In his letter of instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission,

Mr. McKinley first quoted the noble concluding language with which

the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila gave an immediate

and supremely comforting sense of security to a city of some three

hundred thousand people who had then been continuously in terror of

their lives for three and one half months, thus:

This city, its inhabitants, * * * and its private property of

all description * * * are placed under the special safeguard of

the faith and honor of the American army;

and then added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of

the United States to give protection for property and life * * *

to all the people of the Philippine Islands. * * * I charge this

commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation,

which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.

How the premature setting up of the civil government of the Philippines

in 1901 under pressure of political expediency, and the consequent

withdrawal of the police protection of the army, was followed by a

long series of disorders combated by prosecutions for sedition and

brigandage, toward the end of which the writer broke down and left the

Islands exclaiming inwardly, "I do not know the method of drawing an

indictment against a whole people," will now be traced, not so much

to show that the Philippine insular government has failed properly and

competently to meet the most sacred obligations that can rest upon any

government, but to show the inherent unfitness of a government based

on the consent of the governed to run any other kind of a government.

There were five officers of the Philippine volunteer army of 1899-1901

appointed to the bench by Governor Taft in 1901. Their names and the

method of their transition from the military to the civil regime

are indicated by the following communication, a copy of which was

furnished to each, as indicated in the endorsement which follows the

signature of Judge Taft:

UNITED STATES PHILIPPINE COMMISSION

President's Office, Manila, June 17, 1901.

Major-General Arthur MacArthur, U. S. A.,

Military Governor of the Philippine Islands, Manila.

Sir:

I am directed by the commission to inform you that it has made

the following appointments under the recent Judicial Act passed

June 11, 1901:

You will observe that among our appointees are five army officers:

Brigadier General James F. Smith, Lieutenant James H. Blount,

Jr., 29th Infantry, Captain Adam C. Carson, 28th Infantry; Captain

Warren H. Ickis, 36th Infantry; and Lieutenant George P. Whitsett,

32d Infantry.

It is suggested that it would be well for these officers to resign

their positions in the United States military service to the end

that they may accept the civil positions, take the oath of office,

and immediately begin their new duties.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

(Signed) Wm. H. Taft,

President.

Official extract copy respectfully furnished Lieutenant James

H. Blount, Jr., 29th Infantry, U. S. Vols., Manila, P. I. Your

resignation, if offered in compliance with above letter, will be

accepted upon the date preferred.

By command of Major-General MacArthur:

(Signed) E. H. Crowder

Lieutenant-Colonel and Judge Advocate, U. S. A. Secretary.

Military Secretary's Office,

June 18, 1901.

General Smith had come out as colonel of the 1st Californias, and had

won his stars on the field of battle, as has already been described in

an earlier chapter. He went from the army to the Supreme Bench--at

Manila. The archipelago had been divided by the Taft Commission

into fifteen judicial districts, containing three or four provinces

each,--each district court to be a nisi prius or trial court. Judge

Carson (Va.) went to the Hemp Peninsula District in the extreme south

of Luzon, already described, and four years later to the Supreme Bench,

where he still is. Judge Ickis (Ia.) went to Mindanao, and later died

of the cholera down there. Judge Whitsett (Mo.) went to Jolo (the

little group of islets near British North Borneo), but his wife died

soon afterward, and he resigned and came home. The writer (Ga.) went

to northern Luzon, to the First District hereinafter noticed.

Just here it may be remarked that the reader will need no long

complicated description of the details of the organization of the new

government, interspersed with unpronounceable names, if he will simply

assume the view-point Governor Taft had in the beginning. Governor

Taft simply analogized his situation to that of a governor of a State

or Territory at home. His fifty provinces were to him fifty counties,

twenty-five of them in the main island of Luzon, which, as heretofore

stated, is about the size of Ohio or Cuba (forty odd thousand square

miles), and contains half the population and over one-third the total

land area of the archipelago. However, each of his provincial governors

was liberally paid, and the authority of a governor of a province

was, on a small scale, more like that of one of our own state chief

executives than like the authority and functions of the chairman of

the Board of County Commissioners of a county with us. For instance,

the governorship of Cebu, with its 2000 square miles of territory

and 650,000 inhabitants, was quite as big a job as the governorship

of New Mexico, or some other one of our newer States.

So that the task on which Governor Taft entered July 4, 1901, was

the governing of a potential ultimate federal union in miniature,

containing nearly eight millions of people. One slight mistake I

think he made was in providing that the governors of the provinces

should be ex-officio sheriffs of the Courts of First Instance

(of the fifteen several judicial districts aforesaid). This was to

enable the Judges of First Instance to keep a weather eye on the

provincial governors, the judiciary at first being largely American,

and it being the programme to have native governors, some of them

recently surrendered insurgent generals, as rapidly as practicable

and advisable. The scheme was good business, but not tactful. It

subtracted some wind from the gubernatorial sails to be a sheriff,

a provincial governor under the Spanish regime having been quite a

vice-regal potentate. But the judges were as careful to treat their

native governors with the consideration the authority vested in them

called for as Governor Taft himself would have been. So no substantial

harm was done, and the real power in the provinces of questionable

loyalty remained where it belonged, in American hands.

Just after Governor Taft's inauguration, the four newly appointed

district judges just out of the army called on the governor. Judge

Carson was the spokesman, though without pre-arrangement. He said:

"Governor, we have called to pay our respects and say goodbye before

going to the provinces. We have been acting under military orders so

long, that while we are not here to get orders, we would like to have

any parting suggestions that may occur to you." Governor Taft said:

"Well, Gentlemen, all I can think of is to remind you that if what

we have all heard is true the Spanish courts usually operated to the

delay of justice, rather than to the dispensing of it. So just go

ahead to your respective districts, and get to work, remembering that

you are Americans." So we did. Of course none of us loaned ourselves

for a moment to the amiable Taft fiction that "the great majority of

the people are entirely willing to government under the supremacy

of the United States." We had all had a share in the subjugation

of the Islands as far as it had progressed at that time, and had

seen the Filipinos fight--unskilfully and ineffectively, it is true

(because they none of them understood the use of two sights on a rifle,

and simply could not hit us much), but pluckily enough. We knew the

Filipinos well, and our attitude was simply that of "Pharaoh and the

Sergeant," in Kipling's ballad of the conquest of Egypt. However,

we knew nothing of the Egyptians, except what we had learned in the

Bible, gave no thought to whether our occupation was to be "temporary"

like the British occupation of Egypt since 1882, or temporary like

the American occupation of Cuba in 1898. That was a matter for the

people of the United States to determine later. But somebody had to

govern the Islands, and there we were, and there were the Islands. In

the scheme of things some one had to do that part of the world's work,

and, as the salaries were liberal, we went to the work, not concerning

ourselves with amiable fictions of any kind. I think our attitude

was really one of more intimately sympathetic understanding of the

Filipinos than that of Governor Taft himself, because we had all known

them longer, and all spoke their language, i. e., the language of

the educated and representative men (Spanish), and knew their ways,

their foibles, and their many indisputably noble traits. But we did

not start out to play the part of political wet-nurses. Our attitude

was, if Mr. Filipino does not behave, we will make him.

Judge Carson and myself had one peculiar qualification for fidelity

to the Taft policies for which we were entitled to no credit. We

instinctively resented any suggestion comparing the Filipinos to

negroes. We had many warm friends among the Filipinos, had shared

their generous hospitality often, and in turn had extended them

ours. Any such suggestion as that indicated implied that we had been

doing something equivalent to eating, drinking, dancing, and chumming

with negroes. And we resented such suggestions with an anger quite as

cordial and intense as the canons of good taste and loyal friendship

demanded. I really believe that the southern men in the Philippines

have always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any other

Americans out there, and for the reasons just suggested. Not only

is the universal American willingness to treat the educated Asiatic

as a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights going to

redeem him from the down-trodden condition into which British and

other European contempt for him has kept him, but the American from

the South out there is a guarantee that he shall never be treated as

if he were an African. The African is aeons of time behind the Asiatic

in development; the latter is aeons ahead of us in the mere duration

of his civilization. The Filipino has many of the virtues both of the

European and the Asiatic. Christianity has made him the superior in

many respects, of his neighbor and racial cousin, the Japanese. And

Spanish civilization has produced among them many educated gentlemen

whom it is an honor to call friend.

The five lawyers, who on ceasing to be volunteer officers became

judges, had other incentives also to make the Taft Government a

success. The possession of power is always pleasant. We knew the

military folk were going to stand by and watch the civil government,

and prophesy failure. This of course put us on our metal to impress

upon the dictatorial gentry of the military profession, with didactic

firmness, the fundamental importance to all American ideals that the

military should be subordinate to the civil authority.

The First Judicial District to which the writer was first assigned

comprised four provinces, Ilocos Norte, in the Ilocano country, the

province situated at the extreme northwestern corner of Luzon, in the

military district the conquest of which by General Young has already

been fully described; and the three provinces of the Cagayan valley,

[371] overrun by Captain Batchelor on his remarkable march from the

mountains to the sea in November, 1899, also already described. Here

I remained for a year, and then came home on leave, desperately

ill; being given, on returning to the Islands after my recovery,

an assignment in one of the southern islands, hereinafter dealt with.

We volunteers were all commissioned as judges as of the 15th of June,

though none of us I believe were mustered out until June 30th. The

day after I was notified of my appointment as judge, as above set

forth, desiring to enter upon my judicial emoluments, which were

several times those I was receiving as a soldier, I removed the

shoulder-straps and collar ornaments from my white duck suit, and

went over and took the oath of office before the Chief Justice of

the Islands. We had not yet been mustered out of the army, but as

above stated, Governor Taft had suggested to General MacArthur that

we resign without waiting for the day of muster out, so we could

get to work that much sooner, and General MacArthur had notified us

that if we cared to resign at once as suggested, he would cable our

resignations to Washington. Immediately after qualifying before the

Chief Justice, I left his office and on emerging from the court-house

hailed a carromata, [372] but the driver said No, he would not carry

me. I suggested in a very rudimental way, in rather rudimental Spanish

suited to him, that he was a common carrier, and as such under a

duty to transport me. He said his horse was tired. His horse did

not look tired. He would not have thus casually toyed with veracity

if I had had my shoulder-straps on. An autoridad (a representative

of constituted authority) is to the masses of the Filipino people

something which instinctively challenges their respect and obedience,

more especially where the "authority" is firm and just. Respect for

authority is their most conspicuous civic trait, and it is on this

element in the lower ninety, on the intelligence and capacity to

guide them of the upper ten, and on the ardent patriotism of both,

that I predicate my difference with President Taft as to the capacity

of the Filipino people for self-government. However, as I was to all

appearances not an "authority," this ignorant man treated me as merely

one of the Americans who, having invaded his country, apparently were

not sure whether they were afraid of his people or not. Again I tried

diplomacy, offering him an exorbitant fare. "Nothing doing." It was

about siesta time, and he would not budge. Here then was the civil

government proposition in a nutshell, to take the ignorant people and

teach them their rights under theoretically free institutions, instead

of letting their own people do it in their own way; to reason directly

with such people as this cochero (hackman), to begin at the bottom of

the social scale right on the jump, the idea being to fit them, the

sacred (?) majority, to know their rights and "knowing dare maintain"

them against the educated minority, as if the latter did not have

a greater natural interest in their welfare than any stranger could

possibly have. That I indulged all these reflections at the time I

of course do not mean to say. The significance of the incident has

of course deepened in the light of the subsequent years. At any rate,

I did not succeed in budging that cochero. I walked home, forego the

difference between the military and the judicial salary for the two

weeks remaining before muster-out day, put my shoulder-straps back on,

and kept them on until June 30, 1901. [373]

When I first landed on the China seacoast of the district I was to

preside over, I was met by quite a reception committee of the leading

men, who conducted me with great courtesy to the provincial capital. A

little later the justices of the peace paid their respects. One

of them came thirty miles to do so. The court-room was very long,

and when I first spied this last man, he was at the other end of

the room bowing very low. He would bow, then advance a few steps,

then bow again, then resume the forward march toward me. I reminded

myself of some ancient king, so profound were his obeisances. At

first I thought to myself, "He bows too low, he must have been up to

some devilment lately!" Experience showed me later that it was simply

one of the ever-present manifestations of the respect of the Filipino

for constituted authority. They positively love to show their respect

for authority, just as a good soldier loves to show his respect for

an officer. Here some American remarks: "Ah, but that is not good

proof of capacity for self-government. They would not 'cuss out' the

party in power enough." I answer: Who made you the judge to say that

our particular form of government and our particular way of doing

things is better for each and every other people under the sun than

any they can devise for themselves? But there was of course another

possible reason for the profundity of the obeisances of my judicial

subordinate above mentioned. When I reached that province of Ilocos

Norte in July, 1901, the people were in a state of submission that was

simply abject. They had at first worked the amigo business on General

Young, and treachery of that kind had been so inexorably followed by

dire punishment, that every home in the country had its lesson. Yet

that was the only way. The poor devils did not seem to know when they

were licked. This is not maudlin sentiment. It is a protest against the

cotemporary libel on Filipino patriotism about "the great majority"

being "entirely willing" to accept our rule, and the cotemporary

belittling of the work the army had to do to make them accept it.

I remained in charge of the First Judicial District for more

than a year, and during that period tried few or no crimes of a

political character, that is to say, indictments for sedition or the

like--attempts to subvert the government. The district comprised a

total population of about a half million people, more than one-eighth

of the population of Luzon, and a total area of over 13,000 square

miles, nearly one-third of all Luzon. But remember, this was in

northern Luzon, where the work of pacification was lucidly completed

by the army before the "peace-at-any-price" policy began. We will see

what happened in my friend Judge Carson's district, and in the rest of

southern Luzon later. The principal broad general fact I now recall,

in connection with the administration of justice in the First Judicial

District during the year or more I had it, is that the main volume of

business on the court calendars was crimes of violence of a strictly

non-political character due to lack of efficient police protection

in the several communities, consequent on withdrawal of military

garrisons. The country was in an unsettled state. The aftermath

of war, lawless violence, was virulently present, and the presence

of troops scattered through a province, under such circumstances,

is a wonderful moral force to restrain lawlessness. However high

the purpose, however kindly the motive, the setting up of a civil

government in the Philippines at the time it was set up, when the

country was far from ready for it, was a terrible mistake. Of course

no one man in a given province or judicial district had a bird's-eye

view of the whole situation and the whole panorama at the time,

such as we can get at this distance, in retrospect. Of course it did

not lie in human nature for the men responsible for the mistake to

see it at first, and, the die once cast, they had to keep on, with

intermittent resort to military help, the extent of which help was

always minimized thereafter. To show how little the general state of

the archipelago was understood by American provincial officials busy in

a given part of it, and getting little or no news of the outside world,

I remained in the First Judicial District from July, 1901, to August,

1902, and heard nothing of the great insurrection in southern Luzon,

in Batangas, and the adjacent provinces, which raged during the winter

of 1901-02, except a vague rumor that there was trouble down there. The

Filipinos did, however. Of course for Mr. Root to be able to furnish

in December, 1901, a report, as Secretary of War, to the President,

for consumption by Congress and the people of this country, to the

effect that his volunteer army had been mustered out on schedule time,

June 30, 1901, and a "civil" government set up and in due operation,

was a nice showing, calculated to sooth latent public discontent with

wading through slaughter to over-seas dominion. Reports thereafter of

disturbances could always be waived aside as merely local in character,

and not serious. If it were stoutly asserted that everything was

quiet all over the archipelago except in certain parts of certain

localities, naming them, that sounded well, and as the public at home

simply skipped the unpronounceable names, not caring much whether they

represented molecules or hemispheres, all went well. For instance,

most of the provinces of the archipelago were organized under "civil"

government prior to the inauguration of Governor Taft, which occurred,

July 4, 1901, and on July 17th, thereafter, Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol

were restored to military control. [374] I suppose the fact that

Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol had been so restored was duly announced

at the time in the Associated Press despatches from Manila. But

what light did it throw on the situation? Who knew whether any one

of these names represented a mountain lair, a country village, a

remote islet, or a large and populous province? As a matter of fact,

each was a province, and the total population of the three provinces

was 1,180,655, [375] and their total area 4651 square miles. [376]

The eminent gentlemen charged with the government of the Islands,

once they committed themselves to their "civil" government, persisted

always in treating the insurrection, as General Hancock's campaign

speeches used to treat the tariff--as "a local issue." The true

analogy, that of a house on fire, with the fire partly but not wholly

under control, and momentarily subject to gusts of wind, never seems

to have occurred to them. Here were provinces aggregating nearly

twelve hundred thousand people, officially admitted to be still in

insurrection within less than two weeks after the announcement of

the inauguration of a civil government, which included them, with

its implied assertion of a state of peace as to them.

If to the three provinces above named you add the province of Samar,

later of dark and bloody fame, you have a fourth province as to which

not only had there been no "civil" government organized on paper, but

no claim yet made by any one that we had ever conquered it. We had been

so busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not yet had time to bother

very much with Samar. The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its

population 266,237. (See the census tables already cited.) In their

report dated October 15, 1901, [377] you find the Commission admitting

that "the insurrection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu" and

"parts of" Laguna and Tayabas provinces. Now the euphemistic limitation

implied in the words "parts of" is quite negligible, for any serious

purpose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather constantly on the

move, and the population in all the "parts of" any province that was

still holding out backed up the combatants morally and materially,

with information as to our movements, supplies, etc., whenever

the insurgent detachments, in the course of their peregrinations,

happened to pass through those "parts." So, to make a recapitulation

presenting the political situation admitted by the Commission to exist

a little over three months after the inauguration of civil government,

we have the insurrection still in progress as follows:

Province Area (sq. m.) Population

Batangas 1,201 257,715

Cebu 1,939 653,727

Bohol 1,511 269,223

Laguna 629 148,606

Tayabas 5,993 153,065

Samar 5,276 266,237

------ ---------

Total 16,549 1,748,573

According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on

October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his "civil" government on

the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among

one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total

area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the

reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos

and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles,

having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the

case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of

the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration

as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain

why I have so frequently put the word "civil" in quotations in

referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly

speaking, if "civil" does not imply consent of the governed, it

at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate,

and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the

Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it

was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people

to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get

criticised afterwards for "subserviency" to the government you are

thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now

the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine

judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug,

pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home

an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on

the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of

the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench,

never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was

any "consent" on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been

in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed

there a civil regime under a military name. We were now, in the

Philippines, serving a military regime under a civil name. We had all

of us doubtless--if there was an exception it is immaterial--served

on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty,

that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins,

the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission

of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and

travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from

the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis's attacks, [378]

the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to

the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective,

I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly,

by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield

Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether

or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there,

to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, "No,

the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have

never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct." But the distinguished

Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been

since 1909, Governor of the Philippines--and who, before he went out

there was a representative of Big Business in Boston--Governor Forbes,

and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered

any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the

Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft,

Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission

null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and

before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness,

Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines [379]

because he liked that kind of a judge.

Having sown the wind by setting up his civil government too soon,

let us now observe the whirlwind Governor Taft reaped within six

months thereafter. Of course the civil and military folk were at

daggers' points. That goes without saying. But their differences

were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos did not get hold

of them. To that end, the situation was also diligently concealed

in the United States. In his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find

President Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of that

rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, General Chaffee, and

also commending Governor Taft, and telling them how harmoniously they

had gotten along together to the credit of their common country. But

in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee had relieved General MacArthur,

you find the following cablegram:

Executive Mansion, Washington,

October 8, 1901.

Chaffee, Manila: I am deeply chagrined, to use the mildest possible

term, over the trouble between yourself and Taft. I wish you

to see him personally, and spare no effort to secure prompt and

friendly agreement in regard to the differences between you. Have

cabled him also. It is most unfortunate to have any action which

produces friction and which may have a serious effect both in

the Philippines and here at home. I trust implicitly that you

and Taft will come to agreement.

Theodore Roosevelt. [380]

The most important words of the above telegram are "and here at

home." The "serious effect here at home" so earnestly deprecated was

that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might

be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out

the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil

government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was

recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal

of the police protection of the army from districts in which there

were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and

willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch

contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has

already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor

Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that "the great majority"

were "entirely willing" to American sovereignty. It would also show

up Mr. Root's nonsense about "the patient and unconsenting millions,"

so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his

pious Philippics against delivering said millions "into the hands of

the assassin, Aguinaldo," [381] and would reveal the truth confessed

by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July,

1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor

and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just

completed the suppression of "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people."

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt's above

cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular

waters, a company of General Chaffee's command, Company C, of the

9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place

called Balangiga, in the island of Samar. [382] This had made General

Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody

drama of which General "Jake" Smith was the central figure, whereby

Samar was made "a howling wilderness." But Governor Taft was filled

with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government

than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos

of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty

Chaffee with remarks like this: "The people are friendly to the civil

government," and suavely speaking of "the evidence which accumulates

on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and

protection by the civil government." [383] The same Taft report goes

on to deprecate "rigor in the treatment" of the situation and the

"consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the

Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread

and development of the civil government."

General "Jake" Smith was sent to Samar shortly after the Balangiga

massacre, and did indeed make the place a howling wilderness, with his

famous "kill-and-burn" orders, instructions to "kill everything over

ten years old" and so forth, and the army was in sympathy generally

with most of what he did,--except, of course, the unspeakable "10 year

old" part--piously exclaiming, as fallible human nature often will in

such circumstances, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Now the civil

government could have put a stop to all this if it had wanted to. It

had the backing of President Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the

benefit of such "fear of God"--to use the army's rather sacrilegious

expression about that Samar campaign--as the military arm put into

the heart of the Filipino, and went on the even tenor of its way,

still maintaining that the Filipinos must like us because the civil

government was so benevolent,--as if the Filipinos drew any nice

distinctions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or supposed

the two did not represent one and the same government, the government

of the United States. There was much investigation about that awful

Samar campaign afterward. General Smith was court-martialed and partly

whitewashed, at least not dismissed. At General Smith's court-martial,

there was some dispute about the alleged orders to "kill and burn,"

to "kill everything over ten years old," etc. But the nature of the

campaign may be inferred from General Smith's famous circular No. 6,

which, issued on Christmas eve, 1901, advised his command, in effect,

that he did not take much stock in the civil commission's confidence

that the people really wanted peace; that he was "thoroughly convinced"

that the wealthy people in the towns of his district were aiding the

insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that he proposed to

adopt a policy that will create in all the minds of all the

people a burning desire for the war to cease; a desire or longing

so intense, so personal, and so real that it will impel them to

devote themselves in real earnest to bringing about a real state

of peace. [384]

During all his trial troubles, General Smith "took what was coming

to him" without a murmur, and General Chaffee stuck to him as far as

he could without assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful

orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went to Samar, his

superior officer, General Chaffee, was in just the direly vengeful

frame of mind he, General Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted

him to do, substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no

means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put the blame on his

chief. But a fearful lesson was given the Filipinos, and the civil

government profited by it. General Chaffee was never really pressed

on whether he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he did;

Governor Taft was never even criticised for not protesting; but with

a flourish of presidential trumpets, General Smith was finally made

"the goat," by being summarily placed on the retired list, and that

closed the bloody Samar episode of 1901-02. I wonder General Smith

has not gone and wept on General Miles's shoulder and like him become

a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston. Some of the best

fighting men in the army say that as a soldier in battle General

Smith is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation in the

following passage of the Scriptures which fits and describes his case:

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be

presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him,

and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. [385]

In his Report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the four principal

provinces, including Batangas, which gave trouble shortly after the

civil government was set up in that year, and had to be returned

to military control, were organized under civil rule "on the

recommendation" of the then commanding general (MacArthur) [386]: It

certainly seems unlikely that the haste to change from military rule

to civil rule came on the motion of the military. If the Commission

ever got, in writing, from General MacArthur, a "recommendation" that

any provinces be placed under civil rule while still in insurrection,

the text of the writing will show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the

will of Mr. McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contemporaneous

evidence will show that General MacArthur told them, substantially,

that they were "riding for a fall." In fact, whenever an insurrection

would break out in a province after Governor Taft's inauguration as

governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philippines, from

the commanding general down, was "I told you so." They did not say

this where Governor Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge

that they were much addicted to damning "politics" as the cause of

all the trouble.

Governor Taft's statement in his report for 1901, that the four

principal provinces, above named, Batangas and the rest, were organized

under civil rule "on the recommendation of General MacArthur,"

is fully explained in his testimony before the Senate Committee of

1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted from President

McKinley's state papers concerning the Philippines, especially

his messages to Congress, the political pressure Mr. McKinley was

under from the beginning to make a show of "civil" government, thus

emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial opposition

to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity for the use of force,

so as to palliate American repugnance to forcing a government upon an

unwilling people, has been made clear. There were to be no "dark days

of reconstruction." The Civil War in the United States from 1861 to

1865 was a love feast compared with our war in the Philippines. Yet the

work of reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated on the

theory of consent, so persistently urged by President McKinley before

the American people from the beginning, viz., that the insurrection

represented only a small faction of the people. We have seen how

General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, entertained this

notion, and how by the time he took Malolos in March, 1899, he had

gotten over this notion, and had--regretfully--recognized that "the

whole people are loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents." And

now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of continuous

fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on behalf of Mr. McKinley,

that he, MacArthur, did not know what he was talking about, and that

"the great majority" were for American rule. The representative

men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return of the State to

military control in 1870. Most of them had been officers of the

Confederate army. The Federal commander simply told them that if

they could not restrain the lawless element of their own people, he

would. By premature setting up of the Philippine civil government,

the lawless element was allowed full swing. General MacArthur had

been in the Civil War. He knew something about reconstruction. But

here were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. McKinley to

the effect that civil government, government "essentially popular in

form," was to be set up as fast as territory was conquered. It didn't

make any difference about the government being "essentially popular"

just so it was "essentially popular in form." To the Senate Committee

of 1902, Governor Taft said:

General MacArthur and the Commission did differ as to where the

power lay with respect to the organization of civil governments,

as to who should say what civil governments should be organized,

the Commission contending that, under the instructions, it was

left to them, and General MacArthur thinking that everything was

subject to military control ultimately, in view of the fact that

the islands were in a state of war. [387]

Governor Taft then added that he and General MacArthur reached a

modus vivendi. When a good soldier once finds out just what his

commander-in-chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good

faith, to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how

unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General MacArthur saw what

President McKinley wanted done, he proceeded to co-operate loyally

with Governor Taft to carry out the plan. He well knew the country

was not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley was bent on

crowding civil government forward as fast as territory was conquered,

he would make his recommendations on that basis. In the matter of

the utter folly of the prematurity with which the civil government

was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the terrible consequences

to the hapless Filipinos, hereinafter described, which followed,

by reason of the premature withdrawal of the police protection of

the army and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated,

from a country just recovering from some six years of war, General

MacArthur's exemption from responsibility is shown by his reports

for 1900 and 1901. [388] The former has already been fully examined,

and the original sharp differences between him and Governor Taft

made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the date of

the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, if I mistake not, the

day of General MacArthur's final departure for the United States,

the latter washes his hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense,

born of political expediency, about there having never been any real

fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncertain terms thus:

Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede the

activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments [our

military forces,] will not only be a menace to the present, but

put in jeopardy the entire future of American possibilities in

the archipelago. [389]

No, President Taft can never make General MacArthur "the goat" for

what General Bell had to do in Batangas Province in 1901-02 to make

our "willing" subjects behave. Nor can the ultimate responsibility

before the bar of history for the awful fact that, according to the

United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Atlas of the Philippines of

1899, the population of Batangas Province was 312,192, and according

to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903 it was 257,715,

[390] rest entirely on military shoulders. An attempt to place the

responsibility for the prematurity of the civil government on General

MacArthur was made by Honorable Henry C. Ide, who was of the Taft

Commission of 1900, and later Governor General of the Islands, and

is now Minister to Spain, in the North American Review for December,

1907. But Mr. Taft, a man of nobler mould, has at least maintained a

decorous silence on the subject except when interrogated by Congress,

and when so interrogated, his testimony, above quoted, if analyzed,

places the responsibility where it honestly belongs. In 1900 the Taft

Commission were not taking much military advice.

Batangas province was first taken under the wing of the

peace-at-any-price policy by the Act of the Taft Commission of May 2,

1901, entitled "An Act Extending the Provisions of 'the Provincial

Government Act' [391] to the Province of Batangas." By the Act of

the Commission of July 17, 1901, the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, and

Bohol, were restored to military control. When the civil authorities

turned those provinces back to military control, they well knew the

frame of mind the military were in, and there is no escape from the

proposition that they, in effect, said to the military: "Take them

and chasten them; go as far as you like. After you are done with them,

it will be time enough to pet them again. But for the present we mean

business." General Bell was scathingly criticised on the floor of the

United States Senate for what he did in Batangas in 1901-02, but by

the time he took hold there it had become a case of "spare the rod

and spoil the child." The substitution by the Commission of kindness,

and a disposition to forget what the Filipinos could not forget, for

firmness and the policy of making them submit unreservedly to the

inevitable,--viz., abandonment of their dream of independence--had

created among them a well-nigh ineradicable impression that, for some

reason or other, whether due to disapproval in the United States

of the so-called "imperial" policy or what not, we were afraid of

them. General Bell's task in Batangas, therefore, was to eradicate

this impression all over the archipelago by making an example of the

Batangas people.

In General Chaffee's report for 1902, [392] he prefaces his account

of General Bell's operations in Batangas as follows:

The long-continued resistance in the province of Batangas and

in certain parts of the bordering provinces of Tayabas, Laguna,

and Cavite, had made it apparent to me and to others that the

insurrectionary force keeping up the struggle there could exist

and maintain itself only through the connivance and knowledge

of practically all the inhabitants; that it received the active

support of many who professed friendship for United States

authority, etc.

This last was a thrust at Governor Taft's new-found Filipino friends

and advisers, in whose lack of sympathy with the cause of their

country the Governor so profoundly believed, but in whose continuing

co-operation in the killing of his soldiers General Chaffee believed

still more profoundly.

General Bell's famous operations on a large scale in Batangas began

January 1, 1902. The great mistake of the Civil Commission, to which

they adhered so long, was in supposing that when the respectable

military element of the insurgents was pursued to capture or surrender,

these last could and would thereafter control the situation. As a

matter of fact, whether they could or not, they did not.

In his celebrated circular order dated Batangas, December 9, 1901,

General Bell announced:

To all Station Commanders:

A general conviction, which the brigade commander shares,

appears to exist, that the insurrection in this brigade continues

because the greater part of the people, especially the wealthy

ones, pretend to desire, but do not in reality want peace; that

when all really want peace, we can have it promptly. Under such

circumstances, it is clearly indicated that a policy should be

adopted that will, as soon as possible, make the people want

peace and want it badly.

The only acceptable and convincing evidence of the real sentiments

of either individuals or town councils should be such acts

publicly performed as must inevitably commit them irrevocably to

the side of Americans by arousing the animosity of the insurgent

element. * * * No person should be given credit for loyalty simply

because he takes the oath of allegiance, or secretly conveys to

Americans worthless information and idle rumors which result in

nothing. Those who publicly guide our troops to the camps of the

enemy, who publicly identify insurgents, who accompany troops in

operations against the enemy, who denounce and assist in arresting

the secret enemies of the Government, who publicly obtain and

bring reliable and valuable information to commanding officers,

those in fact who publicly array themselves against the insurgents,

and for Americans, should be trusted and given credit for loyalty,

but no others. No person should be given credit for loyalty solely

on account of having done nothing for or against us so far as

known. Neutrality should not be tolerated. Every inhabitant of

this brigade should be either active friend or be classed as enemy.

In his Circular Order No. 5, dated Batangas, December 13, 1901, [393]

General Bell announced that General Orders No. 100, Adjutant General's

Office, 1863, approved and published by order of President Lincoln,

for the government of the armies of the United States in the field,

would thereafter be regarded as the guide of his subordinates in the

conduct of the war. This order is familiar to all who have ever made

any study of military law. Ordinarily, of course, a captured enemy

is entitled to "the honors of war," i. e., he must be held, housed,

and fed, unless exchanged, until the close of the war. But where an

enemy places himself by his conduct without the pale of the laws of

war, i. e., where he does not "play the game according to the rules,"

he may be killed on sight, like other outlaws.

Under General Orders No. 100, 1863, men and squads of men who,

without commission, without being part or portion of the regularly

organized hostile army, fight occasionally only, and with intermittent

returns to their homes and avocations, and frequent assumption of the

semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character

and appearance of soldiers; armed prowlers seeking to cut telegraph

wires, destroy bridges and the like, etc., are not entitled to the

protection of the laws of war and may be shot on sight. In other

words, the game being one of life and death, you must take even

chances with your opponent. General Bell's defenders on the floor of

the Senate simply relied on General Orders No. 100. However, there is

nothing about reconcentration in that order. We learned that from the

Spaniards. In fact we never did succeed in bringing to terms the far

Eastern colonies we bought from Spain, until we adopted her methods

with regard to them. Another of the expedients adopted by General Bell

in Batangas seems harsh, but it was used by Wellington in the latter

end of the Napoleonic wars, and by the Germans in the latter end of

the Franco-Prussian War. It was to promise the inhabitants of a given

territory that whenever a telegraph wire or pole was cut the country

within a stated radius thereof, including all human habitations,

would be devastated. It is in General Bell's Circular Order No. 7

of December 15, 1901, [394] that we find the genesis of the idea of

basing tactics used by Weyler in Cuba on Mr. Lincoln's General Order

100. He there says:

Though Section 17, General Orders 100, authorizes the starving

of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided

it leads to a speedier subjection of the enemy, it is considered

neither justifiable nor desirable to permit any person to starve

who has come into towns under our control seeking protection.

This order goes on to direct that all food supplies encountered

be brought to the towns. Of course this does not mean supplies

captured from the enemy's forces, which may lawfully be destroyed

at once. To those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it

should be explained that reconcentration means this: You notify,

by proclamation and otherwise, all persons within a given area, that

on and after a certain day they must all leave their homes and come

within a certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named town is

usually the centre, there to remain until further orders, and that

all persons found outside that zone after the date named will be

treated as public enemies. General Bell's order of December 20th,

provided that rice found in the possession of families outside the

protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with them to the town

which was the centre of the zone, that that found apparently cached

for enemy's use should be confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary.

Whenever it is found absolutely impossible to transport it [any

food supply] to a point within the protected zone, it will be

burned or otherwise destroyed. These rules will apply to all

food products.

No person within the reconcentration zones was permitted to go

outside thereof--cross the dead line--without a written pass. The

Circular Order of December 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate

commanders might become infected with the Taft belief in Filipino

affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, all the municipal

officials, members of the police force, etc., "who have not fully

complied with their duty by actively aiding the Americans and rendering

them valuable service," shall be summarily thrown into prison. [395]

Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, provided that,

in order to make the existing state oL war and martial law

so inconvenient and unprofitable to the people that they will

earnestly desire and work for the re-establishment of peace and

civil government,

subordinate commanders might, under certain prescribed restrictions,

put everybody they chose to work on the roads. [396] This was an

ingenious blow at the wealthy and soft-handed, intended to superinduce

submission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds of affection

thus sown for the civil government under the reconstruction period

which was to follow. In one of Dickens novels there occurs a law

firm by the name of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite

fond of considering himself, and of being considered by others, as

tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. When the widow and the orphan

would plead with Mr. Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage,

that benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expression of

infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could for them, but that

they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, "who is a very exacting man,"

he would say. In the dual American politico-military regime in the

Philippines of 1901-02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, General

Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former always seemed to harbor the

amiable delusion that the Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as

the movants in each proceeding against them, and that on the contrary

they were sure to make a favorable contrast in their hearts between

the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He

seemed blind to the fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was

done by any of us, spelled us--U. S.

General Bell's Circular Order No. 22, also a Christmas Eve product,

re-iterates the usual purpose to make the people yearn for civil

government, and the usual warning that none of them really and truly

want the blessings of American domination and Benevolent Assimilation

as they truly should, and adds:

To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of

war as insupportable as possible; and there is no more efficacious

way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people

in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such

conditions will soon become unbearable. Little should be said. The

less said the better. Let acts, not words, convey intentions. [397]

Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell reports:

I am now assembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, who will be

used in columns of fifty each. I expect to accompany the command.

* * * I take so large a command for the purpose of thoroughly

searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents

and for food, expecting to destroy everything I find outside of

town. All able-bodied men will be killed or captured.

Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran

Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned

wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling

to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is

beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the

nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs

the soldier above mentioned had lost many a "bunkie," there had gone

on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy,

whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could

fill, much appointing to municipal and other offices of Filipinos,

many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful

to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade

business. With this and the Balangiga massacre ever in mind, the

men of General Bell's brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood

which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to "make living

unbearable" for the Filipino "by acts, not words." Also, the American

soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly,

until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is

beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy

in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell's 2500 men began

that Batangas campaign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference,

out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran:

"He may be a brother of William H. Taft

But he ain't no friend of mine,"

and between songs they would say purringly to one another, "Remember

Balangiga." And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of

this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and

the ring of his iron heel:

I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. I shall then

move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country

westward to the ocean and south of Cavite, returning through

Lipa. I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging

northward, the country in the vicinity of [here follows a long

list of towns] will be scoured, ending at [a named mountain],

which will then be thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging

back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the

country of which [two named mountains] are the main peaks.

And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in Batangas was commended

in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as

well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as "a model in suppressing

insurrections under like circumstances." [398] The Batangas programme

was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the

United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the

Batangas severities and the Samar "kill and burn" orders. I tried

in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved

fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it

had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the

McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of

alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling,

had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people

used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making

sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them,

and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying

them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in

Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in

his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the

Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and

a personal friend of the Senator's, whose name he withheld, but for

whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to "a reconcentrado,

pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is

shot"; spoke of "this corpse-carcass stench wafted in" (to where the

letter-writer sat writing) as making it "slightly unpleasant here,"

and made your flesh crawl thus:

At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on their

orgies over the dead.

This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like

Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered

in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell, [399]

and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled

matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in

those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the

dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations,

which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is

not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give

it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were

daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General

Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar

surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged

of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of

insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents

surrendered. [400]

The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse than his

"bite." The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901-02

lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not

as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite

naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was

made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was

312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the

outset to make General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we

are considering his "bite"--how many lives his Batangas lesson to

the Filipino people cost--another bit of testimony is tremendously

relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas

Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due

to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to a little over 200,000

the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province

had." [401] Considering that General Bell's 1901-'02 campaign in that

ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,--how many of the 209

wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered--the

Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from

the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of

"suppressing insurrection under like circumstances." But it was never

again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon's

"corpse-carcass stench" from supposed reconcentrado pens and his

"clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the

dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain

out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the

noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor

Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most

sobbingly in love with "a benign civil government" and had forgotten

all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a

campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home

a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at

the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair

made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again

in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least;

whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon's army friend's "clouds of

vampire bats softly swirling" over the corpses of reconcentrados, were

doing said swirling not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man

familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces can see from

the letter that it was written from Samar. Moreover, Colonel Wagner

afterwards testified before the Senate Committee of 1902 [402] that

if there had been any great mortality in the reconcentration camps

in Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected practically

all those Batangas camps. Nobody who was in the islands at the time

doubts but what such conditions may have obtained in some places

under General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that any such

conditions would have been tolerated under General Bell. General Bell

has that aversion to either causing or witnessing needless suffering,

which you almost invariably find in men who are both constitutionally

brave and temperamentally generous and considerate of others. But the

moral sought to be pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration

in Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in Samar were

hellish, but that, in all matters concerning the Philippines, the army,

as in the case of Senator Bacon's friend, is gagged by operation of

law, and its enforced silence is peculiarly an asset in the hands of

the party in power seeking to continue in power, in a distant colonial

enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his friend's name, because for an

army officer to tell the truth about the Philippines would be likely

to get him into trouble with the President of the United States. The

President, be it remembered, is also the leader of the political party

to which he belongs. That is why the country has never been able to

get any light from those who know the most about the Philippines and

the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. In 1898 this

republic was beguiled into abandonment of the faiths of the founders

and started after a gold brick, thinking it was a Klondyke. Then and

ever since, the most important and material witnesses concerning the

wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the army,--which best

of all knows the rank folly of it--have been gagged by operation

of law. All republics that have heretofore become monarchies, have

become so through manipulation of the army by men in power seeking

to continue in power. We should either resign our expensive kingship

over the Philippines or get a king for the whole business, and be

done with it. We have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R. [403]

"On June 23, 1902," says General Chaffee, in his report for that year,

[404] "by Act No. 421 of the Philippine Commission, so much of Act

No. 173, of July 17, 1901, as transferred the province of Batangas

to military control was revoked. Civil government was re-established

in the province at 12 o'clock noon, July 4, 1902." The rest of the

1,748,573 people herein above mentioned as constituting the population

of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in

turn made to "want peace and want it badly," and on July 4, 1902,

President Roosevelt issued his proclamation declaring that a state of

general and complete peace existed. This is the famous proclamation

in which he congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men of

his command on "a total of more than 2000 combats, great and small,"

most of them subsequent to the Taft roseate cablegrams of 1900,

and the still more roseate reports of 1901 from the same source. The

proclamation appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66,

Adjutant General's Office, Washington, dated July 4, 1902. [405]

It directed, in the body of it, that it be "read aloud at parade in

every military post." It thanked the officers and enlisted men of the

army in the Philippines, in the name of the President of the United

States, for the courage and fortitude, the indomitable spirit and loyal

devotion with which they had been fighting up to that time, alluded

to the impliedly lamb-like or turn-the-other-cheek way in which they

had been behaving (no special reference is made either to Batangas,

Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully Rooseveltian

war-whoop about the "more than 2000 combats, great and small," above

mentioned. It also referred to how, "with admirable good temper and

loyalty to American ideals its (the army's) commanding generals have

joined with the civilian agents of the government" in the work of

superinducing allegiance to American sovereignty. This document is

one of the most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable of

men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of ability to mould

powerful discordant elements to his will. It put everybody in a good

humor. And yet, read at every military post, it served notice on the

military that if they knew which side their bread was buttered on,

they had better forget everything they knew tending to show the

prematurity of the setting-up of the civil government, sheath all

tomahawks and scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting

for Governor Taft's exit from office, abstain from chatty letters to

United States Senators telling tales out of school, such as the one

Senator Bacon had read on the floor of the Senate (already noticed),

and dutifully perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as

officially announced in the proclamation itself.

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, declares that the

insurrection "as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of

the United States" is over (p. 3). They then proceed, with evident

sincerity, to describe the popularity of themselves and their

policies with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in

your Congressional district, in the type of man who thinks he could

be elected to Congress "in a walk" if he should only announce his

candidacy, when as a matter of fact, the great majority of the people

of his district are, for some notorious reason connected with his

past history among them,--say his war record--very much prejudiced

against him. They repeat one of their favorite sentiments about the

whole country--always except "as hereinafter excepted"--being now

engaged in enjoying civil government. But they casually admit also that

"much remains to be done" in suppressing lawlessness and disturbances,

so as to perfect and accentuate said "enjoyment."

Let us see just what the state of the country was in this regard

according to their own showing. They say:

The six years of war to which these islands have been subjected

have naturally created a class of restless men utterly lacking

in habits of industry, taught to live and prey upon the country

for their support by the confiscation of food supplies as a

war measure, and regarding the duties of a laborer as dull and

impossible for one who has tasted the excitement of a guerrilla

life. Even to the man anxious to return to agricultural pursuits,

the conditions existing present no temptation. By the war

and by the rinderpest, chiefly the latter, the carabaos, or

water-buffaloes, have been reduced to ten per cent. of their

former number.

Think of the condition of a country, any country, but especially one

whose wealth is almost wholly agricultural, which has just had nine

tenths of its plow animals absolutely swept off the face of the earth

by war and its immediate consequences. The report proceeds:

The chief food of the common people of these islands is rice,

and the carabao is the indispensable instrument of the people in

the cultivation of rice,

adding also that the carabao is the chief means of transportation

of the tobacco, hemp, and other crops to market, and that the few

remaining carabaos, the ordinary price of which in normal Spanish

times had been $10 was now $100. Then, after completing a faithful

picture of supremely thorough desolation such as the Islands had never

seen since they first rose out of the sea, certainly not during the

sleepy, easy-going Spanish rule, they say: "The Filipino people of

the better class have received the passage of the Philippine Act with

great satisfaction"--meaning the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, the

Philippine Government Act. Gott im Himmel! What did the people care

about paper constitutions concerning benevolent assimilation? What they

were interested in was food and safety, not politics; food, raiment,

shelter, and efficient police protection from the brigandage which

immediately follows in the wake of all war, not details as to what we

were going to do with the bleeding and prostrate body politic. But

the Commission had started out to govern the Filipino people on a

definite theory,--apparently on the idea that if Americans wore white

duck and no brass buttons, in lieu of khaki and brass buttons, the

Filipinos would at once forget the war and be happy with an exceeding

great happiness. Now the real situation was this. The Islands had not

yet been thoroughly beaten into submission. Northern Luzon had been

conquered. The lake region of Southern Luzon had been conquered. The

most important of the Visayan Islands had been conquered. But the

extreme southern portion of Luzon, the enormously rich hemp peninsula

already described in a former chapter, and the adjoining hemp island of

Samar, were still seething with sedition which later broke out. All

through the winter of 1900-01 General MacArthur had tried to get

Mr. Root to let him close the hemp ports. But some powerful influence

at Washington had prevented the grant of this permission. On January 9,

1901, General MacArthur had wired Mr. Root:

Hemp in southern Luzon in same relation to present struggle as

cotton during rebellion. [406]

Nothing doing. General MacArthur must worry along with the

"blockade-runners" as best he could, no matter how much hemp money

might be poured into the insurgent coffers. So that in the latter

part of 1902, although the more respectable of the insurgent leaders

had then surrendered, even in the hemp country, the flames of public

disorder, which had flickered for a spell after the Batangas lesson,

broke out anew in the province of Albay, and in parts of Sorsogon,

the two provinces of the hemp peninsula having the best sea-ports. The

man at the head of this Albay insurrection was a sorry scamp of some

shrewdness by the name of Simeon Ola, with whom I afterwards had an

interesting and in some respects most amusing acquaintance. But that

is another story. I have simply brought the whole archipelago abreast

of the close of 1902, relatively to public order. In this way only

may the insurrections in Albay and elsewhere in 1902-03, described

in the chapter which follows, be understood in their relation to a

comprehensive view of the American occupation from the beginning,

and not be regarded as "a local issue" like General Hancock's tariff,

having no general political significance. In this way only may those

insurrections be understood in their true relation to the history of

public order in the Islands. The Commission always represented all

disturbances after 1902 as matters of mere banditti, such as have

been chronic for generations in Calabria or the Transcaucasus, wholly

distinct from, instead of being an inevitable political sequel of,

the years of continuous warfare which had preceded. Their benevolent

obsession was that the desire of the Philippine people for independence

was wholly and happily eradicated.

CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly?

Paradise Lost.

Throughout the last year of Governor Taft's administration in the

Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in

the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The

military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901-2 had

precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at

the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public,

already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had

never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of "the days

when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when,

before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus

thundered against the oppressor of Africa." [407] He did not want to

order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated

him to his native municipal police and constabulary, experimental

outfits of doubtful loyalty, [408] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as

it afterwards turned out, [409] for the maintenance of public order and

for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security

for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as

well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity

of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, though not so enamored

of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about

resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see

brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that

sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in

the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many

years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded

by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army

were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would

at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous

institution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a

year, in 1902-3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago,

the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon,

and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had

begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked,

because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and

inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of

weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately

vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the

Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an

attitude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration,

but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must

ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American

sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as

senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American

statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year

ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the

political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he

may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft's administration

of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible

effect it might have on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an

elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor

party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, let us examine his

course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines

in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every

government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley's original instructions of April 7, 1900,

to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the

articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all

descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard

of the faith and honor of the American army;

the President had added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of

the United States to give protection for property and life

* * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

* * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance

of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of

their country.

We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the

Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of

citizen in the republic to-day than the man now [410] at the head of

it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article

on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President

Roosevelt, entitled "The First Civil Governor," which began as follows:

A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public

life and American public men [411] remarked that the first Governor

of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make

a first-class President of the United States with the qualities

which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States,

and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was

Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.

The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing

estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or

not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President

Taft's policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his

chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him

honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in

the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though

as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of

the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem

of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With

this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and

the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has

preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being

animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person

of the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and

fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion,

viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we

blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house

divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with

the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what

may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will

always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the

controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that

in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect

the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly

enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley's

original instructions to him, lest "the full performance of this

obligation" might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend,

Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged,

then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing

business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes

any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled to

a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it "concerns

the honor and conscience of their country."

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders

in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned,

together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then,

that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled

by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary

incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of

"civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace

the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage

prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the

riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked

on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming

subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which

must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I

know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly

nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God.

The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which

began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying

embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials

by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three

distinct stages:

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental

formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having

terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated,

patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of

provinces, until the summer of 1902.

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious

in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil

government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things

had been given time to settle down in them to normal.

These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above

mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really

understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration

applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens

such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through

which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction

is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from

one of the military reports of 1902:

The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left

the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands

of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and

nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous

class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live

without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the

guise of patriotism. [412]

Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to

public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the

two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have

called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those

of the latter's colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year

previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded

an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa,

etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion:

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the

Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province

of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole

archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware, [413]

having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he

has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary,

officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American

volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded

out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there

are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as

soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set

to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over

the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit

as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to

act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any

Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot

a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior

economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing

rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the

same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of

the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to

handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to

mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures

through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may,

possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be

made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them

when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other

cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can

see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands,

or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the

ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners

will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all

until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb

driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore,

in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary

force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain

that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now

confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series

of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The

majority of the people of the province are really sick of the

war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there

is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of

Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless

element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together

nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is

terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto,

and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole

province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands

that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore,

this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common

concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and

order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for

the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell

or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province

just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it.

At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though

tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with

Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington,

calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial

Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The

man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an

annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt

bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus:

I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for

his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar,

and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can

be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith

in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from

reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats swirling out

on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend,

whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never

did have any application to Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did

a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice

of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in

Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that

all those people received daily medical treatment.

For the correctness of the picture of conditions presented in the

above hypothetical talk, I of course intend to be understood as

vouching. If such a talk could have been had in 1903 by President

Roosevelt with Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared his

views, the Albay situation might have been handled creditably. But the

Administration was in no position to be frank with the Opposition. No

Administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a

position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the

situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given

time there was always so much that it could not afford to re-open

and explain. Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too

closely as to why, when Secretary of War, he had gone around the

country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. McKinley, and talking

about "the patient and unconsenting millions" so anxious to be rid

of "Aguinaldo and his band of assassins," when at that very time his

(Mr. Root's) generals in the Philippines were engaged in activities,

the magnitude of which may be inferred from a telegram sent from

Washington to General Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly

spare the 10th Infantry, and adding:

Imperative that we have immediate use of every available company

that we can lay our hands on for service in the Philippines, [414]

although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets how nobly the army

had labored in putting down "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." No,

the Administration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank

concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not recapitulate

here any more of the long train of reasons why, because they have all

been fully explained in the preceding chapters. Of course President

Roosevelt had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. He

was not in constant daily contact with army officers at the War

Department, familiar with the actual situation in the Philippines,

as Mr. Root was. He was simply "sticking to Taft." Somewhere along

about the time the military folk in the Philippines were scoffing at

the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to the lack of a strong

government, President Roosevelt had written his warm personal friend,

Hon. George Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, who had

been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, was then an official

of the civil government of the Philippines, and later Governor of

New Mexico, by appointment of Mr. Roosevelt: "Stick to Taft, George"

or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt's attitude was simply that

of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft who simply assumed that the

Philippine Government was not going to tolerate impotence in the matter

of protecting life and property. But everybody at both ends of the line

was too deep in the mire of all the long and systematic withholding

of facts from the American public which had been occurring ever since

1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to

illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published

official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical

conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position

to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil

government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked

notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own

and Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency,

respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from

the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized

the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left

to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order

in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just

suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What

then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological

order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would

suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do.

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases

arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way

region as "the affair of March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for

1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor

Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of

Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer

in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while

they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town,

and departed. But Mr. Taft's report disposes of the whole incident

in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that

a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the

provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country,

hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of

them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and

stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements

arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to present the gravity of

the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent

solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote

provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified list," to

say nothing of politically negligible native life therein. [415]

Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the

ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope

with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in

the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy

with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair,

Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and

get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one

hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken

away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people

who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th

Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United

States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as

deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under "civil"

government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark,

and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never

taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying "the peace and

protection of a benign civil government." The writ of habeas corpus

was never suspended for a moment.

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft remarks that if

the prompt steps he did take (he had already described the prompt

sending of the military to the scene) had not been taken, "the trouble

might have spread." But the Surigao affair seemed to teach the civil

government nothing in the matter of subsequent protection of life,

nor did it lessen their persistence in relying on their constabulary

for due extension of such protection in time of need.

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for avoiding calling on the

military. When you are in a foreign country building a new government

on the ruins of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you

can about how the old one met its problems. The Spaniards had had

the same problem in their day about not ordering out the military,

because they did not have any military to order out. They were too poor

to garrison the various provinces. They had long followed the plan,

from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main towns of disturbed

districts all the country population they could get to come in, and

then acting on the assumption that all who did not come in were public

enemies. This meant that when the country people came in, they simply

looked out for themselves, while away from their homes, and farms,

as best they could. Of course nobody at all looked after the farms,

and nobody provided medical attention for the reconcentrados, or

sanitary attention for the reconcentration camps. This general plan

was formally sanctioned by the Commission, in so far as the following

law sanctioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is section

6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all the constabulary

problems, of which this was one. It read:

In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or

outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the outlying

barrios [416] are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory

raids--

think of permitting a country to get into any such condition when you

have an abundance of American troops on hand available to prevent it--

and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or outlaws

their sources of food supply, and it is not possible with the

available police forces constantly to provide protection to

such barrios--

there being all the time "available police forces," in the shape

of regular troops, amply able to handle these unsettled conditions,

which were the inevitable aftermath of lawlessness consequent on five

or six years of guerrilla warfare--

it shall be within the power of the Governor-General, upon

resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize the

provincial governor to order that the residents of such outlying

barrios be temporarily brought--

observe the length of time this may last is not limited--

within stated proximity to the poblacion, or larger barrios, of

the municipality, there to remain until the necessity for such

order ceases to exist.

To house and ration the reconcentrados, the following provision is

made by the statute we are considering:

During such temporary residence, it shall be the duty of the

provincial board, out of provincial funds, to furnish such

sustenance and shelter as may be needed to prevent suffering

among the residents of the barrios thus withdrawn.

The act also provides that during the course of the reconcentration,

where the province does not happen to have the necessary ready

cash, it may apply to the Commission, in distant Manila, for an

appropriation to meet the emergency. What is to be done with those

who starve during the temporary deficit, it does not say. If you

must have reconcentration, to leave it to such agencies as the above,

with the native police and constabulary as understudies, in lieu of

availing yourself of the superb equipment of the American army, with

all its facilities for handling great masses of people, as they did,

for instance, after the San Francisco fire, is like preferring the

Mulligan Guards to the Cold-stream Guards. Furthermore, there is no

escape from the logic of the fact that reconcentration is essentially

a war measure. The difference between what is lawful in war and what

is lawful in peace is not a technical one. In war the innocent must

often suffer with the guilty. In peace the theory at least is that

only the guilty suffer. Hence it is that our Constitution is so

jealous that in time of peace no man's life, liberty, or property,

shall be taken from him without "due process of law," a provision

which becomes inoperative in war times, being superseded by martial

law. I know that the early question, "Does the Constitution follow

the flag?" was answered by the Supreme Court of the United States in

the negative as to the Philippines. But the Act of Congress of July

1, 1902, under which we were governing the Philippines in 1903,

and still govern them, known as the Philippine Government Act,

extended to the Islands all the provisions of the Bill of Rights of

our Constitution except the right of jury trial and the individual

right to go armed--"bear arms." It specifically said in section 5:

No law shall be enacted in said Islands which shall deprive any

person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the rural population

of a whole district out of house and home, and make them come to town

to live indefinitely on such public charity as may drain through the

itching fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning meantime

their growing crops, and the household effects they cannot bring with

them, is depriving people of their property, and restraining them

of their liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, in

the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine Report, page 116,

during an insurrection in Batangas, to control which, the presidential

election of 1904 being then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus

had been suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court of the

Philippines held that detention of people as reconcentrados under

such circumstances "for the purpose of protecting them" was not an

illegal restraint of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been

suspended. This decision held it to be both the prerogative and the

duty of the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus

when the public safety so required.

I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, the former

wise and just judge, in whom is now vested by law the mighty power

of filling vacancies on the highest court in this great country of

ours, will seriously contend that that reconcentration law is not in

direct violation of the above quoted section of the Act of Congress

of July 1, 1902, for the government of the Philippines, and therefore

null and void. The truth is, it was a piece of careless legislation,

dealing with conditions that were essentially war conditions, under

a government which was forever vowing that peace conditions existed,

and determined not to admit the contrary. The civil government was

like Lot's wife. It could not look back.

The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual provision permitting

the governor to declare martial law in a given locality in his

discretion. But the reconcentration law passed by the Philippine

Commission was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority,

so as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces to which

it might be applied, regardless of how many lives it might cost. In

its last analysis the reconcentration law was at once an admission

of a duty to order out the military and a declaration of intention

to neglect that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who enacted

it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives how to maintain

order themselves by letting them stew in the dregs of their own

insurrection. Yet no one can read the Commission's own description

of the widespread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the

guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without seeing,

from their own showing, how obvious was their duty to have waited,

originally, until law and order were restored, by not interfering

with the war itself until it was over, and by keeping the country

properly garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it

was over, until something like real peace conditions should exist,

on which to begin the work of post-bellum reconstruction. After all,

it all gets us back to the original pernicious programme outlined in

President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1899,

wherein was announced the intention to send out the Taft Commission,

which message also announced, in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley's

purpose to begin the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient

and unconsenting millions "loyal to our rule" should be rescued from

the clutch of the hated Tagals.

Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the moral quality

of executive action putting it in operation was not unlike that which

would attach should the Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering

the state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a dozen

towns around Boston, issue a proclamation something like this:

The situation has grown so serious that your local police force,

as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the situation. You

will all, therefore, thrust your tooth-brushes, night-gowns,

and a change of clothing, into the family grip, and assemble

on the Boston Common and in the public gardens, there to remain

until the necessity for this order ceases to exist, and we will

there take the best care of you we can, as was done in the case

of the San Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order

out the military.

If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought at the time to the

validity of the reconcentration law, in its relation to the "due

process of law" clause of the Philippine Government Act, which none

of them probably did, he must simply have justified the means by the

benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so much better than

Congress possibly could, the needs of the local situation. But if you

read this law in the light of a knowledge of its practical operation,

there is more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon's friend's

"corpse-carcass stench" and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling

out on their orgies over the dead" than there is of benevolence. It

really was unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted

reconcentration to the native police and constabulary the native

governors had, and it was wholly indefensible for them to take the

liberty of violating an act of Congress in order to live up to their

pet fiction about the war being "entirely over."

After the term of court at Surigao in the month of May, 1903, I was

sent to Misamis province, where I remained until September, handling an

insurrection down there. This province also was nominally in a state of

peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of the existence of the

insurrection by suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Curiously

enough, as I wrote Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of

disturbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their movement

was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection in Albay I dealt with

later, but they were by no means unmitigated cut-throats. I have often

wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They

did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed

purpose was to subvert the existing government. The use of this word

"insurrection" in connection with these various disturbances recalls

a pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the Supreme Bench

of the Islands. Some of my friends, members of the bar of my district,

got up a petition to the then Governor-General setting forth in most

partial terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in the

Philippines, in the candor of informal social intercourse, all of

us always called a spade a spade, i.e., we called an insurrection an

insurrection, instead of referring to the disturbance in the guarded

and euphemistic terms which you find in all the official reports

intended for home consumption. So in their petition, these gentlemen

recited, among my other supposed qualifications, that I had held

court in three different provinces "during insurrections in the same."

The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to deal with during

Governor Taft's administration as Governor of the Philippines. This

was the insurrection headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of

this man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Government in

connection with the Albay disturbances of 1902-3 is in the report

of the colonel commanding the constabulary for the district which

included Albay, Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903. [417] This

report contains a sort of diary of events for the year preceding the

date of it. An entry for October 28, 1902, begins:

Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon Ola, chief

of the ladrones in this province, with a view of inducing him

to surrender.

Think of this great government negotiating with the leader of a band

of thieves who were openly and flagrantly defying its authority! The

entry proceeds:

After many promises and conferences extending over a period of

forty days, during which hostilities were suspended, Ola broke

off negotiations and withdrew his entire force and a large number

of additional recruits that he had secured during the armistice.

Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to have had a total

command ranging at various times from a thousand to 1500 men. And I

think Colonel Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him,

first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. Ola also

makes an official reappearance in the report of the Governor of Albay

Province for 1904. [418] It there appears that reconcentration was

begun in Albay as part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in

March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of that year. Says

this report of the Governor of Albay concerning reconcentration:

Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in a

limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and

ordinary living accommodations.

The Governor does not say how large the "unusual volume of persons"

was that was herded into the reconcentration zones, nor does he

furnish any mortality statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was

of the awful mortality and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling

out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend

correspondent encountered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. The

number of people affected by reconcentration in Albay and an adjacent

province that caught the contagion of unrest and had to be given

similar treatment, was about 300,000. [419]

In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insurrection of 1902-3,

Governor Taft says: "A reign of terror was inaugurated throughout

the province." He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied

the reconcentration tactics. In the same report he describes what

is to my mind the most humiliating incident connected with the

whole history of the American Government in the Philippines, viz.,

Vice-Governor Wright's visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance

of the peace-at-any-price policy that the Manila Government was

bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil government's dealings with

His Excellency, the Honorable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands,

that General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino member of the

Commission, went down to Albay and "talked to the people," the idea

apparently being that those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should

go after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out the military,

and summarily putting a stop to the reign of terror as became the

dignity of this nation. I think these talks had something to do with

the origin of the charge afterwards made that immunity was promised

Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. Of course General

Wright made no such promises. But the idea got out in the province

that the word was, "Get the guns," the inference being that if Ola

and his people would come in and surrender their guns they would be

lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philippine Problem, Professor

Willis, at page 140, gives what purports to be an agreement signed

by Colonel Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Bandholtz

promises Ola immunity, and also promises a number of other things

which are on their face rankly preposterous. Ola was much on the

witness stand before me during that term of court, and, everything

"came out in the wash." He was represented by competent, intelligent,

and fearless Filipino counsel, and they did not suggest the existence

of any such document. No proof of any offer of immunity was adduced

before me. I think Ola simply finally decided to throw himself on

the mercy of the government, on the idea that there would be more joy

over the one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that

are already saved. He was probably as much afraid that Governor Taft

would order out the military as the wretched pacificos were that he

would not. He immediately turned state's evidence against all the men

under him of whose individual actings and doings he had any knowledge,

the prosecuting attorney making, with my full approval, a promise

to ask executive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with the

practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions throughout the

English-speaking world.

The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be somewhat appreciated

from the financial loss it occasioned. Says Governor Taft, in his

report for 1903:

The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production and sale

have been interfered with to the extent of some ten to twelve

millions of dollars Mexican [which is equivalent to five or six

million dollars American money]. [420]

As the population of the province was about 250,000, [421] a loss

of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for the six months or

so of reconcentration during which the farms were neglected. This

would be equivalent to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length

of time to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which is the

total population figure for the United States according to the Census

of 1910.

It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, that Ola finally

surrendered with some five hundred or six hundred men. I was sent to

Albay about the middle of November, to assist the regular judge of

the district, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of the

Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of the case arising

out of the Ola performances. Conditions at the time were also very

much perturbed in various neighboring and other provinces, and the

courts and constabulary were kept very busy.

An incident recurs to memory just here which illustrates the state of

public order. But before relating it a decent respect to the opinions

of the reader requires me to state my own attitude toward that whole

situation at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind that as

society stands at present, capital punishment is a necessary part of

any sensible scheme for its protection. I have no compunction about

hanging any man for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe

it to the community as a measure of protection to your life and mine

and all others. So far as public order was concerned in the country

now under consideration in 1903, the "civil" government was simply a

well-meaning sham, a military government with a civil name to it. When

the constabulary would get in the various brigands, cut-throats, etc.,

who might be terrorizing a given district, some of them masquerading as

patriots, others not even doing that, the courts would try them. None

of the judges cared anything about any particular brigand in any

given case except to find out how many, if any, murders, rapes,

arsons, etc., he had committed during the particular reign of terror

of which he had been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven,

the punishment would always be "a life for a life." And you have no

idea how absolutely wanton some of the murders were, and how cruelly

some of the young women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated

after they were carried off to the mountains. I would hate to try to

guess how much more of this sort of thing would have had to occur in

Albay in 1903 than did occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive

Albay of "the protection of a benign civil government"--one of the pet

expressions of contemporaneous official literature--and say the word

to the army to take hold of the situation and give the people decent

protection. But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly after I

reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. of the district court,

while my colleague, Judge Carson, held Part I. we had a call from a

third judge, Judge Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some

other perturbed region. I think that by that time, late in November,

1903, Governor Taft must have known he was soon to leave the Islands to

become Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able to make

the best showing possible, in his farewell annual report as Governor,

as to the "tranquillity" conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger

came to see us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at

the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge Carson had had a

gallows erected near the public square of the town, for the execution

of some brigand he had convicted, whether it was for maltreating some

poor farmer's daughter until she died, or burying an American alive,

or what, I do not now recollect. But in going around the town some

one suggested, as we passed this gallows, that we go up on it to

get the view. So we went--the three of us. Then each looked at the

other and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge Carson smiled

and dispelled the momentary sombreness by repeating with grim humor,

an old Latin quotation he happened to remember from his college days

at the University of Virginia: Haec olim meminisse juvabit ("It will

be pleasant to remember these things hereafter").