Note 8 — Chapter XIX · Governor Wright—1905

Early in 1905, Hon. George Curry, of New Mexico, who was an officer of Colonel Roosevelt’s regiment in Cuba, and had gone out to the Philippines with a volunteer regiment in 1899, remaining with the civil Government after 1901, was made Governor of Samar. Governor Curry has since been Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, and is now (1912) a member of Congress from the recently admitted State of New Mexico. Governor Curry has told me since he was elected to Congress that it took him all of 1905 and most of 1906, aided by several thousand troops, native and regular, to put down that Samar outbreak. Yet a certificate signed March 28, 1907, by the Governor-General and his associates of the Philippine Commission states that “a condition of general and complete peace” had continued in the Islands for two years previous to the date of the certificate.8 We will come to this certificate in its chronological order later. How many and what sort of uprisings were blanketed in that “forget-it” certificate of 1907 is material to the question whether or not the National Administration has ever been or is now frank with the country about the universality of the desire of the Philippine people for independence and local self-government, and pertinent to the insistently recurring query: “Why should we make of the Philippines an American Ireland?” But inasmuch as, in addition to the Samar uprising which raged all through 1905, another insurrection occurred in that year, which was duly “forgotten” by said certificate, this last movement must now claim our attention.