Note 40 — Chapter XIV · The Taft Commission

I do not believe in the doctrine that might makes right, and I cherish the high hope that this human family of ours will survive to see war superseded, as the ultimate arbiter, by something more like heaven and less like hell. But in the Philippines in 1900 it was a situation, not a theory, that confronted us, and, as far as my consciously fallible thinking apparatus lights the way which then lay before us, that way led to a shrine whereon was written “A life for a life.” This is no mere academic discussion. With me it is a tremendously practical one. In the gravest possible acceptation of the term it is awe-fully so. If I am wrong, every execution I approved by memorandum review furnished Colonel Crowder and General MacArthur, of military commission findings out there was wrong, and so were a number of the executions I ordered as a judge appointed by Governor Taft under a government which, though nominally a civil government, was no more “civil” in so far as that term implies absence of necessity for the presence of military force, than other governments immediately following conquest usually are. The propriety of the imposition of capital punishment by the constituted authorities of a nation as part of a set policy to make its sovereignty respected, is wholly independent of whether you call your colonial government a civil or a military one. So that in justifying General MacArthur I am also justifying Governor Taft, and as it was on the recommendation of the former that the latter appointed me to the Bench, we are certainly all three in the same boat in the matter of the capital punishments under consideration. And while the company you were in on earth in a given transaction, however distinguished that company, is not going to help you with the Recording Angel,40 still, it is some comfort to know that wiser and abler men than yourself approved a course of imposing capital punishments to which you were a party, such punishments having been inflicted as part of a policy whose subsequent evolution revealed it to you as fundamentally wrong. And this reflection is quite relevant in the present connection to the question whether the government of Benevolent Assimilation we have maintained over the Filipinos for the last fourteen years is one which was originally imposed by force against their will, or whether it was ever welcomed by them or any considerable fraction of them.