Note 5 — Chapter XIV · The Taft Commission

It is utterly fatal to clear thinking on this great subject, which concerns the liberties of a whole people, to treat Judge Taft’s reports as Commissioner to, and later Governor of, the Philippines as in the nature of a judicial decision on the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government. When he consented to go out there, he went, not to review the findings of the Paris Peace Commission, but at the urgent solicitation of an Administration whose fortunes were irrevocably committed to those findings, including the express finding that they were unfit for self-government, and the implied one that we must remain to improve the condition of the inhabitants. He was thus not a judge come out to decide on the fitness of the people for self-government, but an advocate to make the best possible case for their unfitness, and its corollary, the necessity to remain indefinitely, just as England has remained in Egypt. The war itself convinced the whole army of the United States that Aguinaldo would have been the “Boss of the Show” had Dewey sailed away from Manila after sinking the Spanish fleet. The war satisfied us all that Aguinaldo would have been a small edition of Porfirio Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have-been would have been, very decidedly, “a going concern,” although Aguinaldo probably would have been able to say with a degree of accuracy, as Diaz might have said in Mexico for so many years, “The Republic? I am the Republic.” The war demonstrated to the army, to a Q. E. D., that the Filipinos are “capable of self-government,” unless the kind which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea for all the ills of government among men without regard to their temperament or historical antecedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos can control the masses of the people in their several districts as completely as a captain ever controlled a company.5 While the municipal officials of the McKinley-Taft municipal kindergarten were stumbling along with the strange new town government system imported from America, and atoning to their benignant masters for mistakes by writing them letters about how benignant they—the teachers—were, they—the pupils,—according to the contemporaneous description by the commanding general of the United States forces in the islands, were running a superbly efficient municipal system throughout the whole archipelago, “simultaneously and in the same sphere as the American governments, and in many instances through the same personnel,”6 in aid of the insurrection. General MacArthur humorously adds that the town officials “acted openly in behalf of the Americans and secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, with considerable apparent solicitude for the interest of both.” In short, the war at once demonstrated their “capacity for self-government” and made granting it to them for the time being unthinkable. For the war was fought not on the issue of the capacity, but on the issue of the granting. The Treaty of Paris settled the “capacity” part. The army in 1898, 1899, and 1900 can hardly be said to have had any much more decided opinion on the capacity branch of the subject, than Perry did about the Japanese in 1854. The Paris Peace Commission having solemnly decided the “capacity part” adversely to the Filipinos and the war having followed, thereafter Mr. Taft went out to make out the best case possible in support of the action of the Peace Commission and, ex vi termini, in support of everything made necessary by the fact of the purchase. Unless some one goes out to present to the American people the other side of the case, they will never arrive at a just verdict.