Note 20 — Chapter XXI · Governor Smith—1907–9

The non-Christian tribes, on the other hand, never have anything to do with the civilized people. The Act of Congress of 1902, therefore, had no sort of reference to the simple, ignorant, and ordinarily docile mountain folk who tilled the soil, revered the priests, paid their cedula or head tax like all the rest of the population of the Islands, and carried their agricultural products from season to season, their hemp and the like, to the coast towns to market. In other words, inclusion of the Samar “Pulajans,” or “Red Breeches” brigade, and the Leyte bandits, in the peace certificate of 1907, as “non-Christian tribes” was an afterthought, having no foundation either in logic or fact. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation. This is clearly apparent from President Roosevelt’s message to Congress of December, 1905.20 You do not find any buncombe about “non-Christian tribes” in that message. In there reviewing the Samar and other insurrections of 1905 in the Philippines, you find him dealing with the real root of the evil with perfect honesty, though adopting the view that the Filipino people were to blame therefor, because we had placed too much power in the hands of an ignorant electorate, which had elected rascally officials. “Cavite and Samar,” he says, “are instances of reposing too much confidence in the self-governing power of a people.” If we had let the Filipinos go ahead with their little republic in 1898, instead of destroying it as we did, they knew and would have utilized the true elements of strength they had, viz., a very considerable body of educated, patriotic men having the loyal confidence of the masses of the people. But we proceeded to ram down their throats a preconceived theory that the only road to self-government was for an alien people to step in and make the ignorant masses the sine qua non. Yet if there was one point on which Mr. McKinley had laid more stress than on any other, in his original instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, that point was the one consecrated in the following language of those instructions: