Note 7 — Chapter XVI · Governor Taft, 1903

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware,7 having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary, officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may, possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands, or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore, in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of the province are really sick of the war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don’t want any howl about it.