Note 13 — Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

Through men I commanded during the early campaigning, I have killed my share of Filipinos in the time of war; and after the civil government was set up I had occasion to hang a good many of them, under what seemed to me a necessary application of the old Mosaic law, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.” But I thank God I have never been a party to the insufferable pretence that they, or any appreciable fraction of them, ever consented to our rule. This, however, is the whole theory of the Philippine Commission’s certificate of March 28, 1907. It is curious how generously and supremely frank a brave soldier will get when he forgets to be a politician. In one of his state papers of 1907 Governor-General Smith13 speaks of General Trias, who had been Lieutenant-General of the insurgent army in the days of the insurrection, and next in rank to Aguinaldo himself, as one “whose love of country had been tested on many a well fought field of honorable conflict.” Contrast this tribute to the respectability of the original Philippine war for independence against us with the long list of stale falsehoods already reviewed in this volume, on the faith of which, in the presidential campaign of 1900, the American people were persuaded that to deny to the Filipinos what they had accorded to Cuba was righteous! The leaders of the Cavite-Batangas uprising of 1905 had been officers of the insurgent army, and that was the secret of their hold upon the people of those provinces. It is true that they must have been pretty sorry officers, and that they were ladrones (brigands). They were cruel and unmitigated scoundrels working for purely selfish and vainglorious ends. But it was the cloak of patriotism, however, infamously misused, that gained them such success as they attained in 1905. Says the American Governor of Cavite province in his annual report for 190614: