Chapter XVIII · Governor Wright—1904

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard.

Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.

Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903, to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was no more hammering it into the American business men having money invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their “little brown brother,” for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans, because, soon after he came into power, he “let the cat out of the bag,” by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft’s “Philippines for the Filipinos” need not cause any specially billowy sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were wholly unfit for self-government—all of which, in effect, meant that Governor Taft had been merely “Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.”

The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and all feel: “Alackaday! Our true friend has departed.” But as Secretary of War Taft, after four years more of trying to please both sides, at home, at last frankly told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the opening of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, practically just what Governor Wright had begun to tell them from the moment his predecessor had exchanged the parting tear with them on the water-front at Manila in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy of uncompromising honesty on the present political situation, may easily be guessed.

Governor Wright’s method of repudiating the Taft straddle took for its key-note, in lieu of “The Philippines for the Filipinos,” the slogan “An Equal Chance for All.” What Governor Wright meant was merely that there would be no more browbeating of Americans to make them love their little brown brother as much as Governor Taft was supposed to love him, but that everybody would be treated absolutely alike and nobody coddled. However, the Filipinos of course knew that they could not compete with American wealth and energy, and so did the Americans in the islands. So what the Wright slogan, unquestionably fair as was its intent, inexorably meant to everybody concerned except the dignified, straightforward and candid propounder of it, was, in effect, the British “White Man’s Burden” or Trust-for-Civilization theory, a theory whereunder the white man who wants some one else’s land goes and takes it on the idea that he can put it to better use than the owner. Thus early did the original “jollying” Mr. Taft had given them become transparent to his little brown brother. Thus early did it become clear to the Filipinos that behind the mask of executive protestations that they shall some day have independence when fit for it, lurks a set determination industriously to earn for an indeterminate number of generations yet to come

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard.

This book has been written, up to this point, in vain, if the preceding chapters have not made clear how much political expediency, looking to the welfare of a party in power naturally seeking to continue in power, necessarily dominates Philippine affairs under American rule. We have observed under the microscope of history, made available by the official documents now accessible, the long battle between the political expediency germ and the independence bug which began in General Anderson’s dealings with Aguinaldo and continued through General Merritt’s and General Otis’s régimes. We have seen General MacArthur’s attempt at a wise surgical operation to excise the independence bug from the Philippine body politic—so that the expediency germ might die a natural death from having nothing to feed on. We have seen that operation interfered with by the Taft Commission during the presidential campaign of 1900, because the men in control of the republic could not ignore considerations of political expediency; and we saw the consequent premature setting up of the civil government in 1901, with all its dire consequences in the then as yet unconquered parts of the archipelago, southern Luzon, and some of the Visayan Islands. We have observed the effective though heroic local treatment administered to the Philippine body politic by General Bell in Batangas in 1901–2, with a view of killing off the independence bug there. We have seen the fierce struggle between some of the bug’s belated spawn and the expediency germ’s now more emboldened forces in Albay in the off year, 1903. We are now to take our fifth year’s course in the colonial department of politico-entomological research, the presidential year 1904.

It was the way the Samar insurrection of 1904–5-6 was handled which finally convinced me that the Filipinos would not kill any more of each other in a hundred years than we have killed, or permitted to be killed, of them, in the fell process of Benevolent Assimilation.

American imperialism is not honest, like the British variety. American imperialism knows that Avarice was its father, and Piety its mother, and that it takes after its father more than it does after its mother. British imperialism frankly aims mostly to make the survivors of its policies happy, not the people it immediately operates on. American imperialism pretends to be ministering to the happiness of the living, and, though it realizes that it is not a success in that line, it resents identification with its British cousin, by sanctimonious reference to the alleged net good it is doing. Yet in its moments of frankness it says, with an air of infinite patience under base ingratitude, “Well, they will be happy in some other generation,” and that therefore the number of people we have had or may have, to kill, or permit to be killed, in the process of Benevolent Assimilation, is wholly negligible. This is simply the old, old argument that the end justifies the means, the argument that has wrought more misery in the world than any other since time began.

When Judge Taft, General Wright, and their colleagues of the Taft Commission, came out to the Philippines in 1900, they came full of the McKinley convictions about a people whom neither they or Mr. McKinley had ever seen, bound hand and foot by political necessity to square the freeing of Cuba with the subjugation of the Philippines. A perfectly natural evolution of this attitude resulted in the position they at once took on arriving in the Islands, viz., that to do for the Filipinos what we have done for the Cubans would mean a bloody welter of anarchy and chaos. And the presidential contest of 1900 was fought and won largely on that issue. After 1900, for all the gentlemen above referred to, the proposition was always res adjudicata. All protests by Filipinos to the contrary caused only resentment, and welded the authorities more and more hermetically to the correctness of the original proposition. Loyalty to the original ill-considered decision became impregnated, in their case, with a fervor not entirely unlike religious fanaticism, and belief in it became a matter of principle, justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might thereafter do. So that when General Wright “came to the throne” in our colonial empire, as Governor, and legatee of the McKinley-Taft Benevolent Assimilation policies, his attitude in all he did was thoroughly honest, and also thoroughly British. He honestly believed in the “bloody welter of anarchy and chaos” proposition, and was prepared, in any emergency that might arise, to follow his convictions in that regard whithersoever they might lead, without variableness or shadow of turning. Take him all in all, Governor Wright was about the best man occupying exalted station I ever knew personally, President Taft himself not excepted; although I still adhere to Colonel Roosevelt’s opinion of 1901 concerning Mr. Taft, quoted in the chapter preceding this, from the Outlook of September 21, 1901, notwithstanding that in the contest for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1912, the Colonel “recalled” that opinion. Seriously, a man may “combine the qualities which would make a first class President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first class Chief Justice of the United States” and still cut a sorry figure trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or a scheme of government, the breath of whose life is public opinion, into the running of a remote colonial government, the breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered with by public opinion.

After the Albay insurrection of 1903 had been cleaned up, I took charge of the Twelfth Judicial District, having been appointed thereto by Governor Taft just before he left the islands to become Secretary of War. In those trying pioneer days they always seemed to give me the insurrections to sift out, but it was purely fortuitous. Whenever you ceased to be busy, prompt arrangements were made for you to get busy again. Judge Ide, the Minister of Justice, wasted no government money.

The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 is dated November 1st, which was just a week before the presidential election day of that year. Their annual report for 1905 is dated November 1, 1905. In their report for 1904, the Commission deal with the general state of public order in the same roseate manner which, as we have seen, had made its first appearance during the political exigencies of 1900 in the language about “the great majority of the people” being “entirely willing” to benevolent alien domination in lieu of independence. When Rip Van Winkle was trying to quit drinking, he used to say after each drink: “Oh, we’ll just let that pass.” In their report for 1904, the Commission swallow the conditions in Samar with equal nonchalance. After stating that some (impliedly negligible) disturbances had occurred in Samar “two months since,” they add that “the constabulary of the province took the field” against the bands of Pulajans, or outlaws, and that “as a result, they were soon broken up, and are being pursued and killed or captured” (p. 3). In their report dated November 1, 1905, by way of preface to an account of the extensive military operations inaugurated in Samar shortly after the presidential election of 1904, which operations had not only been in progress for nearly a year on the date of the 1905 report, but continued for more than a year thereafter, the Commission explain their 1904 nonchalance about Samar thus: “It was then believed that the constabulary forces had succeeded in checking the further progress of the outbreak” (p. 47).

Let us examine the facts on which they based this statement, since it meant that they believed that a duly reported epidemic of massacres of peaceably inclined people, over whom the American flag was floating as a symbol of protection to life and property, had stood effectually checked by November 1, 1904, the date of their report. And first, of the massacres themselves, their nature and extent.

The Samar massacres of 1904 began with what we all called down there “the outbreak of July 10th.” In August, 1904, I went to Samar to handle the cases arising out of the disturbances there, assisted by the (native) Governor of the province, who, under the law already alluded to, was ex-officio sheriff of the court, and an army of deputy sheriffs, as it were, the constabulary, numbering several hundred. The outbreak of July 10th was always known afterwards as “the Tauiran affair.” This Tauiran affair was a raid by an outlaw band on the barrio of Tauiran, one of the hamlets of the municipal jurisdiction of the township called Gandara, in the valley of the Gandara River, in north central Samar, wherein one hundred houses, the whole settlement, were burned, and twenty-one people killed. The term of court lasted from early in August until early in November. The day after the Tauiran affair, over on the other fork of the Gandara River, occurred what was called “the Cantaguic affair.” Cantaguic was a hamlet or barrio about the size of Tauiran. The brigands killed the lieutenant of police of Cantaguic and some others, but they did not kill everybody in the place. Instead, after killing a few people, they went to the tribunal (town hall), seized the local teniente, or municipal representative of American authority, tied the American flag they found at the tribunal about the head of the teniente, turban fashion, poured kerosene oil on it, and took the teniente down stairs and out into the public square, where they lighted and burned the flag on his head, the chief of the band, one Juliano Caducoy by name, remarking to the onlookers that the act was intended as a lesson to those serving that flag. They then cut off the lips of the teniente so he could not eat (he of course died a little later), burned the barrio and carried off fifty of the inhabitants. Caducoy was captured some time afterward, and I sentenced him to be hanged. There was practically no dispute about the facts. After the Cantaguic affair, during the term of court mentioned, the provincial doctor, Dr. Cullen, an American who had been a captain doctor of volunteers, had occasion to run up to Manila. The doctor was a most accomplished gentleman, but he had a fondness for the grewsome in description equal to Edgar Allan Poe himself. After he came back he told me about having told the Governor-General of the Cantaguic affair, and repeated with an evident pleased consciousness of his ability to make his hearer’s blood curdle, how the Governor had said to him slowly, “Doctor, that—is—awful!”

Blood seemed to whet the appetite for slaughter. The records of the August–November, 1904 term of the court of first instance of Samar show all the various barrios of the Gandara Valley in flames on successive days, after the affairs of July 10th and 11th. I do not speak from memory, but from documents contained in a large bundle of papers kept ever since, in memory of that incarnadined epoch. You find one barrio burned one day and another another day, until all the people of the Gandara Valley were made homeless. One of the constabulary officers, Lieutenant Bowers, a very gallant fellow, testified before me that from July 10th to the date of his testimony, which was on or about September 28th, some 50,000 people had been made homeless in Samar by the operations of the outlaws. I deem Lieutenant Bowers’s estimate quite reasonable. His figures include only one-fifth of the population of an island which was in the throes of an all-pervading brigand uprising. The conservative nature of Lieutenant Bowers’s estimate concerning the mischief that had already been wrought by the end of September, 1904, and was then gathering destructive potentiality like a forest or prairie fire, may be inferred from the contents of a memorandum appearing below, furnished me by a Spanish officer of the constabulary, a Lieutenant Calderon, who had been an officer of the Rural Guard in the Spanish days. It contains a list of fifty-three towns, villages, and hamlets (a barrio may be quite a village, sometimes even quite a town, though usually it is a hamlet) burned up to the date the memorandum was furnished me.

In order to a clear understanding of these Samar massacres and town-burnings of 1904, as well as for general geographical purposes, a few preliminary words of explanation will be appropriate just here. A province in the Philippines has heretofore been likened to a county with us. But in the largest provinces, the subdivisions of provinces called municipalities are more like counties; and each municipality is in turn subdivided into sections called barrios. A municipality (Spanish, pueblo) in the Philippines is not primarily a city or town, as we understand it, i.e., a more or less continuous settlement of houses and lots more or less adjacent, but a specific area of territory, a township, as it were. This area or territory may be 5 × 10 square miles, or 10 × 20, or more, or less. For example, Samar’s area is 5276 square miles. Yet it contained in 1904, and probably still contains, only twenty-five townships or municipalities all told, each municipality being subdivided in turn into barrios. Municipalities in the Philippines vary in size as much as counties do with us, and their total area accounts for and represents the total area of the province, just as the total area of the counties of a State represents with us the total area of the State. The seat of government of the municipality always bears the same name as the municipality itself, just as the county seat of a county usually, or frequently, bears the same name as the county, with us. Take for instance, the name of the first municipality or township in the list which appears below, Gandara. The municipality of Gandara might be described by analogy as the “county” of Gandara, the list of barrios burned as a list of towns and villages of the “county” of Gandara.

The municipality of Gandara included a watershed in north central Samar from which the Gandara River flowed in a southwesterly direction to the sea. Within this watershed, parallel 12½ north of the equator intersects the 125th meridian of longitude east of Greenwich. Northern Samar is a very rich hemp country, Catarman hemp being usually quoted higher than any hemp listed on the London market. If you stand at the highest point of the Gandara watershed you can see four streams flowing off north, northwest, northeast, and southwest to the sea. There are some half dozen streams having their source there. Brigands making their headquarters there could always, when hard pressed, get away in canoes toward the sea in almost any direction they wished. The following is Lieutenant Calderon’s list:

RELACION POR MUNICIPIOS DE LOS BARRIOS QUEMADOS.

(List by Municipalities of the Barrios Burned.)

MUNICIPALITY OF GANDARA

MUNICIPALITY OF CATBALOGAN

(Calderon’s List of Barrios Burned, continued)

Malino July 31

Silanga August 9

Ginga August 13

San Fernando August 15

Maragadin August 20

Talinga August 21

Santa Cruz August 22

Dap-dap August 29

Palencia August 31

Albalate (date not given)

Villa Hermosa (date not given)

The above list of villages burned in the township of Catbalogan shows how bold the Pulajans had then grown. By that time they were committing depredations, robbery, murder, and town-burning, in all the various villages within the municipal jurisdiction of the township of Catbalogan, coming often within a few miles of the town proper of Catbalogan itself, the seat of the provincial government. In the attack on Silanga, which occurred August 9th, a number of people were killed. Silanga was but little more than an hour’s walk from the court-house at Catbalogan. The Governor at once wired Manila as follows:

Catbalogan, Samar, Aug. 9, 1904.

Executive Secretary, Manila:

(Signed) Feito, Governor.

On September 2d, the Provincial Governor of Samar sent to Manila the following telegram:

Catbalogan, Sept. 2, 1904.

Carpenter, Actg. Ex. Secy., Palace, Manila:

(Signed) Feito, Governor.

Of course Governor Feito did not call for the regular army of the United States. His job, poor devil, was to demonstrate as best he could that the military were not needed. He would at once have been suspected of trying to scuttle the ship of “benign civil government” if he had admitted that the regular army was needed. But to return to Calderon’s list:

(Calderon’s List of Barrios Burned, continued)

Ylo August 17

Napuro August 17

Balud August 17

MUNICIPALITY OF WRIGHT

(Calderon’s List of Barrios Burned, continued)

Guinica-an July 25

Calapi July 28

Bonga August 4

Tutubigan August 19

Motiong September 1

Lau-an October 10

Sao Jose (date not given)

A sample of the distressing communications I was getting as these massacres progressed is the notification of the Motiong affair of September 1st set forth below, which I give as a type of the methodical stoicism of those bloody times. Motiong was seven miles down the coast road from Catbalogan:

In the district of Motiong, municipality of Wright, province of Samar, Philippine Islands, September 1, 1904.

In the presence of the undersigned Peregrin Albano, member of the village council, there being also present the president of the Municipal Board of Health, Mr. Tomas San Pablo, and the principal men of the place, there has this day occurred the burial of the corpses, victims of the Pulajans, in the cemetery of this place, to wit: The officer of volunteers, Rafael Rosales, and the following volunteers, viz., Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle, Dionisio Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo; also the two women, Eustaquia Sapiten and Apolinaria N., also one unknown Pulajan. This in fulfilment of the official letter of instructions No. 136, from the office of the presidente of the town of Wright dated to-day. Said burial ceremonies were conducted by the Reverend Father Marcos Gomez, and were attended by the whole volunteer force of this place because of the death of their officer Rosales.

Tomas San Pablo, President of the Board of Health.

Peregrin Albano, Councillor.

Fancy having documents like the foregoing handed you with ever-increasing regularity as you sauntered, morning after morning, from your bath to your coffee and rolls, preparatory to the daily sifting of incidents such as that which included the burning of the American flag on the head of the municipal representative of American authority already mentioned, and other like acts of poor misguided peasants stirred up by trifling scamps representing the dregs of insurrection. Motiong was not only within seven miles of the court-house at Catbalogan, but it was so near to Camp Bumpus, over in Leyte, where the 18th Infantry lay, that an order to them to move in the morning would have made life and property in all that brigand-harried region safe that night and continuously thereafter.

General Wm. H. Carter, Major-General U. S. A., well known to the American public as the able officer who, in 1911, commanded the United States forces mobilized on the Mexican border during the Mexican revolution of that year, that ousted President Diaz and seated President Madero, was in command at the time—the fall of 1904—of the military district of the Philippines which included Samar and Leyte. A word of request to him would have made life definitely safe in all the coast towns and their vicinity within two or three days after receipt of such a request.

Besides Gandara, Catbalogan, Calbayog, and Wright, Lieutenant Calderon’s list included the trio of ill-fated municipalities set forth below, concluding with the illustrious name of Taft:

MUNICIPALITY OF CATUBIG

Poblacion September 5

Tagabiran August 11

San Vicente August —

MUNICIPALITY OF BORONGAN

(Calderon’s List of Barrios Burned, continued)

Sepa Sept. 23

Lucsohong Sept. 23

Maybocog Sept. 23

Maydolong Sept. 23

Soribao Sept. 23

Bugas Oct. 10

Punta Maria Oct. 10

Canjauay Oct. 11

MUNICIPALITY OF TAFT

(Calderon’s List continued)

Del Remedio Sept. 22

San Julian Sept. 22

Nena Sept. 22

Libas Sept. 22

Pagbabangnan Sept. 22

San Vicente Sept. 21

Jinolaso Oct. 3

Of the twenty-five pueblos or townships of Samar, the Calderon list only pretended to throw light on events in nine of them, those being the only ones from which definite news had then reached headquarters. But as a reign of terror prevailed all over Samar at the time, the rest may be imagined, though it can never be ascertained. Of these nine, the last two were:

MUNICIPALITY OF LLORENTE

Pagbabalancayan Sept. 23

MUNICIPALITY OF ORAS

Concepcion Sept. 23

Jipapad —

Now it feels just as uncomfortable to be boloed in Pagbabalancayan as it would in a place with a more pronounceable name, and the same is true of the comparatively mellifluous Jipapad. True, some of these places were mere hamlets of twenty to forty houses, but you may be sure there were five or six people, on an average, to each house. On the other hand, glance back again at the list of towns of the township of Taft that were sacked and burned, and consider that San Julian was about the size of the provincial capital, Catbalogan, and that Catbalogan, the town proper, contained a population of four thousand, though looked at from the amphitheatre of hills which surround it, Catbalogan does not look like such a very large group of houses. Filipino houses are usually full of people. It is easier to live that way than to build more houses.

After the Pulajan descent on Llorente, the people of Llorente all went off to the hills to the Pulajans for safety. They were not allowed to have firearms. This was forbidden by law, except on condition of making formal application for permission, getting it finally approved, and giving a bond, conditions which, in practical operation, made the prohibition all but absolute. The law was general for the whole archipelago. The theory of the law was that the inhabitants were under “the peace and protection of a benign civil government.” The real reason of the law was that if the people were allowed to bear arms it was very uncertain which side they would use them on, our side or the other. But, by 1904, the lowland and coast people of Samar would have been glad enough to have stuck to us and gone out after the mountain robber bands had we armed them. Left unprotected, a feeling seemed to spread in many places that about the only thing to do to be safe was to depart from under the “protection” of the American flag and take to the hills and join, or seem to join, the uprising.

Toward the last of September, the provincial treasurer of Samar, an American, a Mr. Whittier, visited the east coast of Samar, including Taft. On October 5th, he stated before me as follows:

The importance of all this testimony, relatively to its forever sickening any one acquainted with it with colonization by a republic, is that a transcript of Mr. Whittier’s statement of October 5th was placed in the hands of the Governor-General a few days later by Mr. Harvey, the Assistant Attorney-General, and yet this situation continued until shortly after the presidential election. Several years afterwards, in the North American Review, Judge Ide, who was Vice-Governor in 1904, after admitting that he was in constant consultation with the Governor-General all through that period (by way of showing his opportunities for knowing whereof he spoke), denied that the failure to order out the military to protect the people from massacre had any relation whatever to the presidential election then going on in the United States.

Mr. Whittier also stated before me that the total population of the municipality of Taft was 18,000, and that twenty-five men armed with guns in each of the four principal villages thereof that were burned would have prevented the destruction of those villages. So we did not protect the people, and we would not let them protect themselves. I do not select the pueblo of Taft on account of its distinguished name. “What’s in a name?” The fate of Taft and its inhabitants was simply typical of the fate which descended upon scores of other places in “dark and bloody” Samar between the outbreak of July 10, 1904, and the presidential election of November 8th, of that year, and between those two dates the shadow of such a fate was over all the towns of the island on which it did not in fact descend. Mr. Whittier stated to me informally that at the time he was speaking of in the above formal statement, there were pending and had been pending for a long time (he seemed to think they must have been pigeon-holed) applications for permission to bear arms from fifteen different pueblos. After Mr. Whittier had finished his statement the Presidente of Taft made a like statement on the same day, October 5th. My retained copy shows that this official bore the ponderous name of Angel Custodio Crisologo. He declared a willingness to lead his people against the Pulajans if given guns, though the fervent soul did qualify this martial remark by adding, “If I am well enough,” explaining that the presidential body was subject to rheumatism. Mr. Crisologo stated among other things that there had been eight hundred houses burned in the jurisdiction of Taft before he left the east coast for Catbalogan—about a week before. Like Mr. Whittier’s, a copy of Mr. Crisologo’s statement was delivered a few days later to the Governor-General in person by the Assistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey, who had been present when it was made and taken down.

American office-holding in the Philippines is not so popular with the Filipinos as to have moved them to any outburst of gratitude in the shape of an effort to create a pension system for Americans who lose their health in the government service out there. When they leave the Islands they become as one dead so far as the Philippine insular government is concerned. And the men whose health is more or less permanently impaired by disability incurred in line of duty in the Philippines are not and will never be numerous or powerful enough back home to create any sentiment in favor of a pension system for former Philippine employees, since the Philippine business is not a subject of much popular enthusiasm at best. So if I had not had private resources, the results of the Samar insurrection of 1904 would have left me also in the pitiable plight in which I have beheld so many of my repatriated former comrades of the Philippine service in the last seven years, to whom the heart of the more fortunate ex-Filipino indeed goes out in sympathy. But to return to the race to beat death to prisoners in that grim and memorable fall of 1904.

In September the crowded condition of the jail had begun to tell on the inmates. The constabulary force at Catbalogan was quite inadequate for the varied emergencies of the situation, there being, besides the town itself to protect, the provincial treasury to guard, the governor’s office, the court-house, and the jail. Consequently the jail guard was too small. The jail buildings were in an enclosure a little larger than a baseball diamond, surrounded by high stone walls. But it was not safe to let the inmates sleep out in the enclosure at night. They had to be kept at night in the buildings. Any American who has visited the central penitentiary at Manila called Bilibid has seen a place almost as clean as a battleship. This is American work. But the Filipinos are not trained in sanitary matters, and all they know about handling large crowds of prisoners they learned from the Spaniards. The Governor was a native half-caste, a very excellent man, but free from that horror, which I think is an almost universal American trait, of seeing unnecessary and preventable sacrifice of human life, no matter whose the life. I inspected the jail as often as was practicable, and managed to keep down the death-rate below what it might have been, the prisoners being allowed to go out in the open court during the day. They also had such medical attention as was available. However, during the last five or six weeks of that term of court I would be pretty sure to find on my desk every two or three days, on opening court in the morning, a notice like this:

Carcel Provincial de Samar, I. F. Oficina del Alcaide

Catbalogan, Samar, I. F., 22 de Septiembre de 1904.

Hon. Sr. Juez de I^a Instancia de esta provincia, Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.

Señor:

Tengo el honor de poner en conocimiento de ese juzgado, que anoche entre 12 y 1 de ella, fallecio el procesado, Ramon Boroce, a consecuencia de la enfermedad de beriberi, que venia padeciendo.

Lo que tengo el honor de communicar a ese Juzgado para su superior conocimiento.

De U. muy respetuosamente, Gonzalo Lucero,

Alcaide de la Carcel Provincial.

which being interpreted means:

Provincial Jail of Samar, P. I.

Catbalogan, Samar, P. I., September 22, 1904.

His honor, the Judge of First Instance of this province, Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.

Sir:

I have the honor to bring to the knowledge of the court that last night between 12 and 1 o’clock, the accused person Ramon Boroce died in consequence of the disease of beriberi from which he has been suffering; which fact I have the honor to communicate to the court for its superior knowledge.

Very respectfully, Gonzalo Lucero,

Warden of the Provincial Jail.

Now a jail death-rate of only ten or twelve a month was not at all a bad record for an insurrection in a Philippine province. It would be rank demagoguery at this late date to be a party to anybody’s getting excited about it. I was rather proud of it by comparison with the jail death-rate of the Albay insurrection of the year before, where 120 men had died in the jail in about six months. But it began to get on one’s nerves to have to expect a billet-doux like the above on your desk at the opening of court each day, when the accused person had had no commitment trial and may have been wholly innocent. It all came back to the difference between war and peace, viz., that in war it is to be expected that many innocent persons will suffer, but that in peace only the guilty should suffer. Moreover, in war that admits it is war, your agents, your army, are better able to handle crowds of prisoners than native police and constabulary, and the percentage of innocent who suffer with the guilty in such war will be far less; whereas the contrary is true of war—waged by constabulary checked by courts—which pretends that a state of peace exists, i.e., which pretends there is no need for declaring martial law and calling on your army.

It was this Samar insurrection which convinced me that waging war with courts and constabulary in lieu of the recognized method was, in its net results, the cruelest kind of war, and that the civil government of the Philippines was a failure, in so far as regarded Mr. McKinley’s original injunction to the Taft Commission; where, after alluding to the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila to our forces, which concluded with the words:

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

he added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of the United States to give protection for property and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands. I charge this commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.

Commenting on this in his inaugural address as Governor of the Philippines, Governor Taft had said:

May we not be recreant to the charge, which he truly says, concerns the honor and conscience of our country.

No matter who was to blame, here we were in Samar, with the 14th Infantry three hours away in one direction at Calbayog, doing nothing, and the 18th Infantry five hours away in another direction, at Tacloban, doing nothing, and a reign of terror going on in Samar, with the peaceably inclined people of the lowlands and coast towns appealing to us for protection and not getting it, sometimes crouching in abject terror without knowing which way to fly, sometimes taking to the hills and joining the outlaws as a measure of self-preservation. ’Twas pitiful, wondrous pitiful! I then and there decided that we ought to get out of the Philippines as soon as any decent sort of a native government could be set up, and that our republic was not adapted to colonization. In his North American Review article above cited, in denying that the unwillingness of the Manila government to order out the army in Samar in the fall of 1904 had anything to do with the possible effect so doing might have had on the presidential election, then in progress in the United States, Governor Ide rebuked me with patronizing self-righteousness thus: “Was Judge Blount opposed to kindness?” He means in giving the Filipinos, under such circumstances, the “protection of civil government,” instead of ordering out the army. No, but I was opposed to using a saw, in lieu of a lancet, in excising the ulcers of that body politic at that time. In protesting that there was “nothing sinister” about the failure to use the troops, Judge Ide cunningly wonders whether my attitude was subsequently assumed after I left the Islands because of “proclivities as a Democrat,” or whether it was merely due to “predilections in favor of military rule.” Read Mr. McKinley’s instructions to the Taft Commission, above quoted, that to protect life and property concerned the honor and conscience of their country, and consider if the Ide suggestion does not seem to hide its head and slink away in shame before the strong clear light of what was then a plain duty. As a matter of fact Judge Charles S. Lobinger, who is still with the Philippine judiciary, visited me en route to another point, during that Samar term of court, and he will recall, should he ever chance upon this book and this chapter, with what vehemence I said to him at the time, in effect, “Judge, we belong in the Western Hemisphere. We have no business out here permanently.” If proclivities and predilections in favor of affording decent protection to the lives and property of defenceless people by properly garrisoning their towns constitutes lack of kindness, then the Ide rebuke was well taken.

These details are not related with Pickwickian gravity in order to acquaint the reader with my utterances as being important per se. But it is important to make clear to the reader, and he is entitled, in all frankness, to have it made clear by one who has now so long detained his attention on this great subject, to know just when “the light from heaven on the road to Damascus” broke upon this witness, and how and why he came to be in favor of Philippine independence, because the reasons which convinced him may seem good in the sight of the reader also. If the man who reads this book shall see that the man who wrote it was, in Samar in 1904, neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but simply an American in a far distant land, jealous of the honor of his country’s flag in its capacity as a symbol of protection to those over whom it floated, then the work will not have been written in vain.

The presidentes or mayors of the various pueblos were in session at Catbalogan in semi-annual convention during the first few days of October, 1904, when the Assistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey, visited Catbalogan. Mr. Harvey and the writer had taken a number of long walks together in the suburbs of Catbalogan, though Major Dade, commanding the Samar constabulary, an officer of the regular army, had warned us it was not safe outside of town. We had talked over the situation fully. Besides all its other aspects, there were a number of American women in Catbalogan, an American lawyer’s wife, the wife of the superintendent of schools, her sister, and others. It was not at all likely that the Pulajans would enter Catbalogan, but there was always the possibility, not to be wholly ignored, that some such episode as that of March 23d, of the preceding year, at Surigao, already described, might be repeated. As hereinbefore noted, on August 9th, the Pulajans had done some killing and burning at Silanga, less than ten miles north of Catbalogan and likewise at Motiong, less than ten miles south of Catbalogan, on September 1st, and on the evening of September 2d, about 7:30, there had been a false alarm caused by some native of Catbalogan running down the main street yelling, “Pulajans! Pulajans!” All of which did not tend to make you feel that your American women were quite as entirely safe from harm as they ought to be.

In the course of one of our walks Mr. Harvey and I had stopped on the mountain side overlooking Catbalogan, to catch our breath and take in the view of the town below and the sea beyond. I said to him, because I knew his mind also was on the one great need of the hour: “Yes sir, if President Roosevelt were here, and could see this situation as we do, he would order out the army and protect these defenceless people, no matter which way the chips might fly.” Mr. Harvey agreed with me. He promised to go back to Manila and tell the authorities there so. After we came back to town, we were advised that the convention of presidentes desired to have Mr. Harvey favor them with an address. He said, “What shall I tell them?” I said, “Tell them that if they will do their duty by the American Government, the American Government will do its duty by them.” He spoke Spanish fluently, made a good speech, and told them in effect just that thing. Then he went back to Manila, and shortly afterward wrote me the two letters which follow:

Department of Justice, Philippine Islands, Office of the Assistant Attorney-General for the Constabulary,

Manila, P. I., October 15, 1904.

My dear Judge: We arrived in Manila on Tuesday morning, the 11th instant, and I prepared my report and submitted it to the attorney-general on the 12th, in the meantime making a transcript of your summary and delivering a copy of same with other information to the attorney-general along with my report. After dictating the report and before delivering it I had a conversation with General Allen on the situation in Samar and told him what my recommendations would be. He agreed that rewards should be offered for the capture of Pablo Bulan, Antonio Anogar, and Pedro de la Cruz, but took issue on the other recommendations, and to my mind he takes a very extreme view; but I thought at the time and still think that he wanted to tone me down in my feelings in the matter. I think the real cause for his opposition is the effect that he fears an aggressive attitude might have on the presidential election. In other words, whatever they do aggressively might be misconstrued and made use of as political capital.

At Governor Wright’s request I got the report from the attorney-general before it was sent up and went over to the Malacañan, and the governor read the report and read most of the data that I submitted with the report, including your summary, and while he did not say much what he did say convinced me that there would be something doing if it were not on the eve of election, and in my opinion there will be things doing in Samar within thirty days.

I inclose herewith a copy of your summary, and also a copy of my report to the attorney-general. On the 18th instant I received your telegram to hold the completion of your summary until receipt of a letter mailed by you that day. I telegraphed you in reply that my report and your summary were placed in the hands of the attorney-general on the 12th instant. If there is any additional data in your letter mailed on the 13th I will submit it to the proper authorities.

For the lack of time, I will close, and write more next time.

Very truly yours, (Signed) Geo. R. Harvey, Assistant Attorney-General.

Department of Justice, Philippine Islands, Office of the Assistant Attorney-General, for the Constabulary,

Manila, P. I., October 19, 1904.

My dear Judge Blount: Since mailing my letter to you of last Saturday I have found the copies of your summary on the situation in Samar and inclose two herewith, in accordance with my promise.

This week we have received some good news from Samar with reference to important captures and killings of Pulajans. I am not in touch with what is going on with reference to Samar, and can give you no information along that line. As I remember, the governor told me the other day when I was talking with him that one more company of scouts will be sent down right away.

I sincerely hope the situation is improving, and that you are getting along rapidly in disposing of the large docket before you. If there is not a very great improvement in the situation by the 9th of November, I think there will be a considerable movement of troops in Samar within thirty days. For the good of the government, I hope the situation will improve materially before that time. I would like to see them put the troops there right now. I am of the opinion that it would not affect the election a half-dozen votes, and it might save two or three or a half-dozen massacres and the destruction of much property.

With best wishes for your success in your work, and with regards to Mr. Block, I am,

Very truly yours,

Geo. R. Harvey,

Assistant Attorney-General, Philippines Constabulary. To Hon. James H. Blount, Judge of First Instance, Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.

These two letters may be found at p. 2532, Congressional Record, February 25, 1908, where they were the subject of remark in the House of Representatives by Hon. Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, apropos of Governor Ide’s North American Review article of December, 1907.

A few weeks after the presidential election I saw Mr. Harvey in Manila. We naturally talked about Samar and his two letters to me. The troops had then been ordered out. He referred to his conference with the Governor-General and stated, “Yes, he told me that was the reason,” meaning that the reason for not ordering out the troops was the one assigned in his (Harvey’s) letter to me, viz., “Whatever we do aggressively might be misconstrued and made use of as political capital.”

On October 18, 1904, there was received at Manila the following cablegram concerning the presidential campaign in the United States:

New York, 16th. Judge Parker, in addressing campaign clubs at Esopus the past week returned to the subject of the Philippines in the evident hope of making it a paramount issue of the campaign. He repeated his former declaration that the retention of the Philippines and the carrying out of the policy of the Republican Administration have cost six hundred and fifty millions of dollars and two hundred thousand lives. Secretary of War Taft, in addressing a mass meeting held in Baltimore, Saturday night, ridiculed Judge Parker’s statement and characterized his figures as alarmist.

At that time the whole archipelago was absolutely quiet for the nonce, except Samar. Samar was the only island where Judge Parker’s statement was true, and as to Samar, it was absolutely true. On October 23d Governor Wright wired Secretary of War Taft as follows:

This was followed by a perfectly true and correct picture of the peace and quiet which then prevailed for the time being everywhere throughout the archipelago, except in Samar, which dark and bloody isle was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement as to Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic as any of the Taft cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly inconsiderable “prowling bands” of outlaws in Samar. Of course nobody at home knew the answer to this, so it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar massacres proceeded unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th Infantry, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if contemptuous, tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence of a republic trying to make conquered subjects behave without colliding too violently with home sentiment against having conquered subjects; sang their favorite barrack room song,

He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft,

But he ain’t no friend of mine;

and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did chafe under the restraint, but it at least relieved them from the not altogether inspiring task of chasing Pulajans through jungles and along the slippery mire of precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time permitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to swear fierce blasé oaths, not wholly unjustified, about how much better he could run the Islands than they were being run.

On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at Manila as follows:

Blount.

I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide, that Philippine independence meant anarchy in the Islands, and the orthodox “bloody welter of chaos,” I too might have hesitated to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until the election was safely over. So might yours, reader. Don’t be so certain you would not. Practically absolute power, sure of its own benevolence, has temptations to withhold its confidence from the people that you wot not of. Don’t condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the policy, and change your republic back to the course set by its founders. Give the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have, instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through the medium of your next great war.

The question of whether the troops should have been ordered out or not at the time above dealt with is by no means without two sides. On the “bloody welter” side, you have the well-known opinions of Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have before you—for the moment—only my little opinion. So instead of having in Governor Wright a Bluebeard, you simply have a man of great personal probity and unflinching moral courage, following his convictions to their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of turning, in the act of colonization. In other words, Mr. American, you see yourself, as others see you. So face the music and look at yourself. In your colony business, you are a house divided against itself, which cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino people far more intimately than either Mr. Taft, Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke their language—which they did not. I had met them both in peace and in war—which they had not. I had held court for months at a time in various provinces of the archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to Mindanao—which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in their homes for years on terms of free and informal intercourse impracticable for any governor-general. It was therefore perfectly natural that I should know them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. I was not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending myself out of office by assenting that our guardianship over the Filipinos should at once be terminated, but I knew there was nothing to the “bloody welter” proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too altogether a model of freedom from discord, pervaded as it is by parental, filial, and fraternal love, and their patriotism is too universal and genuine, to give the “bloody welter” bugaboo any standing in court.

But whosoever questions for one moment Governor Wright’s high personal character, simply does not know the man. To do so, moreover, would fatally cloud the issue I have sought to make clear between his view of the duty of our government and my own. In his moods that reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright used to say: “Don’t shoot the organist, he’s doing the best he can.” It is true that his answer to Judge Parker was not a full and frank statement of the case. But did it lie in American human nature, when your antagonist was recklessly over-stating the case in the heat of debate on the eve of a presidential election, to take him into your confidence and tell him all you knew, in simple trusting faith that he would thereafter quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil down to the real issue, viz., how many lives it was permissible to abandon on the “greatest good to the greatest number” theory, would obviously jeopardize the existence of a government which the Governor of the Philippines naturally believed to be better for all concerned than any other. And there is your cul-de-sac. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

In fourteen years we have made these unwilling subjects, whom we neither want nor need any more than they want or need us, a unit; a unit for Home Rule in preference to alien domination, it is true; but, nevertheless, a patriotic unit—one people—a potential body politic which can take a modest, but self-respecting place in the concert of free nations, with only a little more additional help from us.

In the handling of an insurrection in any given province with courts and constabulary during the first four or five years after the Taft government of the Philippines was founded, the function of a representative of the office of the Attorney-General, coming from Manila to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large docket and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely analogous to that of a grand jury. He originated prosecutions, found “No Bill,” etc. When Mr. Harvey came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after greeting him, began an informal talk which was akin to the nature of a charge to a grand jury, putting him in possession of the general aspects of the uprising. He was a very just and kindly man, and entered into the spirit of the task. I elaborated on the class of cases where the defendant claimed, as most of them did, “Yes, I joined the band of brigands, but I was made to do so.” It was also indictable to furnish supplies to the public enemy. This presented the class of cases where the brigands would swoop down on a town and demand rice, and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons refusing it, and so intimidate the rest into finding rice for them. Also there was the class of cases where a man would claim to have been one of the inhabitants of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills in a body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people by becoming part of them. This sort of thing at one time threatened to become epidemic with all the coast towns. It did not, however. A modus vivendi of some sort, sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, would be arranged between the coast people and the hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements enabled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of safety, in lieu of that we should have secured them but did not, by making the hill folk believe that the coast men were against us and for them. At one time the prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente of Balangiga, the man supposed to have engineered the massacre of the 9th Infantry in September 1901. I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his arrest. But the native governor of the province, and also Major Dade, the American regular officer commanding the constabulary, satisfied me that we did not have force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the Pulajans, if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata to the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending on his town. To arrest him would therefore mean, in their opinion, that the people of Balangiga would take to the hills for protection, and join the hill folk, or Pulajans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any such example all the coast towns might follow it. So the supposed perpetrator of the 9th Infantry massacre was allowed to remain unmolested. The American court was impotent to enforce its processes.

In my mass of Philippine papers there is one containing a copy of my remarks to the Assistant Attorney-General on his arrival at Catbalogan, above referred to as analogous to a charge to a grand jury at home. It is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, and is headed: “Remarks by the court upon the occasion of the arrival of Assistant Attorney-General Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition growing out of the same.” Certain parts of this contemporary document will doubtless give the reader a more vivid apprehension of the then situation than he can get from mere subsequent description. Of course the visiting representative of the Attorney-General’s office was familiar in a general way with the manner of the handling of the Albay insurrection in the previous year, described in the chapter preceding this. In discussing the Samar situation the “remarks” of the court contain, among other things, this passage:

In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there were a great many people who strayed out to the mountains just like cattle. They did not know why or whither they went. As to those persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and myself were unanimous in the opinion that some of them could be indicted under the vagrancy law. There were others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did not appear to have been what you might call ordinary thieves, and we were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law, the limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus you do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the responsibility of sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a connection with bandits which may be but little more than technical. Besides those two classes, there were in Albay of course the bandits proper, to whom the bandolerismo [brigandage] law was specially intended to apply. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that this bandolerismo law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever was on the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the wisest legislation, or to say that this is not the very best legislation, under the circumstances. How we administer the several laws alluded to governing public order, will settle whether or not substantial justice is done.

The men in the United States who in those days were slinging mud at the Philippine trial judges as being “subservient,” wholly missed the core of the whole matter. In the provinces where so many heavy sentences were imposed, the real situation was that a state of war existed, and the judges believed, and I think correctly, that they were practically a military commission of one, and much more able to give a prisoner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than officers briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting to act as a military commission. We tried those men with as little prejudice as if they had just come from the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding words of the above excerpt from my talk to the Assistant Attorney-General, it will be seen that the court had practically unlimited discretion in the matter of punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court of criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.

In the last analysis, the righteousness or unrighteousness of a civil government in a country not yet entirely subjugated, depends on whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation with constabulary whose “prisoners of war” are tried, to see what they may have done, if anything, by one-man courts, or whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation as any other great power on earth but ourselves would have completed it, with an army, trying the prisoners by military commission. Unless you yourself were a traitor to your country, you considered as criminal attempts to subvert your government by cut-throats that no one of the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan Cailles down, would have hesitated to have shot summarily. But you sought to make the punishment in each case fit the crime, by ascertaining as dispassionately as if the defendant were fresh from the moon, just what each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, or an American military commission would have had such people shot in bunches, as not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war. The trouble with the civil government did not lie in its judiciary, but in its constabulary. It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners by the constabulary, and their failure, because not numerous enough, to protect peaceably inclined people, which made it a fact that turning the situation over to the military would have meant less sacrifice of the innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merciful to kill a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go, with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves, merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign “civil” government.

In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. Harvey and the writer sailed close to the wind, by holding only those responsible who had taken active parts in the sacking and burning of villages and the massacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or later some officious prosecuting attorney of less noble mould than Harvey would ask me to convict some poor creature of brigandage for giving a little rice to the brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so, and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all by expressing my sentiments, in the decision, concerning the failure to give adequate protection to defenceless people, along the lines indicated in this chapter. No such case was in fact presented. I broke down under the strain of graver cases early in November and left Samar forever, bound for Manila.

Before I left, the whole island was seething with sedition. I was told by a credible American that the chief deputy sheriff of the court, an ex-insurgent officer, one of the “peace-at-any-price” policy appointees, had remarked among some of his own people where he did not expect the remark to be repeated: “I see no use persecuting our brethren in the hills.” The municipal officials of the provincial capital, Catbalogan, were suspected by the native provincial governor, and the latter in turn was suspected by the Manila government. In fact the whole political atmosphere of the island had become full of rumor and suspicion as to who was for the government, and who was against the government. I left Samar, November 8th, which was the day of the presidential election of 1904, determined to try no more insurrections. By that time nearly everybody in the island was more or less guilty of sedition, and I did not know the method of drawing an indictment against a whole people.