CHAPTER XXIII

"NON-CHRISTIAN" WORCESTER

The cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

In the year 1911, the editor of one of the great metropolitan papers told me that President Taft told him that the Honorable Dean C. Worcester, the Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Government, was "the most valuable man we have on the Philippine Commission." Certainly, reproduction of such an indorsement from so exalted a source shows a wish to be fair, in one who considers Professor Worcester the direst calamity that has befallen the Filipinos since the American occupation, neither war, pestilence, famine, reconcentration, nor tariff-wrought poverty excepted. During all my stay in the Philippines I never did have any official relations of any sort with the Professor, and only met him, casually, once, in 1901. The personal impression left from the meeting was distinctly that of an overbearing bully of the beggar-on-horseback type. Conscious of liability to error, and preferring that the reader should judge for himself, I give the main circumstances upon which this impression is based. Soon after the central insular government was set up, in 1901, Judge Taft and certain other members of the Philippine Commission, the Professor among the number, came into my judicial district to organize provincial governments. Their coming to each town where they stopped was telegraphed in advance, and before they reached the town where I then was holding court each one of the American colony of the town was designated by common consent to look after a fraction of the Taft party during their stay. The Professor fell to my lot. I always was unlucky. However, their stay was only a few hours. While they were there, I had occasion to observe that the Professor spoke Spanish quite well and so remarked to him. The well-bred reply was: "You'll find that I know a great many things you might not think I knew." Whether this was merely "The insolence of office" cropping out in a previously obscure young man suddenly elevated to high station, or whether it was an evidence of the Commissioner's idea of the relation of the Executive Department of a government to its Judiciary, is a question. [495] At all events I think the incident gives an insight into the man not irrelevant to what is hereinafter submitted. I have met a number of other Americans since who had received impressions similar to my own. And the Professor's whole subsequent course in the Islands corroborates those impressions. I have never talked to any American in the Philippines who had a good word for him. Of course, Power, like Property, will always have friends. So that even Professor Worcester may have some friends, among his fellow-countrymen in those far-away Islands. But it has already been made clear in a former chapter how entirely possible it is for a man occupying high position in the government out there to be very generally and cordially disliked by his own countrymen there and actually not know it. Whether this is true of Professor Worcester, or not, as a general proposition it is quite possible. One thing is certain, namely, that he is very generally and very cordially detested by the Filipinos. That this detestation is perfectly natural under the circumstances, and entirely justifiable, and that it is a cruel injustice to those people, as well as a monumental piece of folly, to keep the Professor saddled upon them, it is now in order to show.

In