Note 4 — Chapter XI · The First Philippine Commission

“Ah! but this landscape suited neither General Otis nor the Imperialists! For their criminal intention it was better that the American commissioners should find war and desolation in the Philippines, perceiving from the day of their arrival the fetid stench emitted by the mingled corpses of Americans and Filipinos. For their purposes it was better that that gentleman, Mr. Schurman, President of the Commission, could not leave Manila, limiting himself to listen to the few Filipinos, who, having yielded to the reasonings of gold, were partisans of the Imperialists. It was better that the commission should contemplate the Philippine problem through conflagrations, to the whiz of bullets, on the transverse light of all the unchained passions, in order that it might not form any exact or complete opinion of the natural and proper limits of said problem. Ah! it was better, in short, that the commission should leave defeated in not having secured peace, and would blame me and the other Filipinos, when I and the whole Filipino people anxiously desired that peace should have been secured before rather than now, but an honourable and worthy peace for the United States and for the Philippine Republic.”4