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 regime. "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 sueno de tres siglos Hermanos Despertad! Gritando "Fuera Espana! 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 regime.

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 feted. While they were there, Tirona transferred his authority to a civil regime. 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 protege?

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 Tino 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 Tino 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 Tino 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.