include not only the Cagayan valley
proper, but also the adjoining tributary province of Nueva Vizcaya.

[285] The only thing of interest to the American people that ever
happened over there was the capture of Lieutenant Gilmore of the Navy,
and his men, at Baler, on the Pacific coast, in Principe, a capture
which, it will be recollected, was followed by long captivity, and
ultimately terminated in rescue. The interested student will see
these two provinces on the American maps of the islands, but they
were each attached by the Taft government for administration purposes
to another province, and do not appear in the American census list
of provinces. Therefore, they cut no figure in the census totals,
either of area or population.

[286] The officer on whom public attention in the United States was
later focussed by an alleged order, charged to have been issued by him
in a campaign in Samar to "kill everything over ten years old." This
alleged order was called by the American newspapers of the period
"Jake Smith's Kill and Burn Order."

[287] The figures as to Principe are mere arbitrary guesses, the exact
figures used being fixed on merely to get convenient round numbers,
there being no statistics as to Principe.

[288] Of course the Filipinos should be consulted as to what provinces
should constitute each state, but I am simply sketching a tentative
governmental scheme based upon the way our army perfected its original
grip on public order and the general administrative situation.

[289] All along here we, of course, deal in round numbers only.

[290] See War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., part 5, pp. 45 et
seq. The city of Manila and vicinity constituted the Sixth District
of the Department of Northern Luzon.

[291] War Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., part 5, pp. 47-8.

[292] War Dept. Report, 1900, vol. i., part 1, p. 9.

[293] The Spanish word camarin means a warehouse. The province of
Camarines was originally two provinces, and is still referred to as
two, though governmentally but one.

[294] Of March 2, 1899. Under it the term of enlistment of the
volunteers was to expire June 30, 1901.

[295] Table of Areas, Philippine Census of 1903, vol. i., p. 263. Table
of Population, ib., vol. ii., pp. 123 et seq.

[296] Copper-colored thief.

[297] Sung to the tune of "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching."

[298] See Forum, vol. xxvi., p. 647.

[299] See Forum, vol. xxix., p. 403.

[300] These quotations are not taken from a scrap-book. Many
readers forget that the bound volumes of all the great magazines are
permanently available in the great libraries of the country.

[301] Hostilities had not yet broken out when the article now being
considered appeared on January 4th, and did not break out until thirty
days later, to wit, on February 4th.

[302] Congressional Record, April 13, 1898, p. 3701.

[303] In the early days of the fighting they used to hurrah a good
deal, and shout "Viva la Independencia" (Live Independence).

[304] See Judge Taft's cablegram to Secretary of War Root of August
21, 1900, War Department Report, vol. i., pt. 1, p. 80.

[305] The Caribao Society is an organization composed mainly of
officers of the regular army, but to which any one who served as an
officer, volunteer or regular, in the Philippine Insurrection, is
eligible. Their principal function, like that of the famous Gridiron
Club, is to give an annual dinner.

[306] Addresses at Republican National Convention (1904), p. 62,
published by Isaac H. Blanchard & Co., New York, 1904. The Republican
National Convention of 1900 met June 19th, just sixteen days after
the Taft Commission arrived at Manila.

[307] General MacArthur relieved General Otis May 5, 1900, and the
Taft Commission arrived at Manila June 3d thereafter.

[308] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1051.

[309] Letter of July 22, 1898, by Duc d'Almodovar del Rio, Prime
Minister of Spain, to President McKinley, suing for peace. Senate
Document 62, pt. 1, 55th Congress, 3d Session, pp. 272-3.

[310] See Congressional Record of that date, p. 33.

[311] General Otis's appreciation of such "aid" was thus expressed
in his cablegram to Washington of June 4, 1899: "Negotiations
and conferences with insurgents cost soldiers' lives and prolong
our difficulties." Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain,
vol. ii., p. 1002.

[312] Address by Secretary of War Taft before the National Geographic
Society at Washington, published in the official organ of that Society,
National Geographic Magazine for August, 1905.

[313] Says General Chaffee in his annual report for 1902: "The
intelligent element controlled the ignorant masses as perfectly as
ever a captain controlled the men of his company." War Department
Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 191.

[314] War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 61.

[315] August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900.

[316] Especially independence.

[317] Senate Document 331 (1902), pt. 1, page 50.

[318] A slander ignorantly repeated by the adverse report of the
minority of the Insular Affairs Committee of the House, on the Jones
Bill, introduced in March, 1912, proposing ultimate independence
in 1921.

[319] See The Commoner, April 27, 1906.

[320] Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 9.

[321] These are the three main lines of cleavage, linguistically
speaking. Nearly all the minor dialects are kin to some one of the
principal three.

[322] Peasant's hut, usually of bamboo, thatched with stout straw
(nipa). It is the log cabin of the Philippines.

[323] By way of protest against this kind of belittling of the army's
work, General MacArthur says in his annual report (War Dept. Rept.,
1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60), "Such a narrow statement of the case is
unfair to the service," adding a handsome tribute, which might have
come very graciously from the Commission had it felt so disposed, to
"the endurance, fortitude, and valor" of his 70,000 men during the
precise period while the Commission was filling the American papers
with politically opportune nonsense about "Peace, peace," when there
was no peace.

[324] See Report of Secretary of War Root for 1900. War Department
Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 1, p. 80.

[325] See Report of Taft Philippine Commission of 1900, p. 17.

[326] War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 34-42.

[327] S. D. 435, 56th Cong. 1st Sess.

[328] Report U. S. Philippine Commission, November, 1900, p. 15.

[329] General Lawton was killed in battle in the hour of victory at a
point only about twelve miles out of Manila, in the winter preceding
the spring of 1900 in which the Taft Commission left the United States
for Manila.

[330] This interview was indorsed as substantially correct by General
MacArthur before the Senate Committee of 1902, Senator Culberson first
reading it to him and then asking him if it quoted him correctly. See
hearing on Philippine affairs, 1902, Senate Document 331, pt. 2,
p. 1942.

[331] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 88.

[332] Ibid., 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60.

[333] November, 1899, to September, 1900, both inclusive.

[334] W. D. R., 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60.

[335] Judge Taft had cabled Secretary of War Root on August 21, 1900,
after his arrival in June: "Defining of political issues in United
States reported here in full, gave hope to insurgent officers still
in arms, * * * and stayed surrenders to await result of election." See
War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 80.

[336] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 89.

[337] See Report of Taft Commission to Secretary of War, dated November
30, 1900.

[338] A sample of one of these death sentences that Cailles and all
the rest of the insurgent generals were accustomed to issue against
their "Copperheads" may be seen in General MacArthur's report for
1900. War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 63.

[339] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 90.

[340] See Report of Secretary Root for 1902, p. 13.

[341] Just how correct this was will be examined later.

[342] "The people seem to be actuated by the idea that men are
never nearer right than when going with their own kith and kin." War
Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 61.

[343] General MacArthur's Annual Report dated October 1, 1900. War
Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 61-2.

[344] General MacArthur's report which we are now quoting from,
dated October 1, 1900, was forwarded by the ordinary course of mail,
and even if it arrived before the day of the November election, the
Secretary of War certainly did not at once place it before the public.

[345] Compare this MacArthur, October 1, 1900, statement with the Taft
statements of the same situation between June and November, 1900, as
expressed for instance in his November, 1900, report to the Secretary
of War thus: "A great majority of the people long for peace and are
entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government under
the supremacy of the United States. They are, however, restrained
by fear. * * * Without this, armed resistance to the United States
authority would have long ago ceased. It is a Mafia on a very large
scale." Report, Taft Commission, November 30, 1900, p. 17. This was
before Judge Taft met Juan Cailles above mentioned and liked him well
enough to make him governor of a province, in spite of his being an
"assassin," in other words a Filipino general who had a few weak-kneed
fellows shot for being too friendly with the Americans.

[346] Chapter XI., ante.

[347] See War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, pp. 65-6.

[348] As for my share as a soldier in that Philippine Insurrection,
admitting, as I now do, that it was a tragedy of errors, the President
of the United States would indeed be a very impotent Chief Executive
if it were every American's duty to deliberate as a judge on the
Bench before he decided to answer a president's call for volunteers
in an emergency. I am not yet so highly educated as to find no
inward response to the sentiment, "Right or wrong, my country." If
this sentiment is not right, no republic can long survive, for the
ultimate safety of republics must lie in volunteer soldiery.

[349] Page 93.

[350] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1211.

[351] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1222.

[352] Ibid., vol. ii., p. 1223.

[353] Ibid., p. 1226.

[354] Ibid., p. 1237.

[355] See Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1239.

[356] Ten or twelve thousand.

[357] Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1249.

[358] See Public Laws, U. S. Philippine Commission Division of Insular
Affairs, War Department, Washington, 1901, p. 181.

[359] See General Funston's article on "The Capture of Aguinaldo,"
which appeared in Scribner's Magazine for November, 1911.

[360] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i. pt. 4, p. 99.

[361] For a copy of this proclamation see War Department Report,
1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 100.

[362] The War with Spain, by H. C. Lodge, p. 20.

[363] Mr. Williams to Mr. Cridler, Senate Document 62 (1898), p. 319.

[364] See First Report of Taft Philippine Commission to the Secretary
of War, p. 17.

[365] General MacArthur's report for 1901, War Department Report,
1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 90.

[366] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1241.

[367] J. R. Arnold, of the Philippine Civil Service Board, in North
American Review, for February, 1912.

[368] Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1261.

[369] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 98.

[370] Senate Document 331, pt. 1, 57th Congress, 1st Session, 1902,
p. 136.

[371] Cagayan, Isabela, and Nueva Vizcaya.

[372] A kind of two-wheeled buggy, the principal public vehicle
of Manila.

[373] As it turned out, I lost nothing in the end, because my
resignation of my military commission was not acted on at Washington,
and I only ceased to be an officer of the army by operation of law
at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1901, as had been provided
by the Act of Congress of March 2, 1899, organizing the twenty-five
regiments for Philippine service.

[374] See the Act of the U. S. Philippine Commission of July 17,
1901, entitled, "An act restoring the provinces of Batangas, Cebu,
and Bohol, to the executive control of the military governor," in
Public Laws, U. S. Philippine Commission, Division of Insular Affairs,
War Department.

[375] See American Census of the Philippines, vol. ii., p. 123.

[376] Ib., vol. i., p. 58.

[377] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 8, p. 7.

[378] See pages 102 et seq. of Our Philippine Problem by H. Parker
Willis, Professor of Economics and Politics in Washington and Lee
University. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1905.

[379] Where he still is.

[380] Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1297.

[381] The words quoted were used by Mr. Root in a speech delivered
at Youngstown, Ohio, October 25, 1900.

[382] Sixty-six men and three officers were surprised at breakfast
and cut off from their guns by several hundred bolo men who had come
into town as unarmed natives under pretence of attending a church
fiesta. Forty-five men and officers were killed after a desperate
resistance. Twenty-four only were able to escape. War Department
Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 8, p. 8.

[383] Governor Taft's Report for 1901, War Department Report, 1901,
vol. i., pt. 8, p. 8.

[384] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 208.

[385] Leviticus xvi., 10.

[386] War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 8, p. 12.

[387] Senate Document 331, pt. 1, p. 86, 57th Congress, 1st Session
(1902).

[388] War Department Report for 1900, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 59 et
seq. Ibid., 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 88 et seq.

[389] Report for 1901, p. 98.

[390] See Philippine Census, vol. ii, p. 123.

[391] The Provincial Government Act was an act passed February 6,
1901, outlining the general scheme of government for the several
provinces, and indicating the various tempting official positions
attaching thereto.

[392] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 191.

[393] Senate Document 331, p. 1612 et seq.

[394] Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 1614.

[395] S. D. 331, 1902, p. 1622.

[396] Ibid., p. 1623.

[397] S. D. 331, 1902, p. 1628.

[398] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 221.

[399] Colonel Wagner's testimony before Senate Committee of
1902. Senate Document 331, pt. 3, p. 2873.

[400] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 284.

[401] Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 887.

[402] Senate Document 331, pt. 3, p. 2878.

[403] Theodore Rex.

[404] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 192.

[405] Correspondence relating to the War with Spain, vol. ii.,
pp. 1352-3.

[406] Military Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii.,
p. 1244.

[407] Macaulay's Trial of Hastings.

[408] Says Gen. Henry T. Allen, commanding the Philippines
constabulary, in his report for 1903 (Report U. S. Philippine
Commission, 1903, pt. 3, p. 49), "For some time to come the number of
troops (meaning American) to be kept here should be a direct function
of the number of guns put into the hands of natives." He adds, "It
is unwise to ignore the great moral effect of a strong armed force
above suspicion."

[409] The constabulary force was about 5000. When disturbances in one
province would become formidable, constabulary from provinces would
be hurried thither, thus denuding the latter provinces of proper
police protection.

[410] 1912.

[411] The reference is supposed to be to Mr. McKinley.

[412] War Department Report, 1902, vol. ix., p. 264.

[413] Delaware has 2050 square miles, Albay 1783.

[414] Correspondence Relating to War with Spain, vol. ii., p. 1249.

[415] President Roosevelt cabled Kelly, whom he had known in the West
many years before, congratulating him on the results of his cool
and determined fearlessness and presence of mind on that occasion,
but elaboration on the Surigao affair was not part of the insular
programme, which was one of irrepressible optimism as to the state
of public order.

[416] Every province in the Philippines is divided into so many
pueblos. Pueblo, in Spanish, means town. But the Spanish pueblo is more
like a township. It does not mean a continuous stretch of residences
and other buildings, but a given municipal area. Each pueblo is
likewise subdivided into barrios, dotted usually with hamlets, and
groups of houses.

[417] Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. 3, p. 92.

[418] Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. 1, p. 366.

[419] Senate Document 170, 58th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 16.

[420] Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1903, pt. 1, p. 32.

[421] 240, 326, Philippine Census, 1903, vol. ii., p. 123.

[422] The speech referred to in the text was made at Manila in
December, 1903, but the same "Philippines for the Filipinos" policy had
already been proclaimed much earlier. The Manila American of February
28, 1903, reprints from the Iloilo Times of February 21, 1903, an
account of Governor Taft's celebrated Iloilo speech of February 19,
1903, which was received with such profound chagrin by the American
business community in the Islands. There had been much bad blood
between the American colony at and about Iloilo and the native
Americano-phobes. The following is from the Iloilo paper's account
of Governor Taft's speech: "The Governor then gave some advice to
foreigners and Americans, remarking that if they found fault with the
way the government was being run here, they could leave the islands;
that the government was being run for the Filipinos."

[423] James LeRoy in The World's Work for December, 1903.

[424] A familiar instance of this will occur to any one acquainted
with the situation in the Islands for any considerable part of the
last ten years.

[425] Act No. 136, U. S. Philippine Commission, passed June 11, 1901.

[426] Act 1024, Philippine Commission, passed Oct. 10, 1903.

[427] There were five members of the original Taft Commission,
including President Taft.

[428] I neither forget nor gainsay the generally benevolent character
of his despotism; and having been a beneficiary of it myself I am
therefore disposed to see much of wisdom in the way it was exercised.

[429] Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123.

[430] Ib., vol. i., p. 58.

[431] Says Brigadier-General Wm. H. Carter, in his annual report for
1905 covering the Samar outbreak of 1904-5: "Whatever may have been
the original cause of the outbreak, it was soon lost sight of when
success had drawn a large proportion of the people away from their
homes and fields. Except in the largest towns it became simply a
question of joining the pulajans or being harried by them. In the
absence of proper protection thousands joined in the movement." See
War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 286.

[432] Bulao was situated on a high bluff on the left bank of a river
called the Bangahon. The Pulajans entered before daybreak, on July
21st. There was a stiff fight at Bulao, also, between our native
troops and the enemy on August 21st, but Calderon seems to have
left it out of his list. See Gen. Wm. H. Carter's Report for 1905,
War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 290. Capt. Cary Crockett,
a descendant of David Crockett, commanded the constabulary, and though
badly wounded himself, as were also half his command, he defeated
a force of Pulajans greatly outnumbering his, killing forty-one of
them. Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 3, p. 90, Report
of Col. Wallace C. Taylor. I think he was awarded a medal of honor
for his work. He certainly earned it.

"Pulajan" means "red breeches," the uniform of the mountain clans,
worn whenever they set out to give trouble.

[433] Of March 23d of the previous year, already described in a
previous chapter, where Luther S. Kelly--"Yellowstone" Kelly--saved
the American women by gathering them and a few men in the Government
House and bluffing the brigands off.

[434] The "Conant" peso, named for the noted fiscal expert,
Mr. Conant. It was worth fifty cents American money.

[435] The Fourteenth U. S. Infantry was stationed in garrison just
outside the town proper of Calbayog, which was three hours by steam
launch from the provincial capital, Catbalogan. But the depredations
might have been carried to just outside the line of the military
reservation, and the military folk would not have dared to make a
move save on request first made by the Civil Government at Manila. In
other words the above three villages were burned under their noses.

[436] One seems to get the stoicism better in the original, somehow,
so I give the body of the original Spanish, as it came to me:


    En el distrito de Motiong, municipio de Wright, provincia de
    Samar, Islas Filipinas, a primero de septiembre de mil novecientos
    quatro. Ante mi Peregrin Albano, consejal del mismo, y presente el
    Presidente de Sanidad Municipal, D. Tomas San Pablo y principales
    del mismo se procedio al enterramiento de los cadaveres victimas
    de los Pulajans en el sementerio de esta localidad el oficial de
    voluntarios, Rafael Rosales y otros voluntarios, Gualberto Gabane,
    Juan Pacle, Dionisio Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo, y
    particulares Eustaquia Sapiten y Apolinaria N: con otro tanto
    Pulajan desconocido; en conformidad de la carta oficial de la
    presidencia municipal de Wright de fecha de hoy registrada con
    el numero 136.

    Del citado enteramiento ha sido asistido por el Reverendo Padre
    Marcos Gomez y acompanado por toda la fuerza voluntaria del mismo
    por la muerte del oficial Rosales.


[437] See War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 290.

[438] Hill was Whittier's deputy at Llorente.

[439] Even if the municipal police had been like Cæsar's wife, they
were like chaff before the wind in a Pulajan foray, though they were
somewhat better if well led by some prominent and forceful man of
the community in an expedition after Pulajans.

[440] A disease of a dropsical variety, usually attacking the legs
first, which easily becomes epidemic. It had been the cause of many
of the 120 deaths in the Albay jail during the Ola insurrection. Ideal
conditions for it are a steady diet of poor rice and lack of exercise.

[441] It was not well to be too hasty. You might have the head of the
whole uprising in custody, or one of his most important lieutenants,
and find it out by the merest accident in the course of hearing a
case against some apparently abject "private of the rear rank."

[442] By unwarranted I mean without warrant. Nobody bothered much
with warrants. The times were too strenuous.

[443] See New York Tribune, Oct. 25, 1904.

[444] Ibid.

[445] Smith, Bell & Co. are an old British mercantile house, well
known in Manila and Hong Kong.

[446] The North American Review article by the writer, to which Judge
Ide was replying, appeared in the issue of that magazine for January
18, 1907, and could hardly have escaped the attention of anybody
concerned, having been given wide circulation; (1) by Mr. Andrew
Carnegie through pamphlet reprints; (2) by Hon. Wm. J. Bryan, in his
paper, the Commoner; (3) by Hon. James L. Slayden, M. C. of Texas,
through reprinting in the Congressional Record.

[447] Such as the breakwater at Manila, the road-building in various
provinces, etc.--all, however, be it remembered, being paid for by
the Filipino people, out of the insular revenues and assets.

[448] By Mrs. Campbell Dauncey.

[449] Words used by Governor-General James F. Smith, in an address
at the Quill Club, Manila, January 25, 1909.

[450] Delivered in 1902, after the Senator visited the Islands in 1901.

[451] The following is a copy of the letter accepting my resignation:

             Office of the Civil Governor of the Philippine Islands,
                                                   January 25, 1905.

    My dear Judge Blount:

    I have to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of
    yesterday in which you tender your resignation as Judge of First
    Instance at large. I regret extremely that your ill-health has made
    this course imperative. Under all the circumstances, however, I am
    satisfied that you have acted wisely, as I have feared for some
    time that you would be unable to perform the duties pertaining
    to your office because of your physical condition. I, therefore,
    though with much regret accept your resignation.

    At the same time I beg to express my appreciation of the faithful
    and efficient services you have rendered in the past. I hope very
    much that a rest and change of climate may have the effect of
    restoring you again to vigorous health, and I assure you that
    you carry with you my best wishes for your future prosperity
    and happiness.

        Sincerely yours,
        Luke E. Wright,
        Civil Governor.

    To the Honorable James H. Blount, Judge of First Instance at large,
    Manila, P. I.

[452] See annual report of the Governor-General for 1905, in Report
of the Philippine Commission for 1905, pt. 1, p. 85.

[453] Which delegates were denied admission to the Convention on the
ground that no American living in the Philippines could be in sympathy
with the Democratic programme as to them.

[454] An Englishwoman in the Philippines, by Mrs. Campbell Dauncey.

[455] War Department Report, 1905, vol. iii., p. 285.

[456] Army reports are usually made right after the expiration of
the American governmental fiscal year, June 30th.

[457] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 47.

[458] See Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 38. He
means Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna.

[459] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 212.

[460] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 52.

[461] For a copy of it, see the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, Philippine
Supreme Court Reports, vol. v., p. 89.

[462] Volume v., Philippine Reports.

[463] Mr. Garfield was President Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior.

[464] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2, p. 255.

[465] See page 227, Report of Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2.

[466] Report, Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 1, p. 37.

[467] See Report of Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 2, p. 228.

[468] Pt. 1, p. 36.

[469] Report of Taft Philippine Commission for 1900, p. 17.

[470] See Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 229.

[471] Amigo, in Spanish, means friend. Every non-combatant Filipino
with whom our people came in contact in the early days always claimed
to be an "amigo," and never was, in any single instance.

[472] See testimony of General MacArthur before the Senate Committee
of 1902, Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 1942.

[473] The adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill, which
bill proposes ultimate Philippine independence in 1921, is full of
the old insufferable drivel about "tribes," and of the rest of the
Root views of 1900.

[474] See Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 211.

[475] Part 1, p. 38.

[476] Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 37.

[477] See President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December,
1899, Congressional Record, December 5, 1899, p. 34.

[478] Provinces totalling about a million people.

[479] Report of U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 211.

[480] Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 38.

[481] Ibid., 1906; pt. 1, p. 225.

[482] To be absolutely accurate, there are 688 people classified as
"wild" in the Census figures as to Samar, and 265,549 are put down
as civilized; the total of population being 266,237. All the 388,922
people of Leyte are put down as civilized. See Philippine Census,
Table of Population, vol. ii., p. 123.

[483] Report of Philippine Commission for 1907, pt. 1, p. 195.

[484] See Report of Philippine Commission, 1908, pt. 1, p. 62.

[485] Tract. You speak of the small farmer's "late of hemp" in the
Philippines as you do of his "patch of cotton" in the United States.

[486] A picul is a bale of a given quantity--weight. "Breaking out
a picul of hemp" is analogous, colloquially, to "picking a bale
of cotton."

[487] See Congressional Record, December 5, 1905, p. 103.

[488] See Report of Philippine Commission, 1907, pt. 1, p. 215.

[489] Macbeth, Act V., Sc. 8.

[490] In June, 1912, Governor Forbes was still Governor-General.

[491] By "foreign" I mean, of course, American, i.e., non-resident.

[492] Hearings on Sugar, April 5, 1912.

[493] Introduced in the House of Representatives by Hon. W. A. Jones,
of Va., Chairman of the Committee on Insular Affairs of the House,
in March, 1912.

[494] See also, in connection with this table, the folding map of
the archipelago at the end of the book.

[495] The greatest defect of the Philippine Government was in the
beginning, and still is, that the Philippine Commission, which is
the executive authority, controls the appointment and assignment of
the trial judges, and also, largely, their chances for promotion
to the Supreme Bench of the Islands. The Justices of the Supreme
Court are appointed by the President of the United States, often on
recommendation of the Commission, but thereafter they are absolutely
independent. The trial judges ought also to be appointed by the
President of the United States.

[496] Republished, Congressional Record, January 9, 1900, p. 715.

[497] See Report U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, p. 89
et seq.

[498] Report Philippine Commission, 1906, pt. 1, p. 99.

[499] U. S. Philippine Commission Report, 1907, pt. 1, p. 149.

[500] See Report Philippine Commission for 1907, pt. 1, p. 80.

[501] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 142.

[502] Ibid., pp. 559-560.

[503] See War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 98.

[504] War Department Report, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60.

[505] From July 31, 1898, to May 24, 1900, we lost 1138 men by
disease. See special report of the Surgeon-General of the Army, Senate
Document 426, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. By the middle of 1900 our soldiers
had pretty well learned how to take care of themselves in the tropics.

[506] See vol. ii., p. 102.

[507] See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 887.

[508] Appalling, because there are forty-nine other provinces besides
Batangas.

[509] Vol. ii., p. 123.

[510] See page 78 of the special report of the Secretary of War
Taft on the Philippines, January 23, 1908, transmitted by President
Roosevelt to Congress, January 27, 1908, Senate Document 200, 60th
Cong., 1st Sess.

[511] Act 230, U. S. Philippine Commission.

[512] For the convenience of readers who do not constantly use the
metric system: A kilo is about 2.25 lbs.

[513] According to what part of archipelago grown.

[514] The Payne law of 1909 continued the export tax, etc.

[515] Dried cocoa-nut meat, used to make soaps and oils. I do not
deal with copra because it nearly all goes to Europe, principally
to Marseilles.

[516] Senate Document 200, 1908, Sixtieth Congress, First Session.

[517] I have myself seen a cloud of locusts three miles long.

[518] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1904, pt. 1, pp. 26-7.

[519] Report, U. S. Philippine Commission, 1905, pt. 1, pp. 72-3.

[520] Senator Newlands, North American Review, December, 1905. Senator
Newlands was one of the party.

[521] Part 1, p. 99.

[522] 137 1/2 lbs.

[523] President Roosevelt's message to Congress of January 27, 1908,
transmitting report of Secretary of War Taft on the Philippines.

[524] Before assuming to use these letters in this book, I sent them
to Mr. Carnegie and asked his permission to so use them. He returned
them to me with his consent entered on the back of one of them.

[525] 300,000 tons of sugar, 150,000,000 cigars, etc.

[526] Congressional Record, May 13, 1909, p. 2009.

[527] Mr. Perkins is chairman of the Finance Committee of the
International Harvester Company, a hundred million dollar corporation
owning divers subsidiary companies which make twine and cordage. See
Moody's Manual.

[528] The Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe.

[529] Paul Morton.

[530] Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. ii., p. 317.

[531] P. 252, ante.

[532] P. 255.

[533] P. 258.

[534] Pp. 258-9.

[535] The name is immaterial, but the grouping is convenient and
practicable, though not the only grouping practicable.

[536] See p. 267, ante.

[537] For June 21, 1907.

[538] In the article quoted from I named three men, adding "or
any three men of like calibre." One of the three was Justice Adam
C. Carson, of the Philippine Supreme Court, who has been a member
of the Philippine Judiciary since the Taft Civil Government was
founded in 1901. If this book has gained for me any character in
the estimation of any reader who is or may hereafter be clothed with
authority, I desire to say here, on the very highest public grounds,
that, in my judgment, Judge Carson is the most considerable man we
have out there now (1912)--a good man to have in an emergency. Though
not as learned in the law as his colleague, Justice Johnson--who is
quite the equal, as a jurist, of most of the Federal judges I know
in the United States, Judge Carson is a man of great breadth of view,
and is peculiarly endowed with capacity to handle men and situations
effectively and patriotically.

[539] Says the census of the Philippines of 1903, vol. ii., p. 15:
"The total population of the Philippine Archipelago on March 2,
1903, was 7,635,426. Of this number, 6,987,686 enjoyed a considerable
degree of civilization, while the remainder, 647,740, consisted of wild
people." By this same Census, the Moros are classified as uncivilized,
and the population of the island on which they live, Mindanao, is
given at about 500,000 (499,634, vol. ii., p. 126), of which about
half only (252,940) are Moros, the rest being civilized. The total of
the uncivilized people of the archipelago, according to the Census, is
647,740 (vol. ii., p. 123), less than 400,000, leaving out the Moros.

[540] Tagalo, Ilocano, and Visayan are the three main dialects
that have been evolved into written language by the patience of the
Spanish priests in the last couple of hundred years or so. Probably
five sixths of the people of the archipelago speak some one of these
three dialects. In fact they can hardly be called "dialects," for there
are plenty of books--novels, plays, grammars, histories, dictionaries,
etc.--written in Tagalo, Ilocano, or Visayan. Every educated Filipino
of the well-to-do classes grows up speaking Spanish and the dialect
of his native province, while the latter is the only language spoken
by the less fortunate people of his neighborhood, the poorer classes.

[541] This report is numbered Report 606, 62d Cong., 2d Sess., and
accompanies H. R. 22143 (the Jones Bill).

[542] According to the American Census of the Philippines, of 1903,
the total population of Mindanao is 499,634 (see vol. ii., p. 126),
of which 252,940 are Moros, and the rest civilized. In addition to
said 252,940 Moros on Mindanao, the adjacent islets contain some
25,000 Moros.

[543] See Senate Document 331, 1902, p. 339.