Note 16 — Chapter XV · Governor Taft—1901–2

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain why I have so frequently put the word “civil” in quotations in referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly speaking, if “civil” does not imply consent of the governed, it at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get criticised afterwards for “subserviency” to the government you are thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug, pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench, never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was any “consent” on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed there a civil régime under a military name. We were now, in the Philippines, serving a military régime under a civil name. We had all of us doubtless—if there was an exception it is immaterial—served on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty, that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins, the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis’s attacks,16 the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective, I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly, by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there, to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, “No, the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct.” But the distinguished Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been since 1909, Governor of the Philippines—and who, before he went out there was a representative of Big Business in Boston—Governor Forbes, and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft, Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness, Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines17 because he liked that kind of a judge.