Note 11 — Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

But let us see just how much the Philippine Commission that signed the peace certificate of March 28, 1907, swallowed, and how they swallowed it. It will be observed that they sugar-coated their certificate with a lot of whereases. The first of these recites President Roosevelt’s promise of March 28, 1905, that the Filipinos should have a legislature two years thereafter “provided that a condition of general and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States should be certified by the Philippine Commission to have continued in the territory of the Philippine Islands for a period of two years” after the proclamation. Whereas number two, it will be noted, goes on to state that there have been “no serious disturbances of public order save and except” those in Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte,11 the magnitude of which has been fully described in previous chapters. Of the Cavite-Batangas insurrection, the only one they had previously formally admitted to be an insurrection, they say it was “caused by certain noted outlaws and bandit chieftains [naming them], and their followers.” Obviously this was hardly sufficient to show that an insurrection they had once officially recognized as such was not in fact such at all. So in order to justify a statement that “a condition of general and complete peace” had continued in these two great provinces of Cavite and Batangas, which they had but shortly previously declared to be in a state of insurrection, and been upheld by the Supreme Court in so doing, they resort to the old Otis expedient of 1898–9, worked on the American people through Mr. McKinley to show absence of lack of consent-of-the-governed. This expedient, as we have seen in the earlier chapters of this book, consisted in vague use of the word “majority.” It had stood Judge Taft in good stead in the campaign of 1900, because when he then said that “the great majority of the people” were “entirely willing” to accept American rule, there was no earthly way to disprove it in time for the verdict of the American people to be influenced by the unanimity of the Filipinos against a change of masters in lieu of independence. It was the only possible expedient for an American conscience, because every American naturally feels that unless he can, by some sort of sophistry, persuade himself that “the majority” of the people want a given thing, then the thing is a wrong thing to force upon them. So the ethical hurdle the Commission had to leap in order to sign the certificate of 1907 was cleared thus: