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 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.

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.

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’être 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.

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

He further says:

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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

And now I come to one of the most important things that all my researches into the official records of our government concerning the Philippine Islands have developed. On December 28, 1900, General MacArthur reports by cable the contents of some important insurgent papers captured in Cavite Province about that time. The Filipinos have a great way of reducing to writing, or making minutes of, whatever occurs at any important conference. This habit they did not abandon in the field. The papers in question belonged to General Trias, the Lieutenant-General commanding all the insurgent armies in the field, and, next to Aguinaldo, the highest official connected with the revolutionary government. One of these papers, according to General MacArthur’s despatch of December 28th, purported to be the minutes of a certain meeting had October 11th previous, between General Trias and the Japanese Consul at Manila. As to whether or not the paper was really authentic, General MacArthur says: “I accept it as such without hesitation.” Communicating the contents of the paper he says:

I consider these negotiations of the Japanese Government with the Philippine insurgents important to be related here because they have never been generally known, for the good reason, of course, that the President of the United States cannot take the public into his confidence about such grave and delicate matters when they occur. The incident is not “ancient history” relatively to present-day problems, for the following reasons:

(1) Because it is credibly reported and currently believed in the United States that in Japan, during the cruise of our battleship fleet around the world in 1907, one of the reception committee of Japanese officers who welcomed our officers was recognized by one of the latter as having been, not a great while before that, a servant aboard an American battleship.

(2) Because of the following incident, related to me, in 1911, without the slightest injunction of secrecy, by the Director of Public Health of the Philippine Islands, then on a visit to the United States. Shortly before the Director’s said visit home, while he was out in one of the provinces, there was brought to his attention a Filipino with a broken arm. There was a Japanese doctor in the town, at least a Japanese who had a sign out as a doctor. The Director carried the sufferer to the “doctor,” not being a surgeon himself. The “doctor” turned out to be a civil engineer, who had been making maps and plans of fortifications. The plans were found in his possession.

The reason I said in the chapter before this one that Mr. Root is a dangerous man to Republican institutions was because he is of the type who are constantly finding situations which they consider it best for the people not to know about. After the McKinley election of 1900 was safely “put over,” Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, let Judge Taft go ahead and ride his dove-of-peace hobby-horse in the Philippines, duly repeating to the American people all the cheery Taft cluckings to said horse, at a time when the real situation is indicated by such grim correspondence as the following cablegram dated January 29, 1901:

But let us turn from this sorry spectacle of Mr. Root pulling the wool over the eyes of his countrymen to make them believe the Filipinos were not quite so unconsenting as they seemed to be, and again look at the sheer splendor of American military ability to get anything done the Government wants done. I refer to the capture of Aguinaldo.

One of the most eminent lawyers in this country once said to me, “I would not let that man Funston enter my house.” I tried to enlighten him, but as I happened to be a guest in his house at the time, which entitled him to exemption from light if he insisted—which he did—General Funston and he have continued to miss what might have been a real pleasure to them both. The following is, as briefly as I can dispose of it, the story of the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901.

At all events, the expedition was very much refreshed by the food and highly delighted at the proof, contained in the sending of it, that Aguinaldo did not suspect a ruse. But now came one of the many emergencies which had to be met by quick wit in the course of that memorable adventure. Aguinaldo sent word to leave the “prisoners” under a guard in one of the huts by the sea-shore, where there was one of the Aguinaldo retainers in charge, an old Tagalo. After a hurried, whispered conversation, “prisoner” Funston instructed “Commanding Officer” Placido to go ahead with his main column and then a little later send back a forged written order purporting to be from Aguinaldo, for the “prisoners” to come on also. This was shown to the old Tagalo, thus disarming suspicion on his part. But now came the “closest shave” they had. The column met a detachment from Aguinaldo’s headquarters sent down with instructions to relieve the necessarily worn-out guard of the newly arrived “re-inforcements” that were supposed to be guarding the five prisoners at the beach, and let said guard come on up to headquarters with the rest of the “re-inforcements,” the idea being to still leave the prisoners at the beach so they would not learn definitely as to the Aguinaldo whereabouts. Detaining the officer commanding this detachment for a moment or so on some pretext, the “Commanding Officer” of the “re-inforcements” whispered to a Maccabebe corporal to run back and tell General Funston and the rest of the “prisoners” to jump in the bushes and hide. This they did, lying within thirty feet of the detachment, as it passed them en route for the beach. Of course a fight would have meant considerable firing, and the quarry might hear it, take fright, and escape. Finally they reached Palanan, the “prisoners” quite far in the rear. Placido got safely into Aguinaldo’s presence, followed at a short distance by the main body of his Maccabebes. Aguinaldo’s life-guard of some fifty men, neatly uniformed, presented arms as Placido entered the insurgent headquarters building, and thereafter waited at attention outside. Then the worthy Placido entertained the honorable Presidente with a few cock-and-bull stories about the march across country, etc., made obediently to the President’s order, keeping a weather eye out of the window all the time. As soon as the Maccabebes had come up and formed facing the Aguinaldo life-guard, Placido went to the window and ordered them to open fire. This they did, killing two of the insurgents and wounding their commanding officer. The rest fled, panic-stricken, by reason of the surprise. Then Placido, a very stout individual, grabbed Aguinaldo, who only weighs about 115 pounds, threw him down, and sat on him, until General Funston, the Hazzards, Mitchell, and Newton arrived. The orders were iron-clad that under no circumstances, if it could be avoided, was Aguinaldo to be killed. His signature to proclamations telling the people to quit the war was going to be needed too much. The party rested two days and then set out for the coast again, on March 25th, the day the Vicksburg had agreed to meet them. “At noon” says General Funston, “we again saw the Pacific, and far out on it a wisp of smoke—the Vicksburg coming in!” In due course they reached Manila Bay. The old palace of the Spanish captains-general, then occupied by our commanding general, is up the Pasig River, accessible from the bay by launch. By that method General Funston took his precious prisoner to the palace without the knowledge of a soul in the great city of Manila. He arrived before General MacArthur had gotten up. In a few minutes the General came out. “Where is Aguinaldo?” said he, dryly. He supposed General Funston simply had some details to tell, like the commanding officers of hundreds of other expeditions that had gone out before that on false scents in search of the illustrious but elusive Presidente. “Right here in this house,” said General Funston. General MacArthur could hardly believe his ears. A few days later, General Funston walked into General MacArthur’s office. The latter said; “Well, Funston, they do not seem to have thought much in Washington of your performance. I am afraid you have got into trouble.” “At the same time he handed me,” says General Funston in the Scribner Magazine article above mentioned, “a cablegram announcing my appointment as a brigadier-general in the regular army.”

The time has come, however, when they [the Filipino people] find their advance along this path [the path of their aspirations] impeded by an irresistible force. * * * Enough of blood, enough of tears and desolation.

Soon after this General Tiño surrendered in General Young’s district, and in another part of northern Luzon, General Mascardo, commanding the insurgent forces in the provinces of Bataan and Zambales, heretofore described as “the west wing of the great central plain,” also surrendered. In the latter part of June, General Cailles, with whom we have already had occasion to become acquainted, in connection with Judge Taft’s “Mafia on a large scale,” also surrendered in Laguna Province. After that, there was never any more trouble in northern Luzon. But during the spring of 1901, the Commission had been very busy organizing the provinces of southern Luzon under civil government, thus cutting short the process of licking it into submission and substituting a process of loving it into that state through good salaries and otherwise—a policy which postponed the final permanent pacification of that ill-fated region for several years, as hereinafter more fully set forth.

The unconditional absoluteness with which Judge Taft acted from the beginning on the assumption that the Filipinos would make a distinction between civil and military rule, and that their objection to us was because we had first sent soldiers to rule them and not civilians, and that these objections would vanish before the benignant sunlight of a government by civilians, is one of the great tragedies of all history, considering the countless lives it eventually cost. As a matter of fact, the Filipino objection had little or no relation to the kind of clothes we wore, whether they were white duck or khaki. Their objection was to us, i.e., to an alien yoke. However, to heal the bleeding wounds of war, the Filipinos were benevolently told to forget it, and a civil government was set up on July 4, 1901, pursuant to the amiable delusion indicated. That it has never yet proved a panacea, and why, will be developed in the next and subsequent chapters, but only in-so-far as such development throws light on the present situation—which it is the whole object of this book to do.

And now a few words by way of concluding the present chapter, as preliminary to the inauguration of a civil government, cannot be misconstrued, though they come from one who held office under it. I have certainly made clear that Judge Taft and his colleagues were as honest in their delusion about how popular they were with the Filipinos as many other public men who have been known to have hobbies, and my remarks must be understood as based on the comprehensive bird’s-eye view which we have had of the whole situation from the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898 to the end of June, 1901, as a summation of that situation. It is quite true that all contemporary history is as much affected by its environment as the writer of it is by his own limitations. But it certainly seems clear now that, in regard to the Philippine problem presented in 1898 by the decision to keep the islands, the American people were played upon by the politicians for the next few years thereafter, sometimes on the idea that the Filipino people were not a people but only a jumble of semi-civilized tribes incapable of any intelligent notion of what independence meant, and sometimes on the idea that while there was no denying that they were indeed a civilized, homogeneous, Christian people, yet the great majority of them did not want independence, and would prefer to be under a strong alien government. But the key-note to the McKinley policy from the beginning, his answer to the eager question of his own people, was that there was no real absence of the consent of the governed. In Senator Lodge’s history of the war with Spain, written in 1899, there is a description of the long struggle for independence in Cuba, whose existence Spain denied year after year until we decided that patience had ceased to be a virtue, which description is so strikingly applicable to the situation in the Philippines during the first years of American rule that I cannot refrain from quoting it here:

By the same high token the Philippine question will always remain “the unsettled question” until it is settled right. In other words, the American occupation of the Philippines, having been originally predicated on the idea that the Filipino people did not really want independence, a fiction which political expediency incident to government by parties inexorably compelled it to try to live up to thereafter, took the form, in 1901, of a civil government founded upon a benevolent lie, which expressed a hope, not a fact, a hopeless hope that can never be a fact. And that is what has been the matter with it ever since.

The papers ’id it ’andsome,

But you bet the army knows.