Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

Oh, but Honey, dis rabbit dess ’bleeged ter climb dis tree.

Uncle Remus.

The year 1907 will be known most prominently to the future history of our Far Eastern possession as the year of the opening of the Philippine Assembly, which momentous event occurred on October 16th. But in the departments both of Politics and Psychology it should be known as the year of the Great Certificate. The Great Certificate was a certificate signed by certain eminent gentlemen on March 28, 1907, which made the preposterous affirmation that a condition of general and complete peace had prevailed throughout the archipelago, except among the non-Christian tribes, for the two years immediately preceding. Taken in its historic setting, that certificate can by no possibility escape responsibility, as “accessory after the fact” at least, to the pretence that a similar condition had prevailed ever since President Roosevelt’s final war-whoop of July 4, 1902, published to the American troops in the Islands on the day named. That war-whoop, it will be remembered, was in the form of a presidential proclamation congratulating General Chaffee and “the gallant officers and men under his command” on some “two thousand combats, great and small,” and declaring, in effect, that Benevolent Assimilation was at last triumphantly vindicated, and that opposition to American rule was at an end. The certificate of March 28, 1907, appears at pages 47–8 of the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1907, part 1. If we consider what is now going on in the Islands as “modern” history, and the days of the early fighting as “ancient” history, this certificate will serve as the connecting link between the two. It furnishes the key-note to all that had happened during the American occupation prior to 1907, and the key-note of all that has happened since. Therefore, though somewhat long, it is deemed indispensable to clearness to submit here in full the text of

THE GREAT CERTIFICATE OF 1907

Whereas the census of the Philippine Islands was completed and published on the twenty-seventh day of March, nineteen hundred and five, which said completion and publication of said census was, on the twenty-eighth day of March, nineteen hundred and five, duly published and proclaimed to the people by the governor-general of the Philippine Islands with the announcement that the President of the United States would direct the Philippine Commission to call a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular assembly, provided that a condition of general and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States should be certified by the Philippine Commission to have continued in the territory of the Philippine Islands for a period of two years after said completion and publication of said census; and

Whereas since the completion and publication of said census there have been no serious disturbances of the public order save and except those caused by the noted outlaws and bandit chieftains, Felizardo and Montalon, and their followers in the provinces of Cavite and Batangas, and those caused in the provinces of Samar and Leyte by the non-Christian and fanatical pulahanes resident in the mountain districts of the said provinces and the barrios contiguous thereto; and

Whereas the overwhelming majority of the people of said provinces of Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte have not taken part in said disturbances and have not aided or abetted the lawless acts of said bandits and pulahanes; and

Whereas the great mass and body of the Filipino people have, during said period of two years, continued to be law-abiding, peaceful, and loyal to the United States, and have continued to recognize and do now recognize the authority and sovereignty of the United States in the territory of said Philippine Islands: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Philippine Commission in formal session duly assembled, That it, said Philippine Commission, do certify, and it does hereby certify, to the President of the United States that for a period of two years after the completion and publication of the census a condition of general and complete peace, with recognition of the authority of the United States, has continued to exist and now exists in the territory of said Philippine Islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes; and be it further

Resolved by said Philippine Commission, That the President of the United States be requested, and is hereby requested, to direct said Philippine Commission to call a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular assembly of the people of said territory in the Philippine Islands, which assembly shall be known as the Philippine Assembly.

Let us examine these amiable liberties thus taken with the facts of history by men of irreproachable private character, briefly analyzing their action. Such an examination and analysis are indispensable to a clear understanding by a great free people whose proudest boast is love of fair play, of whether the Filipino people, or any appreciable fraction of them, have ever in the least consented, or do now in the least consent, to our rule, as the small minority among us interested in keeping the Islands, have systematically sought, all these years, to have this nation believe. As the above certificate of 1907 was the last hurdle that Benevolent Assimilation had to leap on the Benevolent Hypocrisy course over which we had to gallop in order to get from the freeing of Cuba to the subjugation of the Philippines, let us glance back for a moment at the first hurdle or two, leapt when Mr. Taft was in the Philippine saddle.

Judge Taft had said on November 30, 1900:

and, pursuant to that idea, he had set up his civil government on July 4, 1901. He never did thereafter admit that he was mistaken in his original theory, but kept on trying to fit the facts to his theory, hoping that after a while they would fit. He “clung to his policy of disinterested benevolence with a tenacity born of conviction,” to borrow a phrase from Governor-General Smith’s inaugural address of 1907. But in this same inaugural address of Governor Smith of 1907, you find, for the first time in all the Philippine state papers, a frank admission of the actual conditions under which the civil government of 1901 was in fact set up. Says he:

That confession, made with the bluntness of a most gallant soldier, is as refreshing in its honesty as the Roosevelt war-whoop of 1902. There shall be no tiresome repetition here concerning the original withholding of the facts from the American people in 1898–9, but to place in juxtaposition Secretary of War Root’s representations to the American public in the year last named, and the actual facts as stated earlier in the same year by General MacArthur, one of our best fighting generals, during the thick of the early fighting, in an interview already noticed in its proper chronological place, will forever fix the genesis of the original lack of frankness as to conditions in the Philippines which has naturally and inexorably made frankness as to those conditions impossible ever since. As late as October 7, 1899, Mr. Root—who had not then and has not since been in the Philippines—had said in Chicago, in a speech at a dinner of the Marquette Club:

Well, against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting the Philippine nation? No. There is none. There are hundreds of islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes, speaking more than sixty different languages, and all but one are ready to accept American sovereignty.

As early as the beginning of April, 1899, just after the taking on March 31st of the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General MacArthur, who commanded our troops in the assault on that place, had said, in an interview with a newspaper man afterwards verified by the General before the Senate Committee of 1902 as substantially correct:

The psychologic processes by which the distinguished gentlemen who signed the Great Certificate of March 28, 1907, got their own consent to sign it make the most profoundly interesting study, relatively to the general welfare of the world, in all our Philippine experiments so far. They are the final flowering of the plant Political Expediency. They are the weeds of benevolent casuistry that become from time to time unavoidable in a colonial garden tended by a republic based on the consent of the governed and therefore by the law of its own life unfitted to run any other kind of a government frankly. These processes find their origin in the provisions of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act. Three days after President Roosevelt approved the Act, he issued his proclamation of July 4, 1902, above noticed, declaring the insurrection at an end. Section 6 of that Act provided:

Whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands shall have ceased, and a condition of general and complete peace shall have been established therein, and the fact shall be certified to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President, upon being satisfied thereof, shall order a census of the Philippine Islands to be taken by said Philippine Commission.

Two years after the completion and publication of the census, in case such condition of general and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States shall have continued in the territory of said islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes, and such facts shall have been certified to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President upon being satisfied thereof shall direct said Commission to call, and the Commission shall call, a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular assembly of the people of said territory in the Philippine Islands, which shall be known as the Philippine Assembly.

Possibly its [Leyte’s] immediate vicinity to Samar has had to do with the disturbed conditions.

In other words, possibly, a fire may spread from one field of dry grass to another near by.

Inasmuch as the President, or Governor-General with the approval of the Philippine Commission, can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus only under the conditions mentioned in the said statute, it becomes their duty to make an investigation of the existing conditions in the archipelago, or any part thereof, to ascertain whether there actually exists a state of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion, and that the public safety requires the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. When this investigation is concluded, and the President, or the Governor-General with the consent of the Philippine Commission, declares that there exists these conditions, and that the public safety requires the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, can the judicial department of the Government investigate the same facts and declare that no such conditions exist?

They answer “No!” The head note of the decision is as follows:

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus may be suspended in the Philippine Islands in the case of rebellion, insurrection, and invasion, when the public safety requires it, by the President of the United States, or by the Governor-General of the Philippine Islands with the approval of the Philippine Commission.

Thus the Supreme Court of the Islands squarely held that on the fourth day of August, 1905 (the day the writ of habeas corpus was made returnable), open insurrection existed against the constituted authorities in the Islands, in the provinces named, and had existed since the Executive Proclamation of January 31st, previous, declaring a state of insurrection, and on that ground denied the writ. Yet the Commission certified on March 28, 1907, that a state of general and complete peace as contemplated by the Act of Congress conditionally promising a legislature, had prevailed for the two years preceding. In other words the Philippine Commission declared a state of insurrection to exist in certain populous provinces, and was upheld by the Supreme Court of the Islands in so doing, and later certified to the continuance of a state of general and complete peace covering the same period.

The overwhelming majority of the people of said provinces have not taken part in said disturbances and have not aided and abetted the lawless acts of said bandits.

The prestige acquired (by the uprising) at San Pedro Tunasan, Paranaque, Taal, and San Francisco de Malabon had great weight in creating active sympathy for ladrone bands and leaders. Something was needed to counterbalance the effect of their combined successes, and the appearance of regular troops was just the thing needed.

This explains how “the overwhelming majority” of which the certificate of 1907 speaks was obtained in Cavite. It took six months to obtain said “majority” at that. I suppose the campaigning of the American regulars might be credited with obtaining the “majority,” and the reconcentration of brother Baker of the constabulary might be accorded the additional credit of making the majority “overwhelming.” If you have, as election tellers, so to speak, a soldier with a bayonet on one side, and a constabulary officer with a reconcentration camp back of him on the other, you can get an “overwhelming majority” for the continuance of American rule even in Cavite province.

The province should be most carefully watched. I am convinced that ladrone leaders do not produce conditions, but that the conditions and attitude of the public produce ladrones.

So much for the Cavite-Batangas hurdle. And now as to the Samar and Leyte hurdle.

In all the forms of government and administrative provisions which they are authorized to prescribe, the commission should bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for * * * the expression of our theoretical views, etc.

Of course the ignorant electorate we perpetrated on Samar as an “expression of our theoretical views” proved that we had “gone too fast” in conferring self-government, or, to quote Mr. Roosevelt, had been “reposing too much confidence in the self-governing power of a people,” if to begin with the rankest material for constructing a government that there was at hand was to offer a fair test of capacity for self-government. But President Roosevelt’s message, above quoted, shows you that the “ignorant electorate” was merely an ignorant electorate, and not a non-Christian tribe, as the Philippine Commission later had the temerity to certify they were. Now the plain, unvarnished, benevolent truth is just this: The Commission knew that nobody in the United States, whether they were for retaining the Islands or against retaining them, had any desire to postpone granting a legislature to the Philippine people. So in their certificate they simply included everybody who had given trouble in Samar and Leyte as “non-Christian tribes.” The only justification for this was that they had in fact acted in a most un-Christianlike manner,—i.e., for people who devotedly murmur prayers to patron saints in good standing in the church calendar. In making their certificate, the Commission simply ignored the various uprisings of the preceding two years. They simply said, generously, “Oh, forget it.” They knew nobody in the United States begrudged the Filipinos their conditionally promised legislature, or cared to postpone it. The leading Filipinos begged the authorities to “forget” the various disturbances that had occurred since the publication of the census, and there was a very general desire in the Islands to let bygones be bygones, wipe the slate, and begin again. Any other attitude would have meant that the legislature would have to be postponed. Then the opposition in the United States would want to know why, and by 1908 Philippine independence might become an issue again. In the eyes of the Commission, the end, being benevolent, justified stretching the language of the Act of 1902 as if it had been the blessed veil of charity itself—i.e., the end justified the means. In fact it did—almost—justify the means. But not quite. The moral quality of the Great Certificate of 1907 was not as reprehensible as General Anderson’s dealings with Aguinaldo, already described, which, like the certificate, were a necessary part of the benevolent hypocrisy of Benevolent Assimilation of an unconsenting people. Yet General Anderson is an honorable man. It was not as bad as General Greene’s juggling Aguinaldo out of his trenches before Manila in a friendly way, and failing to give him a receipt for said trenches, as he had promised to do, because such a receipt would show co-operation and “might look too much like an alliance.” This also was done on the idea that the end justified the means. Yet General Greene is an honorable man. The signers of the great peace certificate of 1907 are all honorable men. But they signed that certificate, just the same. “Judge not that ye be not judged.” All I have to say is, I would not have signed that certificate. I would have said: “No, gentlemen, the end does not justify the means. The Philippine Assembly must be postponed, if we are going to deal frankly with Congress and the folks at home. The conditions Congress made precedent to the grant of an assembly have not been met, and we each and all of us know it. We owe more to our own country and to truth than we do to the Filipinos. The Act of Congress of 1902 did not vest in the Philippine Commission authority to pardon disturbances of public order. It imposed upon the Commission an implied duty to report such disturbances, fully and frankly. It is not true that there has been a continuing state of general and complete peace in these Islands for the last two years, and I for one will not certify that there has been.”

The truth is, the attitude of the signers of the certificate was like that of Uncle Remus, when interrupted by the little boy in one of his stories. When Uncle Remus gets to the point in the rabbit story where the rabbit thrillingly escapes from the jaws of death, i.e., from the jaws of the dogs, by climbing a tree, the rapt listener interrupts: “Why, Uncle Remus, a rabbit can’t climb a tree.” To which Uncle Remus replies, with a reassuring wave of the hand, “Oh, but Honey, dis rabbit dess ’bleeged ter climb dis tree.”

Should any of my good friends still in the Philippines feel disposed to censure such levity as the above, I can only say, as Kipling writes from England to his Anglo-Indian friends in a foreword to one of his books:

I have told these tales of our life

For a sheltered people’s mirth,

In jesting guise,—but ye are wise,

And ye know what the jest is worth.

Moreover, my authority to speak frankly about these matters is also aptly stated by the same great poet thus:

I have eaten your bread and salt,

I have drunk your water and wine,

The deaths ye died I have watched beside

And the lives that ye led were mine.

Was there aught that I did not share

In vigil or toil or ease,

One joy or woe that I did not know,

Dear friends across the seas?

The above reflections are not placed before the reader to show him what a pity it is that the writer was not a member of the Philippine Commission at the time of their certificate of 1907, or to show what a fine thing for our common country it would be if he were made a member of that Commission now. He is, personally, as disinterested as if Manila were in the moon, for he cannot live in the tropics any more. The effect of a year or so of residence there upon white men invalided home for tropical dysentery and then returning to the Islands is like the effect of water upon a starched shirt. However, it is believed that the facts of official record collected in this chapter up to this point are a demonstration of this proposition, to wit: What the Philippine Government needs more than anything else is that the minority party in the United States should be represented on the Commission. By this I do not mean representation by what are called, under Republican Administrations, “White House” Democrats, nor what under a Democratic Administration, if one should ever occur, would probably be called “Copperhead Republicans.” I mean the genuine article. A Democrat who has cast his fortunes with the Philippines is no longer a Democrat relatively to the Philippines, because the Democratic party wants to get rid of the Philippines and the Democrat in the Philippines of course does not. How absurd it is to talk about former Governors Wright and Smith, as “life-long Democrats,” by way of preliminary to using their opinions as “admissions.” In the law of evidence, an “admission” is a statement made against the interest of the party making it.

The first election for representatives in the Philippine Assembly was held on July 30, 1907, and on October 16th thereafter the Assembly was formally opened by Secretary of War, William H. Taft. The various “whereases” hereinabove reviewed, importing complete acquiescence in American rule since President Roosevelt’s Proclamation of July 4, 1902, were first duly read, and then the Assembly was opened. Of course, no man could have been elected to the Assembly without at least pretending to be in favor of independence, and all but a corporal’s guard of them were outspoken in favor of the proposition. As the present Governor-General Mr. Forbes, said, while Vice-Governor, in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909:

To deny the capacity of one’s country for * * * self-government is essentially unpopular.

I am aware that in view of the issues discussed at the election of this assembly I am expected to say something regarding the policy of the United States toward these islands. I cannot speak with the authority of one who may control that policy. The Philippine Islands are territory belonging to the United States, and by the Constitution, the branch of that government vested with the power and charged with the duty of making rules and regulations for their government is Congress. The policy to be pursued with respect to them is therefore ultimately for Congress to determine. * * * I have no authority to speak for Congress in respect to the ultimate disposition of the Islands.

After that there was some talk about “mutually beneficial trade relations” and “improvement of the people both industrially and in self-governing capacity.” But with regard to the “process of political preparation of the Filipino people” for self-government the Secretary said that was a question no one could certainly answer; and so far as he was concerned he thought it would take “considerable longer than a generation.” Somewhere in the early Philippine State papers there is a quotation used by Mr. Taft from Shakespeare about “Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.” The Filipinos have eagerly read for the last twelve years every utterance of Mr. Taft’s that they could get hold of. If any of those embryonic statesmen of the first Philippine Assembly, familiar with the various Taft utterances, had looked up the context of the Shakespearian quotation above alluded to, he would have found it to be as follows:

And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d,

That palter with us in a double sense:

That keep the word of promise to our ear

Since the announcement by Secretary of War Taft at the opening of the Philippine Assembly in October, 1907, of the policy of indefinite retention of the Islands with undeclared intention, the Filipinos have of course clearly understood that if they were ever to have independence they must look to Congress for it. But they know Congress is not interested in them and that they have no influence with it, and that the Hemp Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Sugar Trust, have. So that since 1907, both the American authorities in the Philippines and the Filipinos have settled down, the former suffused with benevolence—hardened however by paternalistic firmness, the latter stoically, to the programme of indefinite retention with undeclared intention. No conceivable programme could be devised more ingeniously calculated to engender race hatred. The Filipino newspapers call the present policy one of “permanent administration for inferior and incapable races.” The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act, which is the “Constitution,” so to speak, we have given the Filipinos, accords “liberty of the press” in the exact language of our own Constitution. The native press does not fail to use this liberty to the limit. Naturally the American press does not remain silent. So here are a pair of bellows ever fanning the charcoals of discontent. And the masses of the Filipino people read the Filipino papers. If they cannot read, their children can. In one of the reports of one of the American constabulary officials in the Philippines, there is an account of the influence of the native press too graphic to be otherwise than accurate. He says one can often see, in the country districts, a group of natives gathered about some village Hampden, listening to his reading the latest diatribe against the American Occupation. Never was there such folly in the annals of statesmanship. In their native papers, the race situation of course comes in for much comment. Now the most notorious and inflexible fact of that race situation is that the colonial Anglo-Saxon does not intermarry with “the yellow and brown” subject people, as the Latin colonizing races do. It would be an over-statement of the case to say that the Filipinos to-day had rather have the Spaniards back as their overlords instead of us. In 1898, they “tasted the sweets of liberty,” to use an expression of one of their leaders, and I am perfectly sure that to-day the desire of all those people for a government of their own is so genuine and universal as that it amounts to a very hopeful positive factor in the equation of their capacity for self-government. But there is no doubt that many of the Filipinos after all have a very warm place in their hearts for the Spanish people. How could it be otherwise when so many of the Filipinos are sons and grandsons of Spaniards? Much of like and dislike in life’s journey is determined pre-natally. On the other hand, the American women in the Philippines maintain an attitude toward the natives quite like that of their British sisters in Hong Kong toward the Chinese, and in Calcutta toward the natives there. The social status of an American woman who marries a native,—I myself have never heard of but one case—is like that of a Pacific coast girl who marries a Jap. This is merely the instinct of self-defence with which Nature provides the weaker sex, just as she provides the porcupine with quills. But look at the other side of the picture. When an American man marries a native woman, he thereafter finds himself more in touch with his native “in-laws” it is true, but correspondingly, and ever increasingly, out of touch with his former associations. This is not as it should be. But it is a most unpleasant and inexorable fact of the present situation. In an address delivered at the Quill Club in Manila on January 25, 1909, Governor Smith, after reciting the various beneficent designs contemplated by the government and the various public works consummated (at the expense of the people of the Islands) deplored, in spite of it all, what he termed “the growing gulf between the races.” Said he:

An era of ill feeling has started between Americans and Filipinos, and, I hesitate to say it, race hatred.

Cherchez la femme! You find her, on the one hand, in the American woman whose attitude has been indicated, and you find her, on the other, in the refined and virtuous native woman, who finds her American husband’s relations to his compatriots altered—queered—since his marriage to her, no matter how faithful a wife and mother she may be. This is the unspeakably cruel situation we have forced upon the Filipino people—whom I really learned to respect, and became much attached to, before I left the Islands—and President Taft knows it as well as I do. Yet he does not take the American people into his confidence. He simply worries along with the situation, wishing it would get better, but knowing it will get worse. That this situation is a permanent one is clearly shown by all the previous teachings of racial history. In his Winning of the West, written in 1889, speaking of the French settlers in the Ohio valley before 1776, and the cordial social relations of the dominant race with the natives—relations which have always obtained with all Latin races under like circumstances—Mr. Roosevelt says (vol. i., page 41):

They were not trammelled by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine.

Men of English stock have changed but little in the matter of race instinct since 1776. If we had a definite policy, declared by Congress, promising independence, the American attitude in the Philippines toward the Filipinos would at once change, from the present impossible one, to our ordinary natural attitude of courtesy toward all foreigners, regardless of their color.

On May 7, 1909, the Honorable James F. Smith took his departure from the Philippine Islands forever and turned over the duties of his office to the Honorable W. Cameron Forbes, as Acting President of the Commission and Governor-General. As in the case of Governors Wright and Ide, so in that of Governor Smith, no reason is apparent why the Washington Government should have been willing to dispense with the services of the incumbent. This was peculiarly true in the case of General Smith. He was but fifty years of age when he left the Islands in 1909. He has rendered more different kinds of distinguished public service than any American who has ever been in the Philippine Islands from the time Dewey’s guns first thundered out over Manila Bay down to this good hour. Going out with the first expedition in 1898 as Colonel of the 1st California Regiment, he distinguished himself on more than one battlefield in the early fighting and in recognition thereof was made a brigadier-general. Subsequent to this he became Military Governor of the island of Negros, that one of the six principal Visayan Islands which gave less trouble during the insurrection and after than any other—a circumstance doubtless not wholly unrelated to General Smith’s wise and tactful administration there. Later on during the military régime he became Collector of Customs of the archipelago. The revenues from customs are the principal source of revenue of the Philippine Government and the sums of money handled are enormous. The customs service, moreover, in most countries, and especially in the Philippines, is more subject to the creeping in of graft than any other. General Smith’s administration of this post was in keeping with everything else he did in the Islands. When the civil government was founded by Judge Taft in 1901, he was appointed one of the Justices of the Supreme Court and filled the duties of that office most creditably. Thence he was promoted to the Philippine Commission, which is, virtually, the cabinet of the Governor-General. Still later he became Vice-Governor, and finally Governor, serving as such from September, 1906, to May, 1909. Any other government on earth that has over-seas colonies and recognizes the supreme importance of a maximum of continuity of policy, would have kept Governor Smith as long as it could have possibly induced him to stay, just as the British kept Lord Cromer in Egypt. Governor Smith was succeeded by a young man from Boston, who had come out to the Islands four years before, and who, prior to that time, had never had any public service in the United States of any kind, had never been in the Philippine Islands, and probably had never seen a Filipino until he landed at Manila.

General Smith is now (1912) one of the Judges of the Court of Customs Appeals at Washington.