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 mediaeval 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 regime 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 regime 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 regime 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 aeons of time behind the Asiatic in development; the latter is aeons 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 regime under a military name. We were now, in the Philippines, serving a military regime 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 oL 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 regime 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.