Note 41 — Chapter XIV · The Taft Commission

General MacArthur’s proclamation of December 20, 1900, served notice on the leaders of a hopeless cause that assassinations, such as that ordered by Juan Cailles, above mentioned, must stop; that the universal practice of the townfolk, of sending money, supplies, and information concerning our movements to the enemy in the field, must stop; that participating in hostilities intermittently, in citizen garb, followed by return to home and avocation when too hard pressed, must stop; in short that the war must stop. Yet the proclamation explained in so firm and kindly a way why the penalties it promised were only reasonable under the circumstances, that “as an educational document the effect was immediate and far-reaching,”41 to quote from an opinion expressed by its author in the body of it, an opinion entirely consistent with modesty and fully justified by the facts. General MacArthur also goes on to say of his unrelenting and rigid enforcement of the terms of this proclamation that the results “preclude all possibility of doubt * * * that the effective pacification of the archipelago commenced December 20, 1900”—its date. It is a part of the history of those times, familiar to all who are familiar with them, that the Taft Civil Commission thought its assurances of the benevolent intentions of our government were what made the civil government possible by midsummer, 1901. But whatever the Filipinos may think of us at present, now that they understand us better, certainly in 1900–01, in view of the events of the preceding two or three years, which formed the basis of the only acquaintance they then had with us, and in view of the fact that their experience for the preceding two or three hundred years had made force the only effective governmental argument with them, and governmental promises a mere mockery, and in view of the fact that the “never-ceasing patrols, explorations, escorts, outposts,” etc., of General MacArthur’s 70,000 men were relentlessly kept up during the six months immediately following the proclamation and in aid of it, it at once becomes obvious how infinitesimal a fraction of the final partial pacification which made the civil government possible, the Taft assurances to the Filipinos as to our intentions must have been. These matters are of prime importance to any honest effort toward a clear understanding of present conditions, because far and away the greatest wrong which we, in our genuinely benevolent misinformation, have done the Filipinos, not even excepting the tariff legislation perpetrated upon them by Congress, lies in the insufferably hypocritical pretence that they ever consented to our rule, or that they consent to it now—a pretence conceived in 1898 by Trade Expansion, to beguile a nation the breath of whose own life is political liberty based on consent of the governed, into a career of conquest, but not even countenanced since by those who believe the Government should go into the politico-missionary business, after the manner of Spain in the sixteenth century.