Note 2 — Chapter IV · Merritt and Aguinaldo

General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo had “proclaimed an independent government, republican in form, with himself as President, and at the time of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice of executive and legislative departments had been accomplished, at least on paper.”2 Of course at that time we were still officially declining to take Filipino aspirations for independence seriously, and preferred to treat Aguinaldo’s government as purely a matter of stationery. As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the official documents of that period, made with a view of ascertaining just how much of that Aguinaldo government of 1898 was stationery fiction and how much was stable fact, has absolutely surprised one man who was out there from 1899 to 1905 (the writer), and I have no doubt will be interesting, as mere matter of political necrology, to any American who was there “in the days of the empire” as the “ninety-niners” called it.