Chapter XX · Governor Ide—1906

The Tariff is a local issue.

General W. S. Hancock.

After Governor Wright left the Islands finally on November 4, 1905, Vice-Governor Henry C. Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2, 1906, when he was duly inaugurated as such. He resigned and left the Islands finally in September thereafter.

After the first rush the fighting continued fiercely, and when the last of the pulahanes disappeared there remained but seven enlisted men of the constabulary able to fight. Seven more were lying about more or less seriously wounded and twenty-two were dead. Captain Jones received a bad spear thrust in the chest early in the fight, but fought on, regardless. Lieutenant Bowers received a gunshot wound through the left arm, which, however, did not put him out of the fight. Thirty-five dead pulahanes were found on the field and eight more have since been found some distance off. The number of wounded who escaped cannot be determined. The unarmed Americans present with Governor Curry escaped to the river and afterwards rejoined Captain Jones who armed them.

At present seventeen companies of scouts and four companies of American troops under Colonel Smith, 8th U. S. Infantry, are operating against the pulahanes, but with success that will be largely dependent upon time and attrition.

General Allen adds: “The entire 21st Regiment [of Infantry] is also in Samar.” These facts are here given because they relate to the period covered by the certificate of the Philippine Commission of March 28, 1907, heretofore alluded to, and which will be more fully dealt with hereinafter, which stated that “a condition of general and complete peace” had prevailed throughout the archipelago for two years prior to March 28, 1907. Without a brief exposition of all these matters, it would be impossible to enable the reader to feel the pulse of the Filipino people as it stood at the time of the election of their assembly in 1907. The fact of our having been unable to discontinue Filipino-killing altogether for any considerable period from 1899 to the end of 1906 is too obviously relevant to the state of the public mind in 1907 to need elaboration.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1900, (page 17) had said:

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

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1901 (page 7) had said:

The collapse of the insurrection came in May.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1902 (page 3) had said:

The insurrection as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of the United States in these islands is entirely at an end,

referring farther on to “the whole Christian Philippine population” as “enjoying civil government.” If the “enjoyment” thus described had been genuine, continued, profound, and sincere, it would have been another story. But the net attitude of the civil government toward the general health of the body politic, relatively to public order, reminds one of the cheerful gentleman who remarked of his invalid friend, “He seems to be ‘enjoying’ poor health.”

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1903 (page 25) says:

The conditions with respect to tranquillity in the islands have greatly improved during the last year.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 (page 1) says:

The great mass of the people, however, were domestic and peaceable.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1905 (part 1, page 59) says:

On the whole life and property have been as safe as in other civilized countries.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 (page 40) says:

Viewing the entire situation the islands are in a peaceable and orderly condition aside from——

various disorders which fill some ten pages of the report.

Governor Ide left the Islands finally on September 20, 1906, having resigned. Why he should have resigned, it is difficult to say. Take it all in all, he made a splendid Governor-General, and ought to have been allowed to remain. He knew the Islands from Alpha to Omega and had been there six years. His going out of office to make way for still another Governor-General was wholly uncalled for. So far as the writer is informed, he was, when he left, still blessed with good health. He had filled a very considerable place in the history of his country most creditably. He had drawn up a fine code of laws for the Islands known as the Ide code. He had made a great minister of finance, successfully performing the perilous task of transferring the currency of the country from a silver basis to a gold basis, and in so doing had proven himself fully a match, in protecting the interests of the Government, for the wiley local financiers representing the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the chartered bank of India, Australia, and China, and other institutions run by experienced men of more or less piratical tendencies. As Governor-General of the Islands, his justice, firmness, and courtliness of manner combined to produce an administration in keeping with the dignity of his great office. After returning to the United States, he remained in private life for a time, and was finally given a comparatively unimportant post as minister to a second-class country, Spain, which post he still occupies (in 1912).

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar massacres of 1904, I landed at Seattle, at the end of my last homeward-bound journey across the Pacific, in April, 1905, one of the “natives” of Seattle asked me: “Have those people over there ever got quiet yet?” The question itself seemed an answer to the orthodox official attitude at Manila, which had so long been elaborately denying, as to each successive local outbreak, that such outbreak bore any relation to the original insurrection, or was any wise illustrative of the general state of public feeling in the Islands. At the time the question was asked, the answer was, “Not entirely.” Not until toward the end of 1906 did “Yes” become a correct answer to the question. In other words, there were no more serious outbreaks after 1906, nor was a state of general and complete peace ever finally established until then. Since 1906 there have been occasional despatches from Manila recounting small episodes of bloodshed, several of which have had quite a martial ring. These have related merely to the country of the Mohammedan Moros, who are as wholly apart from the main problem as the American Indian to-day is from our tariff and other like questions. The Moros are indeed what Kipling calls “half savage and half child.” They never did have anything more to do with the Filipino insurrection against us than the American Indian had to do with the Civil War.