Note 13 — Chapter XVIII · Governor Wright—1904

So the writ of habeas corpus remained unsuspended, thus making it possible to so state in later official certificates covering that period. But habeas corpus cut no more figure in the situation than it did at the battle of Gettysburg, or at the crossing of the Red Sea by the chosen people, or at the sinking of the Titanic. The constabulary would worry along with such force as they had in the island of Samar, only a few hundred, certainly nearer five hundred than one thousand. And, whenever they had a battle with the outlaws, if they themselves were not annihilated, which happened more than once, they would bring back prisoners in droves and put them in the jail, and I was expected to sift out how much proof they had, or claimed to have, of overt acts by persons not actually captured in action. Of course a race then began, a race against death, to see whether death or I would get to John Doe or Richard Roe first. And though I held court every day except Sunday from August to November 8th, sometimes getting in sixteen hours per day by supplementing a day’s work with a night session, death would often beat me to some one man on the jail list whom I happened to have picked out to get to the next day. Men so picked out were men as to whom something I might have heard held out the hope of being able to dispose of their cases quickly by letting them loose,13 thus getting that much farther from the danger limit of crowding in the jail. Some of these would be specially picked out because reported sick. I kept track of the sick by visiting them myself when practicable, and talking to them. Of course many of them were brigands—-Pulajans—but some of them were the saddest looking, most abject little brigands that anybody ever saw. Of course you might catch some nasty disease from them, but nobody, somehow, ever seemed to have any apprehension on that score in the Philippines. This does not argue bravery at all. It is merely the listless stoicism that lurks in the climate. I recollect going to walk one afternoon, after adjourning court at 5 o’clock, saying to the prosecuting attorney before adjourning, “We will take up the case of Capence Coral in the morning; there does not seem, from what I can understand, to be enough proof to convict him of anything.” Of course when you were dealing with hundreds of people, you did not have any nerve-racking hysterics about any one man. Leaving the court-house I passed by the hospital, where Capence had been transferred, pending the arrival of witnesses against him and the rest of the crowd captured with him. I asked the hospital steward how Capence was. The answer was he had died at 4:45—some twenty minutes before. Death had beat me to Capence. When I meet Capence he will know I did the best I could. I was under a great strain, a sort of writ of habeas corpus incarnate, the only thing remotely suggesting relief from unwarranted14 detention on the whole horizon of the situation. I was trying to do the best I could by the Constitution, in so far as the spirit of it had reached the Philippines. I broke down totally under the strain about November 8th, came home in the spring of the following year and remained an invalid for several years thereafter; and as a noted corporation lawyer once said after recovery from a similar illness, “I haven’t had much constitution since, but have been living mostly under the by-laws.”