Note 46 — Chapter XIV · The Taft Commission

So that while the American people were being pacified with the Taft cablegrams to Secretary Root that the Filipino people wanted peace, General MacArthur, under Mr. Root’s direction, was simultaneously proceeding to make them want it with the customary argument used to settle irreconcilable differences between nations—powder and lead. Mr. Root was all the time in constant communication with both, but he gave out only the Taft optimism to the public, and withheld the actual facts within his knowledge. December 25th, General MacArthur wires Secretary Root, “Expectations based on result of election have not been realized.” “Progress,” he says, is “very slow.”46