Note 3 — Chapter XIX · Governor Wright—1905

Four days after the presidential election of 1904, to wit, on November 12th, Governor Wright left Manila and went to Samar, including in his itinerary various others of the southern islands.3 Soon after their return, the seven hundred native troops in Samar were increased to nearly two thousand, and sixteen companies of regulars (say one hundred men to a company) were also thrown into Samar. It took until the end of 1906 to end the trouble. You cannot find in the reports of the civil authorities anything explaining their three or four weeks’ stay in the Visayan Islands in November–December, 1904, that is not absolutely in accord with the original Taft obsession of 1900 about the popularity of the proposed alien “civil” government with its subjects. Governor Wright’s description of the trip says: “The warm hospitality of the Filipino people made this trip of inspection a most agreeable one.” As a matter of fact, on such occasions, the more disaffected a leader of the people was, the more he would seek, by “warm hospitality,” “warm” oratory telling the visiting mighty what the visiting mighty longed to hear, parades, fiestas, etc., to divert suspicion of sedition from himself. The poor creatures had met General Young’s cavalry column in northern Luzon in 1899 with their town bands, doing the only thing they knew of to do to “temper the wind to the shorn lamb”—i.e., to temper it to their several communities—many of them doubtless expecting to be put to the sword by General Young’s troopers, as the Cossacks did the Persians during the brief and sensational sojourn of that brilliant young administrator, Hon. W. Morgan Shuster, in Persia in 1911–12. I have no doubt that high on the list of those extending some of the “warm hospitality” above mentioned appeared the name of Don Jaime de Veyra. Yet in the summer of 1904 Don Jaime had gotten out of a sick bed to attend a convention called to send delegates to the Democratic National Convention in the United States that year,4 and also, in that same year, had run for Governor of Leyte on a platform the principal plank of which was Carthago est delenda—“Carthago” being us, the American régime. De Veyra was defeated that time, but ran again the next time and was elected. While the writer is not one of those who seek to show their “breadth of view” by gossiping with outsiders regarding what is peculiarly our own affair, still, the British view-point of the situation in the Visayan Islands, as conveyed by an Englishwoman whose husband was engaged in mercantile business there in 1904–5, and who therefore was certainly in a position to know the opinion of the little circle of British people at Cebu and Iloilo, may not be superfluous here. This lady, living then at Iloilo, wrote a series of letters to friends back home in England which she afterwards published in book form.5 In a letter dated Iloilo, January 22, 1905 (page 86), she says: