Note 6 — Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

The presidential election of 1900 had been fought out, in the midst of considerable bitterness, on the idea that the Root view was correct and the MacArthur view was altogether mistaken. So that after 1900, the McKinley Administration was irrevocably committed to the Root view.6 The Philippine Government had, after 1900, diligently set to work to live up to the Root view, and to fit the facts to the Root view by prayer and hope, accompanied by asseveration. Hence in 1901 the alleged joyous sobs of welcome with which the Filipino people are, in effect, described in the report of the Philippine Commission for that year as having received the “benign” civil government, said sobs or other manifestations having spread, if the Commission’s report is to be taken at its face value, “like wild-fire.” Hence also the attempt of 1902 to minimize the insurrection of 1901–2, in Batangas and other provinces of southern Luzon, conducted by what Governor Luke E. Wright, in a speech delivered at Memphis in the latter part of 1902, called “the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent.” Hence the quiet placing of the province of Surigao in the hands of the military in 1903 without suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the failure to order out the army in Albay in 1903 and in Samar in 1904. Hence also the prompt use of the army in Samar, Batangas, and Cavite in 1905, after the presidential election was safely over. Hence also the seething state of sedition which smouldered in the Visayan Islands in 1906, punctuated by the outbreak in Leyte of that year.