Note 102 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Blanco’s Memoria102 affords, unconsciously, the most severe indictment that could be passed on Spain’s fitness to hold the Philippines (or her other colonies) in 1898. This man was really of liberal temperament; he had formed a just conception of the real insignificance of the Katipunan movement; and he strove, when the crisis was prematurely forced on him, to restrain the vindictiveness of the rabid Spanish element, and really believed in the efficacy of a “policy of attraction.” But instead of setting forth on broader grounds the reasons for his course of action and discussing with sincerity and frankness a policy for the Philippines, he felt compelled after his return to Spain to bow before the howls of press and public. He defends himself before his clerical-conservative critics not by showing the folly of their illiberal policy for the colony, but endeavors to prove that they were wrong in accusing him of lack of severity as well as of energy. Thus we learn (p. 20) that, even under a Blanco, before the outbreak came, one thousand and forty-two persons had been deported “as Masons, disaffected and suspicious or harmful to their towns.” During the night of August 19–20, 1896, following the sensation created by Friar Gil, there were forty-three arrests in Manila, and three hundred more within the next week. During September, thirty seven men taken in arms were shot, after summary trials (p. 25.) The number of Filipinos, mostly men of some position, who had not taken up arms, but were arrested for alleged complicity in the Katipunan, and involved in the trials before a special court for conspiracy and sedition, very soon mounted to five hundred, including those sent in from the provinces. Some remained incomunicados for more than forty days. The men executed from September 4 to December 12, 1896, when Blanco surrendered command to Polavieja, numbered seventy-four in all.103