Note 41 — Chapter XII · Otis and the War (Continued)

Before the army of occupation had had time to do in southern Luzon what General Young did in northern Luzon and thereby secure like permanent results in that region, a “peace-at-any-price” policy was inaugurated to meet the exigencies of Mr. McKinley’s campaign for the Presidency in 1900. Our last martyred President clung all through that campaign to his original assumption that Benevolent Assimilation would work, and that the single burning need of the hour was to make clear to the Filipinos what our intentions were—as if powder and lead did not spell denial of independence plain enough, as if that were not the sole issue, and as if that issue had not been submitted, with deadly finality, to the stern arbitrament of war. However, neither Lord Roberts in India, nor Lord Kitchener in Egypt ever more effectively convinced the people of those countries that his flag must be respected as an emblem of sovereignty, than General Young did the Ilocanos. Take the month of April, 1900 for instance. Several days after the expiration of said month (on May 5th) General Otis was relieved and went home. During the month of April, General Young killed five hundred insurgents in his district.41 But this did not prevent General Otis, arriving as he did in the United States in the month of June, when the national political conventions meet, from “repeating the same old story about the insurrection going to pieces”42—only, not “going” now, but “gone.” Nor did it, and like sputterings of insurrection all over the place, prevent Judge Taft—the “Mark Tapley of this Philippine business” as he humorously told the Senate Committee of 1902 he had been called—from cabling home, during the presidential campaign of 1900, a series of superlatively optimistic bulletins,43 based on the testimony of Filipinos who had abandoned the cause of their country as soon as patriotism meant personal peril, all such testimony being eagerly accepted, as testimony of the kind one wants and needs badly usually is, in total disregard of information directly to the contrary furnished by General MacArthur and other distinguished soldiers who had been then on the ground for two years.