Note 39 — Chapter XV · Governor Taft—1901–2

The truth is General Bell’s “bark” was much worse than his “bite.” The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901–02 lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was 312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the outset to make General Bell’s “bark” sound louder, but now that we are considering his “bite”—how many lives his Batangas lesson to the Filipino people cost—another bit of testimony is tremendously relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due to war, pestilence, and famine “has reduced to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province had.”39 Considering that General Bell’s 1901–’02 campaign in that ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,—how many of the 209 wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered—the Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of “suppressing insurrection under like circumstances.” But it was never again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon’s “corpse-carcass stench” from supposed reconcentrado pens and his “clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the dead,” so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most sobbingly in love with “a benign civil government” and had forgotten all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least; whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.