Note 8 — Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

On March 27, 1905, the President of the United States was duly advised that the census had been completed, and on March 28th, the presidential proclamation promising the Filipinos a legislature two years later if in the meantime they did not insurrect any, was duly published at Manila. It is true that there is no Philippine state paper signed by anybody, either by the President of the United States, or the Governor-General of the Philippines, or any one else, certifying to a condition of “general and complete peace” between the certificate to that effect made by the Philippine Commission on September 25, 1902, above mentioned, which authorized commencing the census (and was justified by the facts), and the presidential promise of March 28, 1905, that if they would “be good” for two years more, they should have a legislature. But the whole manifest implication of the representations of fact sought to be conveyed by the action both of the Washington and the Manila authorities at the date of the presidential promise of March 28, 1905, is that a condition of general and complete peace had obtained ever since the last certificate to that effect, the certificate of September 25, 1902. Yet, as we saw in the chapter covering the last year of Governor Wright’s administration, besides the Samar disturbances that lasted all through 1905, a big insurrection was actually in full swing in Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna provinces, on March 28, 1905, had then been in progress since before the first of the year, and continued until the latter part of 1905, the then Governor-General, Governor Wright, having, by proclamation issued January 31, 1905, declared Cavite and Batangas to be in a state of insurrection, ordered the military into those provinces, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. President Roosevelt’s proclamation of March 28, 1905, can by no possibility be construed as saying to the Filipinos anything other than substantially this: “You have not insurrected any since my proclamation of July 4, 1902. If you will be good two years more, you shall have a legislature.” What then was the Philippine Commission to do at the end of those two years, peppered, as they had been, with most annoying outbreaks in various provinces not inhabited by “Moros or other non-Christian tribes.” During the presidential campaign of 1904 the Commission had committed themselves, as we have seen, to the proposition that nothing serious was going on at that time in Samar. So how could they take frank official cognizance on paper of the reign of terror let loose there by their delay in ordering out the army until after the presidential election, a delay which, like a delay of fire-engines to arrive at the scene of a fire, had permitted the Samar outbreak to gain such headway that it took two years to finally put it down? Then there was the outbreak of 1906 in Leyte, described in the last chapter, as to which even the Commission had admitted in their annual report for that year8: