CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly?

Paradise Lost.

Throughout the last year of Governor Taft's administration in the Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901-2 had precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public, already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of "the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa." [407] He did not want to order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated him to his native municipal police and constabulary, experimental outfits of doubtful loyalty, [408] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as it afterwards turned out, [409] for the maintenance of public order and for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, though not so enamored of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous institution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a year, in 1902-3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago, the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon, and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked, because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an attitude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration, but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft's administration of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible effect it might have on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, let us examine his course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley's original instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army;

the President had added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of the United States to give protection for property and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

* * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.

We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of citizen in the republic to-day than the man now [410] at the head of it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President Roosevelt, entitled "The First Civil Governor," which began as follows:

A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public life and American public men [411] remarked that the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make a first-class President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States, and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.

The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President Taft's policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person of the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion, viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley's original instructions to him, lest "the full performance of this obligation" might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend, Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged, then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled to a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it "concerns the honor and conscience of their country."

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned, together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then, that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of "civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God.

The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three distinct stages:

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated, patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of provinces, until the summer of 1902.

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things had been given time to settle down in them to normal.

These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from one of the military reports of 1902:

The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the guise of patriotism. [412]

Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those of the latter's colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa, etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion:

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware, [413] having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary, officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may, possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands, or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore, in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of the province are really sick of the war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it.

At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington, calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus:

I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar, and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats swirling out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend, whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never did have any application to Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that all those people received daily medical treatment.

For the correctness of the picture of conditions presented in the above hypothetical talk, I of course intend to be understood as vouching. If such a talk could have been had in 1903 by President Roosevelt with Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared his views, the Albay situation might have been handled creditably. But the Administration was in no position to be frank with the Opposition. No Administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given time there was always so much that it could not afford to re-open and explain. Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too closely as to why, when Secretary of War, he had gone around the country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. McKinley, and talking about "the patient and unconsenting millions" so anxious to be rid of "Aguinaldo and his band of assassins," when at that very time his (Mr. Root's) generals in the Philippines were engaged in activities, the magnitude of which may be inferred from a telegram sent from Washington to General Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly spare the 10th Infantry, and adding:

Imperative that we have immediate use of every available company that we can lay our hands on for service in the Philippines, [414]

although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets how nobly the army had labored in putting down "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." No, the Administration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not recapitulate here any more of the long train of reasons why, because they have all been fully explained in the preceding chapters. Of course President Roosevelt had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. He was not in constant daily contact with army officers at the War Department, familiar with the actual situation in the Philippines, as Mr. Root was. He was simply "sticking to Taft." Somewhere along about the time the military folk in the Philippines were scoffing at the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to the lack of a strong government, President Roosevelt had written his warm personal friend, Hon. George Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, who had been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, was then an official of the civil government of the Philippines, and later Governor of New Mexico, by appointment of Mr. Roosevelt: "Stick to Taft, George" or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt's attitude was simply that of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft who simply assumed that the Philippine Government was not going to tolerate impotence in the matter of protecting life and property. But everybody at both ends of the line was too deep in the mire of all the long and systematic withholding of facts from the American public which had been occurring ever since 1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own and Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do.

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way region as "the affair of March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for 1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town, and departed. But Mr. Taft's report disposes of the whole incident in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country, hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to present the gravity of the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified list," to say nothing of politically negligible native life therein. [415] Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair, Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under "civil" government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark, and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying "the peace and protection of a benign civil government." The writ of habeas corpus was never suspended for a moment.

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft remarks that if the prompt steps he did take (he had already described the prompt sending of the military to the scene) had not been taken, "the trouble might have spread." But the Surigao affair seemed to teach the civil government nothing in the matter of subsequent protection of life, nor did it lessen their persistence in relying on their constabulary for due extension of such protection in time of need.

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for avoiding calling on the military. When you are in a foreign country building a new government on the ruins of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you can about how the old one met its problems. The Spaniards had had the same problem in their day about not ordering out the military, because they did not have any military to order out. They were too poor to garrison the various provinces. They had long followed the plan, from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main towns of disturbed districts all the country population they could get to come in, and then acting on the assumption that all who did not come in were public enemies. This meant that when the country people came in, they simply looked out for themselves, while away from their homes, and farms, as best they could. Of course nobody at all looked after the farms, and nobody provided medical attention for the reconcentrados, or sanitary attention for the reconcentration camps. This general plan was formally sanctioned by the Commission, in so far as the following law sanctioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is section 6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all the constabulary problems, of which this was one. It read:

In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the outlying barrios [416] are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory raids--

think of permitting a country to get into any such condition when you have an abundance of American troops on hand available to prevent it--

and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or outlaws their sources of food supply, and it is not possible with the available police forces constantly to provide protection to such barrios--

there being all the time "available police forces," in the shape of regular troops, amply able to handle these unsettled conditions, which were the inevitable aftermath of lawlessness consequent on five or six years of guerrilla warfare--

it shall be within the power of the Governor-General, upon resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize the provincial governor to order that the residents of such outlying barrios be temporarily brought--

observe the length of time this may last is not limited--

within stated proximity to the poblacion, or larger barrios, of the municipality, there to remain until the necessity for such order ceases to exist.

To house and ration the reconcentrados, the following provision is made by the statute we are considering:

During such temporary residence, it shall be the duty of the provincial board, out of provincial funds, to furnish such sustenance and shelter as may be needed to prevent suffering among the residents of the barrios thus withdrawn.

The act also provides that during the course of the reconcentration, where the province does not happen to have the necessary ready cash, it may apply to the Commission, in distant Manila, for an appropriation to meet the emergency. What is to be done with those who starve during the temporary deficit, it does not say. If you must have reconcentration, to leave it to such agencies as the above, with the native police and constabulary as understudies, in lieu of availing yourself of the superb equipment of the American army, with all its facilities for handling great masses of people, as they did, for instance, after the San Francisco fire, is like preferring the Mulligan Guards to the Cold-stream Guards. Furthermore, there is no escape from the logic of the fact that reconcentration is essentially a war measure. The difference between what is lawful in war and what is lawful in peace is not a technical one. In war the innocent must often suffer with the guilty. In peace the theory at least is that only the guilty suffer. Hence it is that our Constitution is so jealous that in time of peace no man's life, liberty, or property, shall be taken from him without "due process of law," a provision which becomes inoperative in war times, being superseded by martial law. I know that the early question, "Does the Constitution follow the flag?" was answered by the Supreme Court of the United States in the negative as to the Philippines. But the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, under which we were governing the Philippines in 1903, and still govern them, known as the Philippine Government Act, extended to the Islands all the provisions of the Bill of Rights of our Constitution except the right of jury trial and the individual right to go armed--"bear arms." It specifically said in section 5:

No law shall be enacted in said Islands which shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the rural population of a whole district out of house and home, and make them come to town to live indefinitely on such public charity as may drain through the itching fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning meantime their growing crops, and the household effects they cannot bring with them, is depriving people of their property, and restraining them of their liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, in the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine Report, page 116, during an insurrection in Batangas, to control which, the presidential election of 1904 being then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court of the Philippines held that detention of people as reconcentrados under such circumstances "for the purpose of protecting them" was not an illegal restraint of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been suspended. This decision held it to be both the prerogative and the duty of the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when the public safety so required.

I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, the former wise and just judge, in whom is now vested by law the mighty power of filling vacancies on the highest court in this great country of ours, will seriously contend that that reconcentration law is not in direct violation of the above quoted section of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, for the government of the Philippines, and therefore null and void. The truth is, it was a piece of careless legislation, dealing with conditions that were essentially war conditions, under a government which was forever vowing that peace conditions existed, and determined not to admit the contrary. The civil government was like Lot's wife. It could not look back.

The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual provision permitting the governor to declare martial law in a given locality in his discretion. But the reconcentration law passed by the Philippine Commission was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority, so as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces to which it might be applied, regardless of how many lives it might cost. In its last analysis the reconcentration law was at once an admission of a duty to order out the military and a declaration of intention to neglect that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who enacted it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives how to maintain order themselves by letting them stew in the dregs of their own insurrection. Yet no one can read the Commission's own description of the widespread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without seeing, from their own showing, how obvious was their duty to have waited, originally, until law and order were restored, by not interfering with the war itself until it was over, and by keeping the country properly garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it was over, until something like real peace conditions should exist, on which to begin the work of post-bellum reconstruction. After all, it all gets us back to the original pernicious programme outlined in President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1899, wherein was announced the intention to send out the Taft Commission, which message also announced, in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley's purpose to begin the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient and unconsenting millions "loyal to our rule" should be rescued from the clutch of the hated Tagals.

Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the moral quality of executive action putting it in operation was not unlike that which would attach should the Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering the state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a dozen towns around Boston, issue a proclamation something like this:

The situation has grown so serious that your local police force, as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the situation. You will all, therefore, thrust your tooth-brushes, night-gowns, and a change of clothing, into the family grip, and assemble on the Boston Common and in the public gardens, there to remain until the necessity for this order ceases to exist, and we will there take the best care of you we can, as was done in the case of the San Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order out the military.

If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought at the time to the validity of the reconcentration law, in its relation to the "due process of law" clause of the Philippine Government Act, which none of them probably did, he must simply have justified the means by the benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so much better than Congress possibly could, the needs of the local situation. But if you read this law in the light of a knowledge of its practical operation, there is more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon's friend's "corpse-carcass stench" and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling out on their orgies over the dead" than there is of benevolence. It really was unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted reconcentration to the native police and constabulary the native governors had, and it was wholly indefensible for them to take the liberty of violating an act of Congress in order to live up to their pet fiction about the war being "entirely over."

After the term of court at Surigao in the month of May, 1903, I was sent to Misamis province, where I remained until September, handling an insurrection down there. This province also was nominally in a state of peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of the existence of the insurrection by suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Curiously enough, as I wrote Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of disturbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their movement was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection in Albay I dealt with later, but they were by no means unmitigated cut-throats. I have often wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed purpose was to subvert the existing government. The use of this word "insurrection" in connection with these various disturbances recalls a pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the Supreme Bench of the Islands. Some of my friends, members of the bar of my district, got up a petition to the then Governor-General setting forth in most partial terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in the Philippines, in the candor of informal social intercourse, all of us always called a spade a spade, i.e., we called an insurrection an insurrection, instead of referring to the disturbance in the guarded and euphemistic terms which you find in all the official reports intended for home consumption. So in their petition, these gentlemen recited, among my other supposed qualifications, that I had held court in three different provinces "during insurrections in the same."

The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to deal with during Governor Taft's administration as Governor of the Philippines. This was the insurrection headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of this man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Government in connection with the Albay disturbances of 1902-3 is in the report of the colonel commanding the constabulary for the district which included Albay, Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903. [417] This report contains a sort of diary of events for the year preceding the date of it. An entry for October 28, 1902, begins:

Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon Ola, chief of the ladrones in this province, with a view of inducing him to surrender.

Think of this great government negotiating with the leader of a band of thieves who were openly and flagrantly defying its authority! The entry proceeds:

After many promises and conferences extending over a period of forty days, during which hostilities were suspended, Ola broke off negotiations and withdrew his entire force and a large number of additional recruits that he had secured during the armistice.

Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to have had a total command ranging at various times from a thousand to 1500 men. And I think Colonel Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him, first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. Ola also makes an official reappearance in the report of the Governor of Albay Province for 1904. [418] It there appears that reconcentration was begun in Albay as part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of that year. Says this report of the Governor of Albay concerning reconcentration:

Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in a limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and ordinary living accommodations.

The Governor does not say how large the "unusual volume of persons" was that was herded into the reconcentration zones, nor does he furnish any mortality statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was of the awful mortality and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend correspondent encountered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. The number of people affected by reconcentration in Albay and an adjacent province that caught the contagion of unrest and had to be given similar treatment, was about 300,000. [419]

In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insurrection of 1902-3, Governor Taft says: "A reign of terror was inaugurated throughout the province." He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied the reconcentration tactics. In the same report he describes what is to my mind the most humiliating incident connected with the whole history of the American Government in the Philippines, viz., Vice-Governor Wright's visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance of the peace-at-any-price policy that the Manila Government was bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil government's dealings with His Excellency, the Honorable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands, that General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino member of the Commission, went down to Albay and "talked to the people," the idea apparently being that those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should go after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out the military, and summarily putting a stop to the reign of terror as became the dignity of this nation. I think these talks had something to do with the origin of the charge afterwards made that immunity was promised Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. Of course General Wright made no such promises. But the idea got out in the province that the word was, "Get the guns," the inference being that if Ola and his people would come in and surrender their guns they would be lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philippine Problem, Professor Willis, at page 140, gives what purports to be an agreement signed by Colonel Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Bandholtz promises Ola immunity, and also promises a number of other things which are on their face rankly preposterous. Ola was much on the witness stand before me during that term of court, and, everything "came out in the wash." He was represented by competent, intelligent, and fearless Filipino counsel, and they did not suggest the existence of any such document. No proof of any offer of immunity was adduced before me. I think Ola simply finally decided to throw himself on the mercy of the government, on the idea that there would be more joy over the one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that are already saved. He was probably as much afraid that Governor Taft would order out the military as the wretched pacificos were that he would not. He immediately turned state's evidence against all the men under him of whose individual actings and doings he had any knowledge, the prosecuting attorney making, with my full approval, a promise to ask executive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with the practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions throughout the English-speaking world.

The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be somewhat appreciated from the financial loss it occasioned. Says Governor Taft, in his report for 1903:

The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production and sale have been interfered with to the extent of some ten to twelve millions of dollars Mexican [which is equivalent to five or six million dollars American money]. [420]

As the population of the province was about 250,000, [421] a loss of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for the six months or so of reconcentration during which the farms were neglected. This would be equivalent to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length of time to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which is the total population figure for the United States according to the Census of 1910.

It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, that Ola finally surrendered with some five hundred or six hundred men. I was sent to Albay about the middle of November, to assist the regular judge of the district, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of the case arising out of the Ola performances. Conditions at the time were also very much perturbed in various neighboring and other provinces, and the courts and constabulary were kept very busy.

An incident recurs to memory just here which illustrates the state of public order. But before relating it a decent respect to the opinions of the reader requires me to state my own attitude toward that whole situation at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind that as society stands at present, capital punishment is a necessary part of any sensible scheme for its protection. I have no compunction about hanging any man for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe it to the community as a measure of protection to your life and mine and all others. So far as public order was concerned in the country now under consideration in 1903, the "civil" government was simply a well-meaning sham, a military government with a civil name to it. When the constabulary would get in the various brigands, cut-throats, etc., who might be terrorizing a given district, some of them masquerading as patriots, others not even doing that, the courts would try them. None of the judges cared anything about any particular brigand in any given case except to find out how many, if any, murders, rapes, arsons, etc., he had committed during the particular reign of terror of which he had been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven, the punishment would always be "a life for a life." And you have no idea how absolutely wanton some of the murders were, and how cruelly some of the young women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated after they were carried off to the mountains. I would hate to try to guess how much more of this sort of thing would have had to occur in Albay in 1903 than did occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive Albay of "the protection of a benign civil government"--one of the pet expressions of contemporaneous official literature--and say the word to the army to take hold of the situation and give the people decent protection. But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly after I reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. of the district court, while my colleague, Judge Carson, held Part I. we had a call from a third judge, Judge Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some other perturbed region. I think that by that time, late in November, 1903, Governor Taft must have known he was soon to leave the Islands to become Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able to make the best showing possible, in his farewell annual report as Governor, as to the "tranquillity" conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger came to see us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge Carson had had a gallows erected near the public square of the town, for the execution of some brigand he had convicted, whether it was for maltreating some poor farmer's daughter until she died, or burying an American alive, or what, I do not now recollect. But in going around the town some one suggested, as we passed this gallows, that we go up on it to get the view. So we went--the three of us. Then each looked at the other and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge Carson smiled and dispelled the momentary sombreness by repeating with grim humor, an old Latin quotation he happened to remember from his college days at the University of Virginia: Haec olim meminisse juvabit ("It will be pleasant to remember these things hereafter").

The Ola insurrection had continued from October, 1902, to October, 1903, without suspension of civil government. During that period the jail had been filled far beyond its reasonable capacity most of the time. It sometimes had contained many hundreds. As to the sanitary conditions, in passing the jail building one day in company with one of the provincial officials, he remarked to me, nonchalantly: "It's equivalent to a death sentence to put a man in that jail." I afterwards found out that this was no joke. During most of my visit to the province I was too busy holding court and separating the sheep from the goats, to think much of anything else. But toward the close of the term, after Christmas, after Governor Taft had left the Islands and gone home to be Secretary of War, an incident happened that produced a profound impression on me, suggested a new view-point, and started troubled doubts as to whether the whole Benevolent Assimilation business was not a mistake born of a union of avarice and piety in which avarice predominated--doubts which certain events of the following year, hereinafter related, converted in conviction that any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos would be better for all concerned than any government we could give them, hampered as we always will be by the ever-present necessity to argue that government against the consent of the governed is not altogether wrong, and that taxation without representation may be a blessing in disguise. The Yule-tide incident above alluded to was this. Most of the docket having been disposed of, and there being a lull between Christmas and New Year's day which afforded time for matters more or less perfunctory in their nature, the prosecuting attorney brought in rough drafts of two proposed orders for the court to sign. One was headed with a list of fifty-seven names, the other with a list of sixty-three names. Both orders recited that "the foregoing" persons had died in the jail--all but one between May 20 and Dec. 3. 1903 (roughly six and one-half months) as will appear from an examination of the dates of death--and concluded by directing that the indictments be quashed. The writer was only holding an extraordinary term of court there in Albay, and was about to leave the province to take charge of another district to which Governor Taft had assigned him before leaving the Islands. The newly appointed regular judge of the district, Judge Trent, now of the Philippine Supreme Court, was scheduled soon to arrive. Therefore the writer did not sign the proposed orders but kept them as legal curios. A correct translation of one of them appears below, followed by the list of names which headed the other (identical) order:

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, EIGHTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT

In the Court of First Instance of Albay

The United States against

Cornelio Rigorosa died December 3, 1903 Fabian Basques died September 25, 1903 Julian Nacion died October 14, 1903 Francisco Rigorosa died October 18, 1903 Anacleto Solano died November 25, 1903 Valentin Cesillano died November 6, 1903 Felix Sasutona died September 26, 1903 Marcelo de los Santos died June 3, 1903 Marcelo Patingo died November 15, 1903 Julian Raynante died September 7, 1903 Dionisio Carifiaga died October 4, 1903 Felipe Navor died September 17, 1903 Luis Nicol died November 23, 1903 Balbino Nicol died September 23, 1903 Damiano Nicol died November 23, 1903 Leoncio Salbaburo died November 20, 1903 Catalino Sideria died July 25, 1903 Marcelo Ariola died October 26, 1903 Francisco Cao died November 26, 1903 Martin Olaguer died November 13, 1903 Juan Neric died November 16, 1903 Eufemio Bere died November 21, 1903 Julian Sotero died October 30, 1902 Juan Payadan died September 10, 1903 Benedicto Milla died July 30, 1903 Placido Porlage died June 13, 1903 Gaudencio Oguita died October 11, 1903 Alberto Cabrera died September 8, 1903 Julian Payadan died August 4, 1903 Eusebio Payadan died August 10, 1903 Leonardo Rebusi died November 2, 1903 Julian Riobaldis died October 2, 1903 Victor Riobaldis died October 23, 1903 Mauricio Balbin died September 27, 1903 Tomas Rigador died July 23, 1903 Miguel de los Santos died July 28, 1903 Eustaquio Mapula died November 18, 1903 Eugenio Lomibao died November 1, 1903 Francisco Luna died August 7, 1903 Gregorio Sierte died October 31, 1903 Teodoro Patingo died November 21, 1903 Teodorico Tua died September 23, 1903 Ceferino Octia died November 10, 1903 Graciona Pamplona died September 12, 1903 Felipe Bonifacio died November 26, 1903 Baltazer Bundi died October 12, 1903 Julian Locot died October 13, 1903 Francisco de Punta died August 20, 1903 Pedro Madrid died August 24, 1903 Felipe Pusiquit died July 17, 1903 Rufo Mansalan died July 14, 1903 Ignacio Titano died June 20, 1903 Alfonso Locot died June 29, 1903 Gil Locot died May 23, 1903 Regino Bitarra died September 7, 1903 Bonifacio Bo died August 2, 1903 Francisco de Belen died September 29, 1903

DECREE

The defendants above named, charged with divers crimes, having died in the provincial jail by reason of various ailments, upon various dates, according to official report of the jailer, it is

ORDERED BY THIS COURT, That the cases pending against the said deceased persons be, and the same are hereby, quashed, the costs to be charged against the government.

Judge of the Twelfth District acting in the Eighth.

Albay, December 28, 1903.

The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. As already indicated, the second order was like the first. It contained the names of sixty-three other deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit:

Anacleto Avila died September 2, 1903 Gregorio Saquedo died July 21, 1903 Francisco Almonte died October 11, 1903 Faustino Sallao died October 9, 1903 Leocadio Pena died October 16, 1903 Juan Ranuco died October 16, 1903 Esteban de Lima died February 4, 1903 Estanislao Jacoba died October 7, 1903 Macario Ordiales died October 19, 1903 Laureano Ordiales died October 27, 1903 Reimundo Narito died October 4, 1903 Antonio Polvorido died September 12, 1903 Norverto Melgar died June 14, 1903 Bartolome Rico died November 8, 1903 Simon Ordiales died September 13, 1903 Candido Rosari died September 29, 1903 Saturnino Vuelvo died October 18, 1903 Vicente Belsaida died May 26, 1903 Felix Canaria died June 12, 1903 Pedro Cuya died July 26, 1903 Evaristo Dias died July 24, 1903 Felix Padre died July 8, 1903 Alberto Mantes died August 7, 1903 Joaquin Maamot died September 5, 1903 Santiago Cacero died May 28, 1903 Hilario Zalazar died July 26, 1903 Tomas Odsinada died October 1, 1903 Julian Oco died October 4, 1903 Julian Lontac died August 27, 1903 Ambrosio Rabosa died September 19, 1903 Mariano Garcia died September 12, 1903 Ramon Madrigalejo died August 19, 1903 Albino Oyardo died October 1, 1903 Felipe Rotarla died September 29, 1903 Urbano Saralde died October 5, 1903 Gil Mediavillo died June 13, 1903 Egidio Mediavillo died June 16, 1903 Mauricio Losano died October 5, 1903 Bernabe Carenan died September 27, 1903 Pedro Sagaysay died September 29, 1903 Laureano Ibo died August 5, 1903 Vicente Sanosing died July 17, 1903 Francisco Morante died June 10, 1903 Anatollo Sadullo died September 16, 1903 Lucio Rebeza died August 27, 1903 Eugenio Sanbuena died August 13, 1903 Nicolas Oberos died August 26, 1903 Eusebio Rambillo died September 13, 1903 Tomas Rempillo died August 19, 1903 Daniel Patasin died August 19, 1903 Ignacio Bundi died September 7, 1903 Juan Locot died May 23, 1903 Zacarias David Padilla died August 7, 1903 Juan Almazar died September 12, 1903 Rufino Quipi died June 13, 1903 Antonio Brio died June 13, 1903 Timoteo Enciso died September 12, 1903 Hilario Palaad died August 28, 1903 Ventura Prades died May 24, 1903 Alejandro Alevanto died May 22, 1903 Rufino Pelicia died May 20, 1903 Alejo Bruqueza died July 19, 1903 Prudencio Estrada died September 15, 1903

These lists were printed in an article by the author which appeared in the North American Review for January 18, 1907, which article was reprinted by Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, in the Congressional Record for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that President Taft saw the article, and that if it had contained any inaccuracies they would long since have been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in 1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta, on a small scale.

If the military authorities had had charge of the Albay insurrection and of the prisoners in the Albay jail in 1903, it is safe to say that the great majority of those who died would have lived. But to have ordered out the troops would have been to abandon the official fiction that there was peace.

Of Ola's five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and I, assisted by the chief prosecuting attorney of the government, Hon. James Ross, turned several hundred loose. Another large batch were disposed of under a vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on the roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, usually six to twelve months. Most of the remainder, a few score, we tried under the sedition law, and sent to Bilibid, the central penitentary at Manila, for terms commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. The more serious cases were sent up for longer terms under the brigandage law. We indulged in no more maudlin sentiment about those precious scamps who had been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally invoking its name in the course of a long season of preying upon their respectable fellow-countrymen than Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would have indulged. I am quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch than Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown to have committed crimes usually punished capitally in this country that we sentenced to death--a dozen or more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the state. He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting attorney to convict the men who had followed him for a year. He was given a sentence of thirty years (by Judge Carson), as a sort of expression of opinion of the most Christian attitude possible concerning his real deserts, but his services as state's evidence entitled him to immunity, and for that very good and sufficient reason Judge Carson, Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and myself so recommended to the Governor.

Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he was quite an ignorant man. But to show what his control must have been over the rank and file of his men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going up to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, Ola was aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as he was a prospective recipient of executive clemency, though the guards kept an eye on him, he was allowed the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up, the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom sometime after midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, and went back to the storm steering-gear at the stern of the ship, to spend the rest of the night more comfortably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassignable cause, I realized that the crown of another head was tangent to the crown of my own, and occupying part of my pillow. It was Ola, the chief of the brigands. I raised up, shook the intruder, and said: "Hello, Ola, what are you doing here?" He wakened slowly. He had no idea of any first-class passenger being back there, and had taken it for granted that I was one of the ship's crew, when he decided to share my pillow. As soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his feet with profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck until morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect of the incident on my recommendation concerning himself.

After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went back to sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened by some of the guards chattering. But I heard Ola, who had apparently been keeping watch over my august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious tone to the guards, his keepers, "Hush, the judge is sleeping." They looked at the brigand chief, and cowed, obeyed.

Ola was pardoned.