CHAPTER XIV

THE TAFT COMMISSION

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

Kipling, Ballad of the Boer War.

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

It is not necessary to "vex the dull ear" of a mighty people much engrossed with their own affairs, by repetition of any further details concerning the original de facto alliance between Admiral Dewey and Aguinaldo. Suffice it to remind a people whose saving grace is a love of fair play, that, after the battle of Manila Bay, when Admiral Dewey brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Cavite, both the Admiral and his Filipino allies were keenly cognizant of the national purpose set forth in the declaration of war against Spain, and that the Filipinos could not have been expected to make any substantial distinction between the casual remarks of a victorious admiral on the quarter-deck of his flagship in May, remarks concurrent and consistent with actual treatment of the Filipinos as allies, and the imperious commands of a general ashore in December thereafter,

## acting under specific orders pursuant to the Treaty of Paris. The

one great fact of the situation, "as huge as high Olympus," they did grasp, viz., that both were representatives of America on the ground at the time of their respective utterances, and that one in December in effect repudiated without a word of explanation what the other had done from May to August. They had helped us to take the city of Manila in August, and, to use the current phrase of the passing hour, coined in this period of awakening of the national conscience to a proper attitude toward double-dealing in general, they felt that they had been "given the double cross." In other words they believed that the American Government had been guilty of a duplicity rankly Machiavellian. And that was the cause of the war.

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

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

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

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

## action on this sort of stuff, the presidential message outlines the

presidential purpose as follows--this in December, 1899, mind you:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He further says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The institution of municipal government under American auspices, of course, carried the idea of exclusive fidelity to the sovereign power of the United States. All the necessary moral obligations to that end were readily assumed by municipal bodies, and all outward forms of loyalty and decorum carefully preserved. But precisely at this point the psychologic conditions referred to above [meaning the unity against us], [342] began to work with great energy, in assistance of insurgent field operations. For this purpose most of the towns secretly organized complete insurgent municipal governments, to proceed simultaneously and in the same sphere as the American governments and in many instances through the same personnel--that is to say, the presidentes and town officials acted openly in behalf of the Americans and secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, paradoxical as it may seem, with considerable apparent solicitude for the interests of both. In all matters touching the peace of the town, the regulation of markets, the primitive work possible on roads, streets, and bridges, and the institution of schools, their open

## activity was commendable; at the same time they were exacting and

collecting contributions and supplies and recruiting men for the Filipino forces, and sending all obtainable military information to the Filipino leaders. Wherever, throughout the archipelago, there is a group of the insurgent army, it is a fact beyond dispute, that all contiguous towns contribute to the maintenance thereof. In other words, the towns, regardless of the fact of American occupation and town organization, are the actual bases for all insurgent military activities; and not only so in the sense of furnishing supplies for the so-called flying columns of guerrillas, but as affording secure places of refuge. Indeed, it is now the most important maxim of Filipino tactics to disband when closely pressed and seek safety in the nearest barrio; a manoeuvre quickly accomplished by reason of the assistance of the people and the ease with which the Filipino soldier is transformed into the appearance of a peaceful native. [343]

To contrast a cold, hard military fact involving the lives of American soldiers with a lot of political nonsense intended for consumption in the United States during a presidential election, the next paragraph is

## particularly interesting in the light of the cotemporaneous Taft view:

[344]

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

Then follows this bit of grim humor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On September 19, 1900, General MacArthur wired Secretary of War Root--General Corbin, the Adjutant-General of the Army, to be exact, but it is the same thing--describing what he calls "considerable

## activity" throughout Luzon, ominously stating that General Young (up

in the Ilocano country, into which we followed him and his cavalry in