Note 38 — Chapter XIV · The Taft Commission

In all the foregoing, General MacArthur was not simply trying to score a point against Judge Taft, though his resentment of the effort of the Taft Commission of 1900 to mix politics with war in the presidential year was quite as decided, and quite as well known in the islands at the time, as was General Otis’s similar attitude toward the Schurman Commission of the previous year.38 He is simply laying before the War Department, as a soldier, the familiar facts of a situation which he had been dealing with for two years past, as well known to the 70,000 officers and men under his command as to himself. And as the details into which he goes are simply prefatory to an account of the remedy he applied to the situation, that remedy must now claim our attention. The remedy General MacArthur finally applied was a proclamation, explaining to the Filipino people—“to all classes throughout the archipelago,” it read, and especially to the leaders in the field, many of whose captured comrades-in-arms he had now become thoroughly acquainted with—the severities sanctioned by the laws of civilized nations under such circumstances, and the reasons therefor; and, further, serving them with notice that thenceforward he proposed to enforce those laws with full rigor.39