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 Jose, 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 senoritas 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."