1903, without suspension of civil government. During that period the
jail had been filled far beyond its reasonable capacity most of the
time. It sometimes had contained many hundreds. As to the sanitary
conditions, in passing the jail building one day in company with
one of the provincial officials, he remarked to me, nonchalantly:
"It's equivalent to a death sentence to put a man in that jail." I
afterwards found out that this was no joke. During most of my visit
to the province I was too busy holding court and separating the sheep
from the goats, to think much of anything else. But toward the close of
the term, after Christmas, after Governor Taft had left the Islands
and gone home to be Secretary of War, an incident happened that
produced a profound impression on me, suggested a new view-point,
and started troubled doubts as to whether the whole Benevolent
Assimilation business was not a mistake born of a union of avarice
and piety in which avarice predominated--doubts which certain events
of the following year, hereinafter related, converted in conviction
that any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos would
be better for all concerned than any government we could give them,
hampered as we always will be by the ever-present necessity to argue
that government against the consent of the governed is not altogether
wrong, and that taxation without representation may be a blessing in
disguise. The Yule-tide incident above alluded to was this. Most of
the docket having been disposed of, and there being a lull between
Christmas and New Year's day which afforded time for matters more or
less perfunctory in their nature, the prosecuting attorney brought in
rough drafts of two proposed orders for the court to sign. One was
headed with a list of fifty-seven names, the other with a list of
sixty-three names. Both orders recited that "the foregoing" persons
had died in the jail--all but one between May 20 and Dec. 3. 1903
(roughly six and one-half months) as will appear from an examination
of the dates of death--and concluded by directing that the indictments
be quashed. The writer was only holding an extraordinary term of court
there in Albay, and was about to leave the province to take charge
of another district to which Governor Taft had assigned him before
leaving the Islands. The newly appointed regular judge of the district,
Judge Trent, now of the Philippine Supreme Court, was scheduled soon
to arrive. Therefore the writer did not sign the proposed orders
but kept them as legal curios. A correct translation of one of them
appears below, followed by the list of names which headed the other
(identical) order:
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, EIGHTH
JUDICIAL DISTRICT
In the Court of First Instance of Albay
The United States against
Cornelio Rigorosa died December 3, 1903
Fabian Basques died September 25, 1903
Julian Nacion died October 14, 1903
Francisco Rigorosa died October 18, 1903
Anacleto Solano died November 25, 1903
Valentin Cesillano died November 6, 1903
Felix Sasutona died September 26, 1903
Marcelo de los Santos died June 3, 1903
Marcelo Patingo died November 15, 1903
Julian Raynante died September 7, 1903
Dionisio Carifiaga died October 4, 1903
Felipe Navor died September 17, 1903
Luis Nicol died November 23, 1903
Balbino Nicol died September 23, 1903
Damiano Nicol died November 23, 1903
Leoncio Salbaburo died November 20, 1903
Catalino Sideria died July 25, 1903
Marcelo Ariola died October 26, 1903
Francisco Cao died November 26, 1903
Martin Olaguer died November 13, 1903
Juan Neric died November 16, 1903
Eufemio Bere died November 21, 1903
Julian Sotero died October 30, 1902
Juan Payadan died September 10, 1903
Benedicto Milla died July 30, 1903
Placido Porlage died June 13, 1903
Gaudencio Oguita died October 11, 1903
Alberto Cabrera died September 8, 1903
Julian Payadan died August 4, 1903
Eusebio Payadan died August 10, 1903
Leonardo Rebusi died November 2, 1903
Julian Riobaldis died October 2, 1903
Victor Riobaldis died October 23, 1903
Mauricio Balbin died September 27, 1903
Tomas Rigador died July 23, 1903
Miguel de los Santos died July 28, 1903
Eustaquio Mapula died November 18, 1903
Eugenio Lomibao died November 1, 1903
Francisco Luna died August 7, 1903
Gregorio Sierte died October 31, 1903
Teodoro Patingo died November 21, 1903
Teodorico Tua died September 23, 1903
Ceferino Octia died November 10, 1903
Graciona Pamplona died September 12, 1903
Felipe Bonifacio died November 26, 1903
Baltazer Bundi died October 12, 1903
Julian Locot died October 13, 1903
Francisco de Punta died August 20, 1903
Pedro Madrid died August 24, 1903
Felipe Pusiquit died July 17, 1903
Rufo Mansalan died July 14, 1903
Ignacio Titano died June 20, 1903
Alfonso Locot died June 29, 1903
Gil Locot died May 23, 1903
Regino Bitarra died September 7, 1903
Bonifacio Bo died August 2, 1903
Francisco de Belen died September 29, 1903
DECREE
The defendants above named, charged with divers crimes, having
died in the provincial jail by reason of various ailments, upon
various dates, according to official report of the jailer, it is
ORDERED BY THIS COURT, That the cases pending against the said
deceased persons be, and the same are hereby, quashed, the costs
to be charged against the government.
Judge of the Twelfth District acting in the Eighth.
Albay, December 28, 1903.
The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. As already indicated,
the second order was like the first. It contained the names of
sixty-three other deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit:
Anacleto Avila died September 2, 1903
Gregorio Saquedo died July 21, 1903
Francisco Almonte died October 11, 1903
Faustino Sallao died October 9, 1903
Leocadio Pena died October 16, 1903
Juan Ranuco died October 16, 1903
Esteban de Lima died February 4, 1903
Estanislao Jacoba died October 7, 1903
Macario Ordiales died October 19, 1903
Laureano Ordiales died October 27, 1903
Reimundo Narito died October 4, 1903
Antonio Polvorido died September 12, 1903
Norverto Melgar died June 14, 1903
Bartolome Rico died November 8, 1903
Simon Ordiales died September 13, 1903
Candido Rosari died September 29, 1903
Saturnino Vuelvo died October 18, 1903
Vicente Belsaida died May 26, 1903
Felix Canaria died June 12, 1903
Pedro Cuya died July 26, 1903
Evaristo Dias died July 24, 1903
Felix Padre died July 8, 1903
Alberto Mantes died August 7, 1903
Joaquin Maamot died September 5, 1903
Santiago Cacero died May 28, 1903
Hilario Zalazar died July 26, 1903
Tomas Odsinada died October 1, 1903
Julian Oco died October 4, 1903
Julian Lontac died August 27, 1903
Ambrosio Rabosa died September 19, 1903
Mariano Garcia died September 12, 1903
Ramon Madrigalejo died August 19, 1903
Albino Oyardo died October 1, 1903
Felipe Rotarla died September 29, 1903
Urbano Saralde died October 5, 1903
Gil Mediavillo died June 13, 1903
Egidio Mediavillo died June 16, 1903
Mauricio Losano died October 5, 1903
Bernabe Carenan died September 27, 1903
Pedro Sagaysay died September 29, 1903
Laureano Ibo died August 5, 1903
Vicente Sanosing died July 17, 1903
Francisco Morante died June 10, 1903
Anatollo Sadullo died September 16, 1903
Lucio Rebeza died August 27, 1903
Eugenio Sanbuena died August 13, 1903
Nicolas Oberos died August 26, 1903
Eusebio Rambillo died September 13, 1903
Tomas Rempillo died August 19, 1903
Daniel Patasin died August 19, 1903
Ignacio Bundi died September 7, 1903
Juan Locot died May 23, 1903
Zacarias David Padilla died August 7, 1903
Juan Almazar died September 12, 1903
Rufino Quipi died June 13, 1903
Antonio Brio died June 13, 1903
Timoteo Enciso died September 12, 1903
Hilario Palaad died August 28, 1903
Ventura Prades died May 24, 1903
Alejandro Alevanto died May 22, 1903
Rufino Pelicia died May 20, 1903
Alejo Bruqueza died July 19, 1903
Prudencio Estrada died September 15, 1903
These lists were printed in an article by the author which appeared
in the North American Review for January 18, 1907, which article was
reprinted by Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, in the Congressional
Record for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that President
Taft saw the article, and that if it had contained any inaccuracies
they would long since have been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in
1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta,
on a small scale.
If the military authorities had had charge of the Albay insurrection
and of the prisoners in the Albay jail in 1903, it is safe to say
that the great majority of those who died would have lived. But to
have ordered out the troops would have been to abandon the official
fiction that there was peace.
Of Ola's five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and I, assisted by
the chief prosecuting attorney of the government, Hon. James Ross,
turned several hundred loose. Another large batch were disposed of
under a vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on the
roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, usually six to
twelve months. Most of the remainder, a few score, we tried under the
sedition law, and sent to Bilibid, the central penitentary at Manila,
for terms commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. The
more serious cases were sent up for longer terms under the brigandage
law. We indulged in no more maudlin sentiment about those precious
scamps who had been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally
invoking its name in the course of a long season of preying upon
their respectable fellow-countrymen than Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles
would have indulged. I am quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan
Cailles would have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch than
Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown to have committed
crimes usually punished capitally in this country that we sentenced
to death--a dozen or more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the
state. He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting attorney
to convict the men who had followed him for a year. He was given a
sentence of thirty years (by Judge Carson), as a sort of expression
of opinion of the most Christian attitude possible concerning his
real deserts, but his services as state's evidence entitled him to
immunity, and for that very good and sufficient reason Judge Carson,
Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and myself so recommended to the Governor.
Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he was quite an
ignorant man. But to show what his control must have been over the
rank and file of his men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going
up to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, Ola was
aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as he was a prospective
recipient of executive clemency, though the guards kept an eye on him,
he was allowed the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up,
the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom sometime after
midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, and went back to the storm
steering-gear at the stern of the ship, to spend the rest of the night
more comfortably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassignable
cause, I realized that the crown of another head was tangent to the
crown of my own, and occupying part of my pillow. It was Ola, the
chief of the brigands. I raised up, shook the intruder, and said:
"Hello, Ola, what are you doing here?" He wakened slowly. He had no
idea of any first-class passenger being back there, and had taken
it for granted that I was one of the ship's crew, when he decided to
share my pillow. As soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his
feet with profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck until
morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect of the incident
on my recommendation concerning himself.
After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went back to
sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened by some of the guards
chattering. But I heard Ola, who had apparently been keeping watch
over my august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious tone to
the guards, his keepers, "Hush, the judge is sleeping." They looked
at the brigand chief, and cowed, obeyed.
Ola was pardoned.
CHAPTER XVII
GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903 (Continued)
The Philippines for the Filipinos.
Speech of Governor Taft.
Just before Governor Taft left the Islands in 1903, he made a speech
which made him immensely popular with the Filipinos and immensely
unpopular with the Americans. The key-note of the speech was "The
Philippines for the Filipinos." The Filipinos interpreted it to
mean for them that ultimate independence was not so far in the dim
distance of what is to happen after all the living are dead as to
be a purely academic matter. And there was absolutely nothing in
the speech to negative that idea, although he must have known how
the great majority of the Filipinos would interpret the speech. On
the other hand, the Americans in the Islands, popularity with whom
was then and there a negligible factor, interpreted the speech,
not inaccurately, to mean for them: "If you white men out here, not
connected with the Government, you Americans, British, Germans and
Spaniards, and the rest of you, do not like the way I am running this
country, why, the boats have not quit running between here and your
respective homes." [422] Then he came back to the United States and
has ever since been urging American capital to go to the Philippines,
all the time opposing any declaration by the law-making power of the
Government which will let the American who goes out there know "where
he is at," i.e., whether we are or are not going to keep the Islands
permanently, and how to formulate his earthly plans accordingly, though
the educated Filipinos are concurrently permitted to clamor against
American "exploitation," American rule, and Americans generally,
and to keep alive among the masses of their people what they call
"the spirit of liberty," and what the insular government calls the
spirit of "irreconcilableness." Clearly, a policy which makes for race
friction and race hatred is essentially soft-headed, not soft-hearted,
and ought not to be permitted to continue. Yet it has been true for
twelve years, as one of President Taft's admiring friends proudly
boasted concerning him some time since:
One man virtually holds in his keeping the American conscience
with the regard to the Philippines. [423]
This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should either stop
the clamor, or stop the American capital and energy from going to
the Islands. After an American goes out to the Islands, invests his
money there, and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade,
he sticks to his own people out there. Then the Taft policy steps in
and bullyrags him into what he calls "knuckling to the Filipinos,"
every time he shows any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision
reversing the verdict of all racial history--which has been up to
date, that wheresoever white men dwell in any considerable numbers
in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white man will
rule. Yet the American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into
going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has taken his family to
the Islands, and all his worldly interests are there. Yet he is living
under a despotism, a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the
non-office-holding American does not openly oppose the government's
policies, but one which, however benevolent, is, so far as regards any
brooking of opposition from any one outside the government hierarchy,
as absolute as any of the other despotic governments of Asia. Though
the Governor of the Philippines does not wear as much gilt braid
as some of his fellow potentates on the mainland of Asia, still,
in all executive matters he wields a power quite as immediate and
substantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his royal
colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either to the American
Government official in the Philippines, or to the American citizen
engaged in private business there who is in entire accord with the
policies of the insular government and on terms of friendship with
the officials, that the government under which he is living is any
more of a despotism than the Government of the United States. The
shoe never pinches the American citizen engaged in private business
until he begins, for one reason or another, to be "at outs" with the
insular government, and to have "opinions" which--American-like--he
at once wants to express. If he permits himself to get thoroughly
out of accord with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the
Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious single fact
in the present situation. There is no public opinion to help such a
person, in any case where he differs with any specific act or policy
of the insular government. The American colony is comparatively small,
say between ten and twenty thousand all told, outside the army (which
consists of ten or twelve thousand individuals living wholly apart
from the rest of the community). The doctor who is known to have
the patronage of high government officials is sure of professional
success, and his wife is sure to receive the social recognition her
husband's position in the community naturally commands; and this
permits her to make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at
precedence with her next neighbor called "society," so dear to the
hearts of many otherwise sensible and estimable women--to say nothing
of carpet knights, callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also
if the doctor and his lady have adult children, their opportunities
to marry well are multiplied by the sunlight from the seats of the
mighty. Thus the doctor and his wife are a standing lesson to the man
"with convictions" that yearn for utterance, but who is also blessed
with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the general welfare and
happiness of all the family than in seeing her husband's name in
the paper. What is true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer
known to be persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper
man in favor with the government is sure to get his share of the
government advertising, according to a very liberal construction,
and that insures his being able to command reportorial and editorial
talent such as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is
sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mercantile community,
thus placing success for him on a solid, comfortable basis. Also, a
contrary course will, slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash
competitor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines is deprived
of one of his most precious home pleasures, viz., letting off steam,
in some opposition paper, about the real or imagined shortcomings of
the men in charge of the government. For the reasonable expectancy
of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically brief. The
hapless editor on the prosperous paper, whatever his talents,
who happens to become afflicted with "views" which he airs in his
editorial columns, is soon upbraided by his friends at his club as
"getting cranky," and is told by the orthodox old-timers among them,
"John, you've been out here too long. You better go home." If he does
not change his tone, the receipts of the advertising department of his
paper soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, who
"knows how to get along with people," is not long in agreeing with
the rest of his friends that he has "been out here too long." Again
the successful merchant has too many interests at stake in which he
needs the cordial friendship of the government to be able to afford
to antagonize it. And so on, through every walk of life, the influence
of the government permeates every nook and corner of the situation.
The average public man in the United States would not feel "nat'ral"
unless intermittently bedewed with steam from the exhaust valve of
the soul of some "outraged citizen," through the medium of the public
press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous
position with the government may be very generally detested and
actually not know it. [424] The American in the Philippines, with
all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to
the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or
speech,--even supposing any paper would publish it--which, copied by
the papers back in the United States, would embarrass the National
Administration's Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to
talking too freely for the newspapers when home on a visit.
I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent
impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about
current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there
must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with
shaping the course of the government out there for which they are
responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their
governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not
change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial
situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on
a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of
lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and
future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly
foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka
or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are
fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government
we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of
the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable
governmental asset, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion
which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can
accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of
questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.
To show how absolute was the executive and legislative power over
8,000,000 of people entrusted by the sole authority of President
McKinley to Governor Taft--without consulting Congress, though
afterwards the authority so conferred was ratified by Congress and
descended from Governor Taft to his successor--an incident related
to me in the freedom of social intercourse, and not in the least
in confidence, by my late beloved friend Arthur W. Fergusson,
long Executive Secretary to Governor Taft, will suffice. In 1901
the Commission had passed a law providing for the constitution of
the Philippine judiciary, [425] according to which law an American,
in order to be eligible to appointment as a Judge of First Instance
(the ordinary trial court, or nisi prius court, of Anglo-Saxon
jurisprudence) must be more than thirty years old, and must have
practised law in the United States for a period of five years before
appointed. In 1903 President Roosevelt wanted to make Hon. Beekman
Winthrop (then under thirty years of age) now (1912), Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, a Judge of First Instance. Governor Taft called
Fergusson in and said: "Fergy, make me out a commission for Beekman
Winthrop as a Judge of First Instance." Fergusson said: "You can't do
it, Governor. It's against the law. He's not old enough." Winthrop was
a graduate of the Harvard Law School. Governor Taft said humorously,
"I can't eh? I'll show you. Send me a stenographer." A law was dictated
[426] striking out thirty years and inserting twenty-five, and adding
after the words "must have practised law for a period of five years"
the words "or be a graduate of a reputable law school." Fergusson
was then called in, and told to go down the hall, see the other
commissioners, [427] and get them together, which he did, and
the law was passed in a few minutes. Then Fergusson was sent for,
and the Governor said, handing him the new "law"; "Now make out
that commission." Even if Fergusson colored the incident up a bit,
in the exercise of his inimitable artistic capacity to make anything
interesting, his story was certainly substantially correct relatively
to the absoluteness of the authority of the Governor, as will appear
by reference to the two laws cited.
It is only fair to say that Winthrop made a very good judge. There
used to be current in the Philippines a story that Governor Taft
had said, in more or less humorous vein: "Gentlemen, I'm somewhat
of an expert on judges. What you need in a judge is"--counting with
the index finger of one hand on the fingers of the other--"firstly,
integrity; secondly, courage; thirdly, common sense; and fourthly,
he must know a little law." Winthrop's integrity, courage, and common
sense were beyond all question. It could hardly have been otherwise. He
came of a long line of sturdy and distinguished men, the first of whom
had come over in the Mayflower days to the Massachusetts coast. And,
he did know a little law. But the manner of his appointment is none
the less illustrative of how much quicker, Governor Taft could make
and publish a law than any of his fellow despots [428] over on the
mainland of Asia, considering how slow-moving all their various grand
viziers were, compared with Fergy, and his corps of stenographers.
Having now given, I hope, a more or less sympathetic insight into
what absolute rulers our governors in the Philippines have been, in
the very nature of the case, from the beginning, let us observe the
change of tone of the government, after the reign of the first ended,
and the reign of the second began.
CHAPTER XVIII
GOVERNOR WRIGHT--1904
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard.
Kipling's White Man's Burden.
Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903,
to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and
shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the
governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was
no more hammering it into the American business men having money
invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their "little brown
brother," for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more
than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the
Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans,
because, soon after he came into power, he "let the cat out of the
bag," by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as
well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as
he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft's
"Philippines for the Filipinos" need not cause any specially billowy
sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos
now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in
some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused
them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest
of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to
tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were
wholly unfit for self-government--all of which, in effect, meant
that Governor Taft had been merely "Keeping the word of promise to
the ear and breaking it to the hope."
The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and all feel:
"Alackaday! Our true friend has departed." But as Secretary of War
Taft, after four years more of trying to please both sides, at home, at
last frankly told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the opening
of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, practically just what
Governor Wright had begun to tell them from the moment his predecessor
had exchanged the parting tear with them on the water-front at Manila
in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy of uncompromising honesty
on the present political situation, may easily be guessed.
Governor Wright's method of repudiating the Taft straddle took for its
key-note, in lieu of "The Philippines for the Filipinos," the slogan
"An Equal Chance for All." What Governor Wright meant was merely that
there would be no more browbeating of Americans to make them love
their little brown brother as much as Governor Taft was supposed
to love him, but that everybody would be treated absolutely alike
and nobody coddled. However, the Filipinos of course knew that they
could not compete with American wealth and energy, and so did the
Americans in the islands. So what the Wright slogan, unquestionably
fair as was its intent, inexorably meant to everybody concerned except
the dignified, straightforward and candid propounder of it, was, in
effect, the British "White Man's Burden" or Trust-for-Civilization
theory, a theory whereunder the white man who wants some one else's
land goes and takes it on the idea that he can put it to better
use than the owner. Thus early did the original "jollying" Mr. Taft
had given them become transparent to his little brown brother. Thus
early did it become clear to the Filipinos that behind the mask of
executive protestations that they shall some day have independence
when fit for it, lurks a set determination industriously to earn for
an indeterminate number of generations yet to come
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard.
This book has been written, up to this point, in vain, if the
preceding chapters have not made clear how much political expediency,
looking to the welfare of a party in power naturally seeking to
continue in power, necessarily dominates Philippine affairs under
American rule. We have observed under the microscope of history,
made available by the official documents now accessible, the long
battle between the political expediency germ and the independence
bug which began in General Anderson's dealings with Aguinaldo and
continued through General Merritt's and General Otis's regimes. We
have seen General MacArthur's attempt at a wise surgical operation
to excise the independence bug from the Philippine body politic--so
that the expediency germ might die a natural death from having nothing
to feed on. We have seen that operation interfered with by the Taft
Commission during the presidential campaign of 1900, because the men
in control of the republic could not ignore considerations of political
expediency; and we saw the consequent premature setting up of the civil
government in 1901, with all its dire consequences in the then as yet
unconquered parts of the archipelago, southern Luzon, and some of the
Visayan Islands. We have observed the effective though heroic local
treatment administered to the Philippine body politic by General Bell
in Batangas in 1901-2, with a view of killing off the independence
bug there. We have seen the fierce struggle between some of the bug's
belated spawn and the expediency germ's now more emboldened forces
in Albay in the off year, 1903. We are now to take our fifth year's
course in the colonial department of politico-entomological research,
the presidential year 1904.
It was the way the Samar insurrection of 1904-5-6 was handled which
finally convinced me that the Filipinos would not kill any more of
each other in a hundred years than we have killed, or permitted to
be killed, of them, in the fell process of Benevolent Assimilation.
American imperialism is not honest, like the British variety. American
imperialism knows that Avarice was its father, and Piety its
mother, and that it takes after its father more than it does
after its mother. British imperialism frankly aims mostly to make
the survivors of its policies happy, not the people it immediately
operates on. American imperialism pretends to be ministering to the
happiness of the living, and, though it realizes that it is not a
success in that line, it resents identification with its British
cousin, by sanctimonious reference to the alleged net good it is
doing. Yet in its moments of frankness it says, with an air of infinite
patience under base ingratitude, "Well, they will be happy in some
other generation," and that therefore the number of people we have
had or may have, to kill, or permit to be killed, in the process of
Benevolent Assimilation, is wholly negligible. This is simply the old,
old argument that the end justifies the means, the argument that has
wrought more misery in the world than any other since time began.
When Judge Taft, General Wright, and their colleagues of the Taft
Commission, came out to the Philippines in 1900, they came full of the
McKinley convictions about a people whom neither they or Mr. McKinley
had ever seen, bound hand and foot by political necessity to square the
freeing of Cuba with the subjugation of the Philippines. A perfectly
natural evolution of this attitude resulted in the position they
at once took on arriving in the Islands, viz., that to do for the
Filipinos what we have done for the Cubans would mean a bloody welter
of anarchy and chaos. And the presidential contest of 1900 was fought
and won largely on that issue. After 1900, for all the gentlemen above
referred to, the proposition was always res adjudicata. All protests
by Filipinos to the contrary caused only resentment, and welded the
authorities more and more hermetically to the correctness of the
original proposition. Loyalty to the original ill-considered decision
became impregnated, in their case, with a fervor not entirely unlike
religious fanaticism, and belief in it became a matter of principle,
justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might thereafter
do. So that when General Wright "came to the throne" in our colonial
empire, as Governor, and legatee of the McKinley-Taft Benevolent
Assimilation policies, his attitude in all he did was thoroughly
honest, and also thoroughly British. He honestly believed in the
"bloody welter of anarchy and chaos" proposition, and was prepared,
in any emergency that might arise, to follow his convictions in that
regard whithersoever they might lead, without variableness or shadow
of turning. Take him all in all, Governor Wright was about the best
man occupying exalted station I ever knew personally, President Taft
himself not excepted; although I still adhere to Colonel Roosevelt's
opinion of 1901 concerning Mr. Taft, quoted in the chapter preceding
this, from the Outlook of September 21, 1901, notwithstanding that in
the contest for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1912,
the Colonel "recalled" that opinion. Seriously, a man may "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 still cut a sorry figure trying to fit a square peg
into a round hole, or a scheme of government, the breath of whose life
is public opinion, into the running of a remote colonial government,
the breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered with by
public opinion.
After the Albay insurrection of 1903 had been cleaned up, I took charge
of the Twelfth Judicial District, having been appointed thereto by
Governor Taft just before he left the islands to become Secretary of
War. In those trying pioneer days they always seemed to give me the
insurrections to sift out, but it was purely fortuitous. Whenever you
ceased to be busy, prompt arrangements were made for you to get busy
again. Judge Ide, the Minister of Justice, wasted no government money.
The Twelfth District consisted of the two island provinces of Samar and
Leyte, two of the six Visayan Islands heretofore noticed as the only
ones worth considering in a general view of the archipelago such as
the student of world politics wants or needs. Leyte had a population
of 388,922, [429] and an area of 3008 square miles. [430] Samar's
population was 266,237, and its area, 5276 square miles, makes it the
third largest island of the Philippine Archipelago. So that as Judge
of the Twelfth District, consisting of two provinces, the Governor of
each of which was ex-officio sheriff of the court for his province,
I was, in a sense, a sort of shepherd of a political flock of some
650,000 people, whom I always thought of as a whole as "my" people.
Samar and Leyte are separated, where nearest together, by a most
picturesque winding strait bordered with densely wooded hills. San
Juanico Strait is much narrower than the inland sea of Japan at its
narrowest point, and almost as beautiful. In fact, at its narrowest
point it seems little more than a stone's throw in width. It is as
pretty as the prettiest part of the Golden Horn. Leyte had been put
under the Civil Government in 1901, and this premature interference
with the military authorities in the midst of their efforts to pacify
the island had had the usual result of postponing pacification, by
filling local politicians, wholly unable to comprehend a government
which entreated or reasoned with people to do things, with the notion
that we were resorting to diplomacy in lieu of force because of fear
of them. Leyte and Samar were strategically one for the insurgents,
just as the provinces of the Lake district of Luzon, described in
an earlier chapter, were, because they could flee by night from
one province to another in small boats without detection, when hard
pressed by the Americano. The main insurgent general in Samar, Lucban,
had surrendered to General Grant in 1902, but the cheaper fellows
stayed out much longer, preying upon those who preferred daily toil
to cattle-stealing and throat-cutting as a means of livelihood,
and continuing the political unrest intermittently in gradually
diminishing degree, through 1903. By the spring of 1904, however,
there still remained in Samar riffraff enough, the jetsam and flotsam
of the insurrection--professional outlaws--to get up some trouble,
so that, as brigand chiefs, they might resume the roles of Robin
Hood, Jesse James, et al. During the first half of that year the
opportunity these worthies had been waiting for, while resting on
their oars, developed. The crop of municipal officials resulting from
the original McKinley plan of beginning the work of reconstruction
during, instead of after, the war, and among the potential village
Hampdens, instead of among the Cromwells, had resulted in some very
rascally municipal officials who oppressed the poor, getting the hemp
of the small farmer, when they would bring it to town, at their own
prices--hemp being to Samar what cotton is to the South. From the
lowland and upland farmers the ever-widening discontent spread to
the hills, where dwelt a type of people constituting only a small
fraction of the total population of the Islands--"half savage and
half child"--but loving their hills, and wholly indisposed, of their
own initiative, to start trouble, unless manipulated. Obviously,
then, "the public mind" of Samar--those who know Samar will smile
with me at the phrase, but it will do, for lack of a better--was
likely soon to be in a generally inflammable condition. By July,
1904, the Robin Hoods, Jesse Jameses, et al., touched the match to
the material and a political conflagration started, apparently as
unguided--save by the winds of impulse--and certainly as persistent,
as a forest fire. Every native of the Philippine Islands, whether
he be of the 7,000,000 Christians or of the 500,000 non-Christian
tribes, is born with a highly developed social instinct either to
command or to obey. The latter tendency is quite as common in the
Philippines as the former is in the United States. Hence the Samar
disturbances of 1904-5-6, though made up at the outset of raids and
depredations by various roving bands of outlaws yielding allegiance
only to their immediate chief, soon took on a very formidable military
and political aspect. [431] The roving bands would ask the peaceably
inclined people our flag was supposed to be protecting, "Are you for
us or for the Americans?" promptly chopping their heads off if they
showed any lack of zeal in denouncing American municipal institutions
and things American in general. Pursuant to Mr. McKinley's original
scheme--concocted for a people he had never seen, under pressure of
political necessity--to rig up in short order a government "essentially
popular in form," a lot of most pitiable municipal governments had
been let loose on the people, a part of our series of kindergarten
lessons. The plan was as wise as it will be for the Japanese--some
one please hold Captain Hobson while I finish the analogy--when
they conquer the United States, to go to the Bowery and the Ghetto
for mayors of all our cities. Thus by our pluperfect benevolence,
we had contrived in Samar by 1904 to rouse the highland folk, or hill
people, whom the Spaniards had always let alone, against the pacific
agricultural lowland people and the dwellers in the coast villages. The
latter, or such of them as did not join the hill folk for protection,
we permitted to be mercilessly butchered by wholesale, from August to
November, 1904, as hereinafter more fully set forth, because ordering
out the army to protect them might have been construed at home to mean
disturbances more serious and widespread than actually existed, and
might therefore affect the presidential election in the United States
by renewing the notion that the Administration had never been frank
with the American people concerning conditions in the Philippines.
The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 is dated
November 1st, which was just a week before the presidential election
day of that year. Their annual report for 1905 is dated November 1,
1905. In their report for 1904, the Commission deal with the general
state of public order in the same roseate manner which, as we have
seen, had made its first appearance during the political exigencies
of 1900 in the language about "the great majority of the people"
being "entirely willing" to benevolent alien domination in lieu
of independence. When Rip Van Winkle was trying to quit drinking,
he used to say after each drink: "Oh, we'll just let that pass." In
their report for 1904, the Commission swallow the conditions in Samar
with equal nonchalance. After stating that some (impliedly negligible)
disturbances had occurred in Samar "two months since," they add that
"the constabulary of the province took the field" against the bands
of Pulajans, or outlaws, and that "as a result, they were soon broken
up, and are being pursued and killed or captured" (p. 3). In their
report dated November 1, 1905, by way of preface to an account of
the extensive military operations inaugurated in Samar shortly after
the presidential election of 1904, which operations had not only
been in progress for nearly a year on the date of the 1905 report,
but continued for more than a year thereafter, the Commission explain
their 1904 nonchalance about Samar thus: "It was then believed that
the constabulary forces had succeeded in checking the further progress
of the outbreak" (p. 47).
Let us examine the facts on which they based this statement, since it
meant that they believed that a duly reported epidemic of massacres
of peaceably inclined people, over whom the American flag was floating
as a symbol of protection to life and property, had stood effectually
checked by November 1, 1904, the date of their report. And first,
of the massacres themselves, their nature and extent.
The Samar massacres of 1904 began with what we all called down there
"the outbreak of July 10th." In August, 1904, I went to Samar to
handle the cases arising out of the disturbances there, assisted by
the (native) Governor of the province, who, under the law already
alluded to, was ex-officio sheriff of the court, and an army of
deputy sheriffs, as it were, the constabulary, numbering several
hundred. The outbreak of July 10th was always known afterwards as
"the Tauiran affair." This Tauiran affair was a raid by an outlaw
band on the barrio of Tauiran, one of the hamlets of the municipal
jurisdiction of the township called Gandara, in the valley of the
Gandara River, in north central Samar, wherein one hundred houses,
the whole settlement, were burned, and twenty-one people killed. The
term of court lasted from early in August until early in November. The
day after the Tauiran affair, over on the other fork of the Gandara
River, occurred what was called "the Cantaguic affair." Cantaguic was
a hamlet or barrio about the size of Tauiran. The brigands killed the
lieutenant of police of Cantaguic and some others, but they did not
kill everybody in the place. Instead, after killing a few people,
they went to the tribunal (town hall), seized the local teniente,
or municipal representative of American authority, tied the American
flag they found at the tribunal about the head of the teniente, turban
fashion, poured kerosene oil on it, and took the teniente down stairs
and out into the public square, where they lighted and burned the
flag on his head, the chief of the band, one Juliano Caducoy by name,
remarking to the onlookers that the act was intended as a lesson to
those serving that flag. They then cut off the lips of the teniente
so he could not eat (he of course died a little later), burned the
barrio and carried off fifty of the inhabitants. Caducoy was captured
some time afterward, and I sentenced him to be hanged. There was
practically no dispute about the facts. After the Cantaguic affair,
during the term of court mentioned, the provincial doctor, Dr. Cullen,
an American who had been a captain doctor of volunteers, had occasion
to run up to Manila. The doctor was a most accomplished gentleman,
but he had a fondness for the grewsome in description equal to Edgar
Allan Poe himself. After he came back he told me about having told the
Governor-General of the Cantaguic affair, and repeated with an evident
pleased consciousness of his ability to make his hearer's blood curdle,
how the Governor had said to him slowly, "Doctor, that--is--awful!"
Blood seemed to whet the appetite for slaughter. The records of the
August-November, 1904 term of the court of first instance of Samar show
all the various barrios of the Gandara Valley in flames on successive
days, after the affairs of July 10th and 11th. I do not speak from
memory, but from documents contained in a large bundle of papers
kept ever since, in memory of that incarnadined epoch. You find one
barrio burned one day and another another day, until all the people
of the Gandara Valley were made homeless. One of the constabulary
officers, Lieutenant Bowers, a very gallant fellow, testified before
me that from July 10th to the date of his testimony, which was on or
about September 28th, some 50,000 people had been made homeless in
Samar by the operations of the outlaws. I deem Lieutenant Bowers's
estimate quite reasonable. His figures include only one-fifth of the
population of an island which was in the throes of an all-pervading
brigand uprising. The conservative nature of Lieutenant Bowers's
estimate concerning the mischief that had already been wrought
by the end of September, 1904, and was then gathering destructive
potentiality like a forest or prairie fire, may be inferred from the
contents of a memorandum appearing below, furnished me by a Spanish
officer of the constabulary, a Lieutenant Calderon, who had been an
officer of the Rural Guard in the Spanish days. It contains a list
of fifty-three towns, villages, and hamlets (a barrio may be quite a
village, sometimes even quite a town, though usually it is a hamlet)
burned up to the date the memorandum was furnished me.
In order to a clear understanding of these Samar massacres and
town-burnings of 1904, as well as for general geographical purposes,
a few preliminary words of explanation will be appropriate just here.
A province in the Philippines has heretofore been likened to a county
with us. But in the largest provinces, the subdivisions of provinces
called municipalities are more like counties; and each municipality
is in turn subdivided into sections called barrios. A municipality
(Spanish, pueblo) in the Philippines is not primarily a city or town,
as we understand it, i.e., a more or less continuous settlement
of houses and lots more or less adjacent, but a specific area of
territory, a township, as it were. This area or territory may be 5 x
10 square miles, or 10 x 20, or more, or less. For example, Samar's
area is 5276 square miles. Yet it contained in 1904, and probably still
contains, only twenty-five townships or municipalities all told, each
municipality being subdivided in turn into barrios. Municipalities
in the Philippines vary in size as much as counties do with us, and
their total area accounts for and represents the total area of the
province, just as the total area of the counties of a State represents
with us the total area of the State. The seat of government of the
municipality always bears the same name as the municipality itself,
just as the county seat of a county usually, or frequently, bears
the same name as the county, with us. Take for instance, the name of
the first municipality or township in the list which appears below,
Gandara. The municipality of Gandara might be described by analogy
as the "county" of Gandara, the list of barrios burned as a list of
towns and villages of the "county" of Gandara.
The municipality of Gandara included a watershed in north central Samar
from which the Gandara River flowed in a southwesterly direction to
the sea. Within this watershed, parallel 12 1/2 north of the equator
intersects the 125th meridian of longitude east of Greenwich. Northern
Samar is a very rich hemp country, Catarman hemp being usually quoted
higher than any hemp listed on the London market. If you stand at the
highest point of the Gandara watershed you can see four streams flowing
off north, northwest, northeast, and southwest to the sea. There are
some half dozen streams having their source there. Brigands making
their headquarters there could always, when hard pressed, get away
in canoes toward the sea in almost any direction they wished. The
following is Lieutenant Calderon's list:
RELACION POR MUNICIPIOS DE LOS BARRIOS QUEMADOS.
(List by Municipalities of the Barrios Burned.)
MUNICIPALITY OF GANDARA
Tauiran July 10
Cantaguic July 12
Cauilan July 13
Erenas July 16
Blanca Aurora July 19
Bulao [432] July 21
Pizarro August 8
Cagibabago August 8
Nueva August 10
Hernandez August 10
San Miguel August 10
Buao August 15
El Cano August 17
San Enrique August 20
San Luis August 25
MUNICIPALITY OF CATBALOGAN
(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)
Malino July 31
Silanga August 9
Ginga August 13
San Fernando August 15
Maragadin August 20
Talinga August 21
Santa Cruz August 22
Dap-dap August 29
Palencia August 31
Albalate (date not given)
Villa Hermosa (date not given)
The above list of villages burned in the township of Catbalogan
shows how bold the Pulajans had then grown. By that time they were
committing depredations, robbery, murder, and town-burning, in all the
various villages within the municipal jurisdiction of the township
of Catbalogan, coming often within a few miles of the town proper
of Catbalogan itself, the seat of the provincial government. In the
attack on Silanga, which occurred August 9th, a number of people
were killed. Silanga was but little more than an hour's walk from
the court-house at Catbalogan. The Governor at once wired Manila
as follows:
Catbalogan, Samar, Aug. 9, 1904.
Executive Secretary, Manila:
The peaceably inclined people of the barrios near here are
collecting here in large numbers, terrorized by Pulajans who are
boldly roaming the country, burning barrios within seven or eight
miles from Catbalogan. They kill men, women, and children without
distinction. These Pulajans have fled from Gandara where they are
being actively pursued by constabulary. All forces that could be
spared have gone out. We have about thirty available fighting
men here. Pulajans liable at any time to enter Catbalogan. We
are in danger of some occurrence quite as serious as the Surigao
affair. [433] There are buildings here which I must protect at all
hazards--Treasury, Provincial Jail with ninety-five prisoners, and
commissary and ordnance stores of constabulary. We need at once at
least three hundred men, scouts if possible, to handle situation,
between here and Gandara. Pulajans undoubtedly have friends in
Catbalogan. I suspect certain of the municipal authorities here. I
estimate number of Pulajans now operating at about five hundred.
(Signed) Feito, Governor.
On September 2d, the Provincial Governor of Samar sent to Manila the
following telegram:
Catbalogan, Sept. 2, 1904.
Carpenter, Actg. Ex. Secy., Palace, Manila:
Seven-thirty this evening simultaneous reports from north
and south sides of town Pulajans approaching. They have not
entered yet and may not, but have gathered Americans with wives
and children in my house. Arms supplied. Treasury twenty-five
thousand Conant. [434] One hundred forty prisoners in jail. Only
forty-seven constabulary here. If Pulajans enter much needless
sacrifice life pacific citizens here. Feel sure Pulajans have
friends in Catbalogan. Request company either scouts or soldiers
from Calbayog stationed here, preferably former. Their presence
guarantee stability.
(Signed) Feito, Governor.
Of course Governor Feito did not call for the regular army of the
United States. His job, poor devil, was to demonstrate as best he
could that the military were not needed. He would at once have been
suspected of trying to scuttle the ship of "benign civil government"
if he had admitted that the regular army was needed. But to return
to Calderon's list:
MUNICIPALITY OF CALBAYOG [435]
(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)
Ylo August 17
Napuro August 17
Balud August 17
MUNICIPALITY OF WRIGHT
(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)
Guinica-an July 25
Calapi July 28
Bonga August 4
Tutubigan August 19
Motiong September 1
Lau-an October 10
Sao Jose (date not given)
A sample of the distressing communications I was getting as these
massacres progressed is the notification of the Motiong affair
of September 1st set forth below, which I give as a type of the
methodical stoicism of those bloody times. Motiong was seven miles
down the coast road from Catbalogan:
In the district of Motiong, municipality of Wright, province of
Samar, Philippine Islands, September 1, 1904.
In the presence of the undersigned Peregrin Albano, member of
the village council, there being also present the president of
the Municipal Board of Health, Mr. Tomas San Pablo, and the
principal men of the place, there has this day occurred the
burial of the corpses, victims of the Pulajans, in the cemetery
of this place, to wit: The officer of volunteers, Rafael Rosales,
and the following volunteers, viz., Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle,
Dionisio Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo; also the two women,
Eustaquia Sapiten and Apolinaria N., also one unknown Pulajan. This
in fulfilment of the official letter of instructions No. 136,
from the office of the presidente of the town of Wright dated
to-day. Said burial ceremonies were conducted by the Reverend
Father Marcos Gomez, and were attended by the whole volunteer
force of this place because of the death of their officer Rosales.
Tomas San Pablo,
President of the Board of Health.
Peregrin Albano,
Councillor.
(Illegible)----Moro, Captain of Volunteers. [436]
Fancy having documents like the foregoing handed you with
ever-increasing regularity as you sauntered, morning after morning,
from your bath to your coffee and rolls, preparatory to the daily
sifting of incidents such as that which included the burning of
the American flag on the head of the municipal representative of
American authority already mentioned, and other like acts of poor
misguided peasants stirred up by trifling scamps representing the
dregs of insurrection. Motiong was not only within seven miles of
the court-house at Catbalogan, but it was so near to Camp Bumpus,
over in Leyte, where the 18th Infantry lay, that an order to them
to move in the morning would have made life and property in all that
brigand-harried region safe that night and continuously thereafter.
General Wm. H. Carter, Major-General U. S. A., well known to the
American public as the able officer who, in 1911, commanded the United
States forces mobilized on the Mexican border during the Mexican
revolution of that year, that ousted President Diaz and seated
President Madero, was in command at the time--the fall of 1904--of
the military district of the Philippines which included Samar and
Leyte. A word of request to him would have made life definitely safe
in all the coast towns and their vicinity within two or three days
after receipt of such a request.
Besides Gandara, Catbalogan, Calbayog, and Wright, Lieutenant
Calderon's list included the trio of ill-fated municipalities set
forth below, concluding with the illustrious name of Taft:
MUNICIPALITY OF CATUBIG
Poblacion September 5
Tagabiran August 11
San Vicente August --
Catubig was toward the north end of Samar. On the day of the burning
and sacking of the poblacion of Catubig, September 5th, which was done
by a force of several hundred Pulajans, the scouts and constabulary,
so it was afterward reported, killed a hundred of the Catubig Pulajans
in an engagement. If this report were correct, as is likely, it was
the biggest single killing of natives since the early days of the
insurrection. [437] But it did not in the least check the Pulajan
insurrection, which simply swerved its fury from the Catubig region
toward the coast (the Pacific coast), descending upon the towns,
villages, and hamlets of the townships of Borongan and Taft, thus:
MUNICIPALITY OF BORONGAN
(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)
Sepa Sept. 23
Lucsohong Sept. 23
Maybocog Sept. 23
Maydolong Sept. 23
Soribao Sept. 23
Bugas Oct. 10
Punta Maria Oct. 10
Canjauay Oct. 11
MUNICIPALITY OF TAFT
(Calderon's List continued)
Del Remedio Sept. 22
San Julian Sept. 22
Nena Sept. 22
Libas Sept. 22
Pagbabangnan Sept. 22
San Vicente Sept. 21
Jinolaso Oct. 3
Of the twenty-five pueblos or townships of Samar, the Calderon
list only pretended to throw light on events in nine of them,
those being the only ones from which definite news had then reached
headquarters. But as a reign of terror prevailed all over Samar at the
time, the rest may be imagined, though it can never be ascertained. Of
these nine, the last two were:
MUNICIPALITY OF LLORENTE
Pagbabalancayan Sept. 23
MUNICIPALITY OF ORAS
Concepcion Sept. 23
Jipapad --
Now it feels just as uncomfortable to be boloed in Pagbabalancayan
as it would in a place with a more pronounceable name, and the same
is true of the comparatively mellifluous Jipapad. True, some of
these places were mere hamlets of twenty to forty houses, but you
may be sure there were five or six people, on an average, to each
house. On the other hand, glance back again at the list of towns of
the township of Taft that were sacked and burned, and consider that
San Julian was about the size of the provincial capital, Catbalogan,
and that Catbalogan, the town proper, contained a population of
four thousand, though looked at from the amphitheatre of hills which
surround it, Catbalogan does not look like such a very large group
of houses. Filipino houses are usually full of people. It is easier
to live that way than to build more houses.
After the Pulajan descent on Llorente, the people of Llorente all went
off to the hills to the Pulajans for safety. They were not allowed
to have firearms. This was forbidden by law, except on condition of
making formal application for permission, getting it finally approved,
and giving a bond, conditions which, in practical operation, made
the prohibition all but absolute. The law was general for the whole
archipelago. The theory of the law was that the inhabitants were under
"the peace and protection of a benign civil government." The real
reason of the law was that if the people were allowed to bear arms it
was very uncertain which side they would use them on, our side or the
other. But, by 1904, the lowland and coast people of Samar would have
been glad enough to have stuck to us and gone out after the mountain
robber bands had we armed them. Left unprotected, a feeling seemed
to spread in many places that about the only thing to do to be safe
was to depart from under the "protection" of the American flag and
take to the hills and join, or seem to join, the uprising.
Toward the last of September, the provincial treasurer of Samar, an
American, a Mr. Whittier, visited the east coast of Samar, including
Taft. On October 5th, he stated before me as follows:
All the presidentes that I have talked with, and this man Hill,
[438] said that they wanted some protection for their towns. Except
at Borongan there are no guns in the hands of the municipal
police. [439] This band near Taft was said to have nineteen
guns, and they felt they could not defend their towns with spears
against these guns. There were reported to be between 200 and 600
in operation on the coast at that time, and they felt that they
could not defend their towns with the means at hand. I found at
Taft that they had taken all the records of the municipality,
and the money, and taken it over to an island away from the
main coast, in order to protect their money and their records,
and I understand the same thing was done at Llorente. At Oras
they had practically decided to take the same step if it became
necessary. All of the commercial houses on the east coast and
a large number of people congregated at Borongan, which was
safe on account of the protection of the constabulary; and the
constabulary there were doing very good work, doing everything
they could with their small force, and they (the presidentes)
felt that if they had guns in the hands of the municipal police
or if they had the constabulary to guard their towns, they could
go out after these people themselves.
The importance of all this testimony, relatively to its forever
sickening any one acquainted with it with colonization by a republic,
is that a transcript of Mr. Whittier's statement of October 5th
was placed in the hands of the Governor-General a few days later by
Mr. Harvey, the Assistant Attorney-General, and yet this situation
continued until shortly after the presidential election. Several
years afterwards, in the North American Review, Judge Ide, who
was Vice-Governor in 1904, after admitting that he was in constant
consultation with the Governor-General all through that period (by
way of showing his opportunities for knowing whereof he spoke),
denied that the failure to order out the military to protect the
people from massacre had any relation whatever to the presidential
election then going on in the United States.
Mr. Whittier also stated before me that the total population of the
municipality of Taft was 18,000, and that twenty-five men armed with
guns in each of the four principal villages thereof that were burned
would have prevented the destruction of those villages. So we did not
protect the people, and we would not let them protect themselves. I
do not select the pueblo of Taft on account of its distinguished
name. "What's in a name?" The fate of Taft and its inhabitants was
simply typical of the fate which descended upon scores of other places
in "dark and bloody" Samar between the outbreak of July 10, 1904, and
the presidential election of November 8th, of that year, and between
those two dates the shadow of such a fate was over all the towns of
the island on which it did not in fact descend. Mr. Whittier stated to
me informally that at the time he was speaking of in the above formal
statement, there were pending and had been pending for a long time
(he seemed to think they must have been pigeon-holed) applications
for permission to bear arms from fifteen different pueblos. After
Mr. Whittier had finished his statement the Presidente of Taft made
a like statement on the same day, October 5th. My retained copy
shows that this official bore the ponderous name of Angel Custodio
Crisologo. He declared a willingness to lead his people against
the Pulajans if given guns, though the fervent soul did qualify
this martial remark by adding, "If I am well enough," explaining
that the presidential body was subject to rheumatism. Mr. Crisologo
stated among other things that there had been eight hundred houses
burned in the jurisdiction of Taft before he left the east coast
for Catbalogan--about a week before. Like Mr. Whittier's, a copy
of Mr. Crisologo's statement was delivered a few days later to
the Governor-General in person by the Assistant Attorney-General,
Mr. Harvey, who had been present when it was made and taken down.
This Mr. Harvey need not be, to the western hemisphere reader, a
mere nebulous antipodal entity, as the Hon. Angel Custodio Crisologo
might. He is a very live American, a very high-toned gentleman, and
an excellent lawyer, and was at last accounts still with the insular
government of the Philippine Islands, though in a higher capacity
(Solicitor General) than he was at the date of the events herein
narrated. There was very little congenial society in Catbalogan when
Mr. Harvey came there to help dispose of the criminal docket, and his
advent was to me a very welcome oasis in a desert of "the solitude
of my own originality"--or lack of originality. On September 19th I
had wired Vice-Governor Ide that there were 172 prisoners in the jail
awaiting trial and "many more coming." Of course no justice of the
peace would be trusted to pass on whether an alleged outlaw should
or should not be held for trial. If he were secretly in sympathy
with the discomfiture American authority in Samar was having, he
might let the man go, no matter what the proof. Also he might seek to
clear himself of all suspicion in each case by committing men against
whom there was no proof, thus unnecessarily crowding an already fast
filling provincial jail of limited dimensions, wherein beriberi [440]
was already making its dread appearance.
So the writ of habeas corpus remained unsuspended, thus making it
possible to so state in later official certificates covering that
period. But habeas corpus cut no more figure in the situation than
it did at the battle of Gettysburg, or at the crossing of the Red
Sea by the chosen people, or at the sinking of the Titanic. The
constabulary would worry along with such force as they had in the
island of Samar, only a few hundred, certainly nearer five hundred
than one thousand. And, whenever they had a battle with the outlaws,
if they themselves were not annihilated, which happened more than
once, they would bring back prisoners in droves and put them in
the jail, and I was expected to sift out how much proof they had,
or claimed to have, of overt acts by persons not actually captured
in action. Of course a race then began, a race against death, to see
whether death or I would get to John Doe or Richard Roe first. And
though I held court every day except Sunday from August to November
8th, sometimes getting in sixteen hours per day by supplementing a
day's work with a night session, death would often beat me to some
one man on the jail list whom I happened to have picked out to get to
the next day. Men so picked out were men as to whom something I might
have heard held out the hope of being able to dispose of their cases
quickly by letting them loose, [441] thus getting that much farther
from the danger limit of crowding in the jail. Some of these would be
specially picked out because reported sick. I kept track of the sick
by visiting them myself when practicable, and talking to them. Of
course many of them were brigands---Pulajans--but some of them were
the saddest looking, most abject little brigands that anybody ever
saw. Of course you might catch some nasty disease from them, but
nobody, somehow, ever seemed to have any apprehension on that score
in the Philippines. This does not argue bravery at all. It is merely
the listless stoicism that lurks in the climate. I recollect going
to walk one afternoon, after adjourning court at 5 o'clock, saying to
the prosecuting attorney before adjourning, "We will take up the case
of Capence Coral in the morning; there does not seem, from what I can
understand, to be enough proof to convict him of anything." Of course
when you were dealing with hundreds of people, you did not have any
nerve-racking hysterics about any one man. Leaving the court-house I
passed by the hospital, where Capence had been transferred, pending
the arrival of witnesses against him and the rest of the crowd captured
with him. I asked the hospital steward how Capence was. The answer was
he had died at 4:45--some twenty minutes before. Death had beat me to
Capence. When I meet Capence he will know I did the best I could. I
was under a great strain, a sort of writ of habeas corpus incarnate,
the only thing remotely suggesting relief from unwarranted [442]
detention on the whole horizon of the situation. I was trying to do
the best I could by the Constitution, in so far as the spirit of it
had reached the Philippines. I broke down totally under the strain
about November 8th, came home in the spring of the following year
and remained an invalid for several years thereafter; and as a noted
corporation lawyer once said after recovery from a similar illness,
"I haven't had much constitution since, but have been living mostly
under the by-laws."
American office-holding in the Philippines is not so popular with
the Filipinos as to have moved them to any outburst of gratitude in
the shape of an effort to create a pension system for Americans who
lose their health in the government service out there. When they
leave the Islands they become as one dead so far as the Philippine
insular government is concerned. And the men whose health is more or
less permanently impaired by disability incurred in line of duty in
the Philippines are not and will never be numerous or powerful enough
back home to create any sentiment in favor of a pension system for
former Philippine employees, since the Philippine business is not a
subject of much popular enthusiasm at best. So if I had not had private
resources, the results of the Samar insurrection of 1904 would have
left me also in the pitiable plight in which I have beheld so many
of my repatriated former comrades of the Philippine service in the
last seven years, to whom the heart of the more fortunate ex-Filipino
indeed goes out in sympathy. But to return to the race to beat death
to prisoners in that grim and memorable fall of 1904.
In September the crowded condition of the jail had begun to tell on
the inmates. The constabulary force at Catbalogan was quite inadequate
for the varied emergencies of the situation, there being, besides
the town itself to protect, the provincial treasury to guard, the
governor's office, the court-house, and the jail. Consequently the jail
guard was too small. The jail buildings were in an enclosure a little
larger than a baseball diamond, surrounded by high stone walls. But
it was not safe to let the inmates sleep out in the enclosure at
night. They had to be kept at night in the buildings. Any American
who has visited the central penitentiary at Manila called Bilibid
has seen a place almost as clean as a battleship. This is American
work. But the Filipinos are not trained in sanitary matters, and all
they know about handling large crowds of prisoners they learned from
the Spaniards. The Governor was a native half-caste, a very excellent
man, but free from that horror, which I think is an almost universal
American trait, of seeing unnecessary and preventable sacrifice of
human life, no matter whose the life. I inspected the jail as often
as was practicable, and managed to keep down the death-rate below
what it might have been, the prisoners being allowed to go out in
the open court during the day. They also had such medical attention
as was available. However, during the last five or six weeks of that
term of court I would be pretty sure to find on my desk every two or
three days, on opening court in the morning, a notice like this:
Carcel Provincial de Samar, I. F.
Oficina del Alcaide
Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.,
22 de Septiembre de 1904.
Hon. Sr. Juez de Ia Instancia de esta provincia,
Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.
Senor:
Tengo el honor de poner en conocimiento de ese juzgado, que
anoche entre 12 y 1 de ella, fallecio el procesado, Ramon Boroce,
a consecuencia de la enfermedad de beriberi, que venia padeciendo.
Lo que tengo el honor de communicar a ese Juzgado para su superior
conocimiento.
De U. muy respetuosamente,
Gonzalo Lucero,
Alcaide de la Carcel Provincial.
which being interpreted means:
Provincial Jail of Samar, P. I.
Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.,
September 22, 1904.
His honor, the Judge of First Instance of this province,
Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.
Sir:
I have the honor to bring to the knowledge of the court that last
night between 12 and 1 o'clock, the accused person Ramon Boroce
died in consequence of the disease of beriberi from which he has
been suffering; which fact I have the honor to communicate to
the court for its superior knowledge.
Very respectfully,
Gonzalo Lucero,
Warden of the Provincial Jail.
Now a jail death-rate of only ten or twelve a month was not at all a
bad record for an insurrection in a Philippine province. It would be
rank demagoguery at this late date to be a party to anybody's getting
excited about it. I was rather proud of it by comparison with the jail
death-rate of the Albay insurrection of the year before, where 120
men had died in the jail in about six months. But it began to get on
one's nerves to have to expect a billet-doux like the above on your
desk at the opening of court each day, when the accused person had
had no commitment trial and may have been wholly innocent. It all
came back to the difference between war and peace, viz., that in war
it is to be expected that many innocent persons will suffer, but that
in peace only the guilty should suffer. Moreover, in war that admits
it is war, your agents, your army, are better able to handle crowds
of prisoners than native police and constabulary, and the percentage
of innocent who suffer with the guilty in such war will be far less;
whereas the contrary is true of war--waged by constabulary checked
by courts--which pretends that a state of peace exists, i.e., which
pretends there is no need for declaring martial law and calling on
your army.
It was this Samar insurrection which convinced me that waging war
with courts and constabulary in lieu of the recognized method was,
in its net results, the cruelest kind of war, and that the civil
government of the Philippines was a failure, in so far as regarded
Mr. McKinley's original injunction to the Taft Commission; where,
after alluding to the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila
to our forces, which concluded with the words:
This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all
descriptions * * * are placed under the special safeguard of the
faith and honor of the American Army,
he 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.
Commenting on this in his inaugural address as Governor of the
Philippines, Governor Taft had said:
May we not be recreant to the charge, which he truly says,
concerns the honor and conscience of our country.
No matter who was to blame, here we were in Samar, with the
14th Infantry three hours away in one direction at Calbayog,
doing nothing, and the 18th Infantry five hours away in another
direction, at Tacloban, doing nothing, and a reign of terror going
on in Samar, with the peaceably inclined people of the lowlands
and coast towns appealing to us for protection and not getting it,
sometimes crouching in abject terror without knowing which way to fly,
sometimes taking to the hills and joining the outlaws as a measure
of self-preservation. 'Twas pitiful, wondrous pitiful! I then and
there decided that we ought to get out of the Philippines as soon
as any decent sort of a native government could be set up, and that
our republic was not adapted to colonization. In his North American
Review article above cited, in denying that the unwillingness of
the Manila government to order out the army in Samar in the fall
of 1904 had anything to do with the possible effect so doing might
have had on the presidential election, then in progress in the United
States, Governor Ide rebuked me with patronizing self-righteousness
thus: "Was Judge Blount opposed to kindness?" He means in giving
the Filipinos, under such circumstances, the "protection of civil
government," instead of ordering out the army. No, but I was opposed
to using a saw, in lieu of a lancet, in excising the ulcers of that
body politic at that time. In protesting that there was "nothing
sinister" about the failure to use the troops, Judge Ide cunningly
wonders whether my attitude was subsequently assumed after I left
the Islands because of "proclivities as a Democrat," or whether it
was merely due to "predilections in favor of military rule." Read
Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Taft Commission, above quoted,
that to protect life and property concerned the honor and conscience
of their country, and consider if the Ide suggestion does not seem to
hide its head and slink away in shame before the strong clear light
of what was then a plain duty. As a matter of fact Judge Charles
S. Lobinger, who is still with the Philippine judiciary, visited me
en route to another point, during that Samar term of court, and he
will recall, should he ever chance upon this book and this chapter,
with what vehemence I said to him at the time, in effect, "Judge,
we belong in the Western Hemisphere. We have no business out here
permanently." If proclivities and predilections in favor of affording
decent protection to the lives and property of defenceless people
by properly garrisoning their towns constitutes lack of kindness,
then the Ide rebuke was well taken.
These details are not related with Pickwickian gravity in order to
acquaint the reader with my utterances as being important per se. But
it is important to make clear to the reader, and he is entitled,
in all frankness, to have it made clear by one who has now so long
detained his attention on this great subject, to know just when "the
light from heaven on the road to Damascus" broke upon this witness,
and how and why he came to be in favor of Philippine independence,
because the reasons which convinced him may seem good in the sight
of the reader also. If the man who reads this book shall see that
the man who wrote it was, in Samar in 1904, neither a Republican nor
a Democrat, but simply an American in a far distant land, jealous
of the honor of his country's flag in its capacity as a symbol of
protection to those over whom it floated, then the work will not have
been written in vain.
The presidentes or mayors of the various pueblos were in session
at Catbalogan in semi-annual convention during the first few days
of October, 1904, when the Assistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey,
visited Catbalogan. Mr. Harvey and the writer had taken a number of
long walks together in the suburbs of Catbalogan, though Major Dade,
commanding the Samar constabulary, an officer of the regular army,
had warned us it was not safe outside of town. We had talked over
the situation fully. Besides all its other aspects, there were a
number of American women in Catbalogan, an American lawyer's wife,
the wife of the superintendent of schools, her sister, and others. It
was not at all likely that the Pulajans would enter Catbalogan, but
there was always the possibility, not to be wholly ignored, that some
such episode as that of March 23d, of the preceding year, at Surigao,
already described, might be repeated. As hereinbefore noted, on August
9th, the Pulajans had done some killing and burning at Silanga, less
than ten miles north of Catbalogan and likewise at Motiong, less than
ten miles south of Catbalogan, on September 1st, and on the evening
of September 2d, about 7:30, there had been a false alarm caused
by some native of Catbalogan running down the main street yelling,
"Pulajans! Pulajans!" All of which did not tend to make you feel
that your American women were quite as entirely safe from harm as
they ought to be.
In the course of one of our walks Mr. Harvey and I had stopped on the
mountain side overlooking Catbalogan, to catch our breath and take in
the view of the town below and the sea beyond. I said to him, because
I knew his mind also was on the one great need of the hour: "Yes sir,
if President Roosevelt were here, and could see this situation as we
do, he would order out the army and protect these defenceless people,
no matter which way the chips might fly." Mr. Harvey agreed with
me. He promised to go back to Manila and tell the authorities there
so. After we came back to town, we were advised that the convention of
presidentes desired to have Mr. Harvey favor them with an address. He
said, "What shall I tell them?" I said, "Tell them that if they will
do their duty by the American Government, the American Government will
do its duty by them." He spoke Spanish fluently, made a good speech,
and told them in effect just that thing. Then he went back to Manila,
and shortly afterward wrote me the two letters which follow:
Department of Justice, Philippine Islands,
Office of the Assistant Attorney-General
for the Constabulary,
Manila, P. I., October 15, 1904.
My dear Judge: We arrived in Manila on Tuesday morning,
the 11th instant, and I prepared my report and submitted it
to the attorney-general on the 12th, in the meantime making a
transcript of your summary and delivering a copy of same with other
information to the attorney-general along with my report. After
dictating the report and before delivering it I had a conversation
with General Allen on the situation in Samar and told him what
my recommendations would be. He agreed that rewards should be
offered for the capture of Pablo Bulan, Antonio Anogar, and Pedro
de la Cruz, but took issue on the other recommendations, and to my
mind he takes a very extreme view; but I thought at the time and
still think that he wanted to tone me down in my feelings in the
matter. I think the real cause for his opposition is the effect
that he fears an aggressive attitude might have on the presidential
election. In other words, whatever they do aggressively might be
misconstrued and made use of as political capital.
At Governor Wright's request I got the report from the
attorney-general before it was sent up and went over to the
Malacanan, and the governor read the report and read most of the
data that I submitted with the report, including your summary, and
while he did not say much what he did say convinced me that there
would be something doing if it were not on the eve of election,
and in my opinion there will be things doing in Samar within
thirty days.
I inclose herewith a copy of your summary, and also a copy of my
report to the attorney-general. On the 18th instant I received
your telegram to hold the completion of your summary until receipt
of a letter mailed by you that day. I telegraphed you in reply
that my report and your summary were placed in the hands of the
attorney-general on the 12th instant. If there is any additional
data in your letter mailed on the 13th I will submit it to the
proper authorities.
For the lack of time, I will close, and write more next time.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) Geo. R. Harvey,
Assistant Attorney-General.
Department of Justice, Philippine Islands,
Office of the Assistant Attorney-General,
for the Constabulary,
Manila, P. I., October 19, 1904.
My dear Judge Blount: Since mailing my letter to you of last
Saturday I have found the copies of your summary on the situation
in Samar and inclose two herewith, in accordance with my promise.
This week we have received some good news from Samar with
reference to important captures and killings of Pulajans. I
am not in touch with what is going on with reference to Samar,
and can give you no information along that line. As I remember,
the governor told me the other day when I was talking with him
that one more company of scouts will be sent down right away.
I sincerely hope the situation is improving, and that you are
getting along rapidly in disposing of the large docket before
you. If there is not a very great improvement in the situation
by the 9th of November, I think there will be a considerable
movement of troops in Samar within thirty days. For the good of the
government, I hope the situation will improve materially before
that time. I would like to see them put the troops there right
now. I am of the opinion that it would not affect the election a
half-dozen votes, and it might save two or three or a half-dozen
massacres and the destruction of much property.
With best wishes for your success in your work, and with regards
to Mr. Block, I am,
Very truly yours,
Geo. R. Harvey,
Assistant Attorney-General, Philippines Constabulary.
To Hon. James H. Blount,
Judge of First Instance, Catbalogan, Samar, P. I.
These two letters may be found at p. 2532, Congressional Record,
February 25, 1908, where they were the subject of remark in the House
of Representatives by Hon. Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, apropos of
Governor Ide's North American Review article of December, 1907.
A few weeks after the presidential election I saw Mr. Harvey
in Manila. We naturally talked about Samar and his two letters
to me. The troops had then been ordered out. He referred to his
conference with the Governor-General and stated, "Yes, he told me
that was the reason," meaning that the reason for not ordering out
the troops was the one assigned in his (Harvey's) letter to me, viz.,
"Whatever we do aggressively might be misconstrued and made use of
as political capital."
On October 18, 1904, there was received at Manila the following
cablegram concerning the presidential campaign in the United States:
New York, 16th. Judge Parker, in addressing campaign clubs at
Esopus the past week returned to the subject of the Philippines
in the evident hope of making it a paramount issue of the
campaign. He repeated his former declaration that the retention
of the Philippines and the carrying out of the policy of the
Republican Administration have cost six hundred and fifty millions
of dollars and two hundred thousand lives. Secretary of War Taft,
in addressing a mass meeting held in Baltimore, Saturday night,
ridiculed Judge Parker's statement and characterized his figures
as alarmist.
Of course Judge Parker's figures were rather high--of which more
anon. He was not going to miss anything in the way of a chance of
"getting a rise" out of the Administration, by understatement. But some
statement from the Philippines at once became a supremely important
desideratum, to counterbalance Judge Parker's over-statement, some
optimism to meet the Parker pessimism. Encouraged by the public
interest aroused by the figures furnished him, and the consequent
apparent uneasiness it created in "the enemy's camp," Judge Parker
soon had the whole Philippine group of islands going to "the demnition
bow-wows." On October 20th, Secretary of War Taft cabled Governor
Wright, then Governor-General of the Islands, a long telegram, quoting
Judge Parker as having used, among other language descriptive of the
beatitudes we had conferred on our little brown brother, the following:
"The towns in many places in ruins, whole districts in the hands of
ladrones." [443]
At that time the whole archipelago was absolutely quiet for the nonce,
except Samar. Samar was the only island where Judge Parker's statement
was true, and as to Samar, it was absolutely true. On October 23d
Governor Wright wired Secretary of War Taft as follows:
There is nothing warranting the statement that towns are in
ruins. It is not true that there are whole districts in the hands
of ladrones. Life and property are as safe here as in the United
States. [444]
This was followed by a perfectly true and correct picture of the
peace and quiet which then prevailed for the time being everywhere
throughout the archipelago, except in Samar, which dark and bloody
isle was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement as to
Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic as any of the Taft
cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly inconsiderable "prowling bands" of
outlaws in Samar. Of course nobody at home knew the answer to this,
so it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar massacres proceeded
unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th
Infantry, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if contemptuous,
tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence of a republic trying to
make conquered subjects behave without colliding too violently with
home sentiment against having conquered subjects; sang their favorite
barrack room song,
He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft,
But he ain't no friend of mine;
and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did chafe under the
restraint, but it at least relieved them from the not altogether
inspiring task of chasing Pulajans through jungles and along the
slippery mire of precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time
permitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to swear fierce
blase oaths, not wholly unjustified, about how much better he could
run the Islands than they were being run.
On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at Manila as follows:
Since my letter of October 6th, situation appears worse. Additional
depredations both on east and west coast. Smith-Bell closing
out. [445] Reliable American residing in Wright says that during
week ending last Sunday thirteen families living along river
Nacbac, barrio of Tutubigan, said pueblo, kidnapped by brigands
and carried off to hills. This means some sixty people having
farms along river, rice ready to be harvested. Seven of the eleven
barrios of Wright have been burned.
Blount.
When I sent that telegram of October 26th, the situation in the pueblo
of Wright was typical of the reign of terror throughout the island.
Wright could have been reached by the 18th Infantry (then over at
Tacloban, in Leyte), and garrisoned on eight hours' notice. But I had
little hope that the telegram would stir the 18th. The best man I had
ever personally known well in high station was at the head of the
government of the Islands, and as he was my friend, I sat down to
think the situation out, determined, with the prejudice which is the
privilege of friendship, to analyze his apparent apathy, and to
conjecture how many times thirteen families "having farms along river,
rice ready to be harvested" would have to be carried off to the hills
by the brigands in order to move the 18th Infantry before the
presidential election. Then I wondered just how many seconds it
would have taken a British governor-general, backed by unanimous
home sentiment concerning the wisdom of having colonies, to have
acted, had a great British colonial mercantile house like Smith,
Bell & Co. appealed to him for protection of its interests. And that
brought me, there on "the tie-ribs of earth," as Kipling would phrase
it, to the fundamentals of the problem. The British imperial idea of
which Kipling is the voice and Benjamin Kidd the accompanist is based,
superficially, upon a supposed necessity for the control of the tropics
by non-tropical peoples, though fundamentally, it is an assertion of
the right of any people to assume control of the land and destinies
of another when they feel sure they can govern that other better than
that other can govern itself. Is this proposition tenable, and if so,
within what limits? Is it tenable to the point of total elimination of
the people sought to be improved? If not, then how far? How far is
incidental sacrifice of human life negligible in the working out of
the broader problem of "the greatest good of the greatest number?" In
his article in the North American Review for December, 1907, Governor
Ide makes exhaustive answer to "the doctors who for some months past,
in the columns of the North American Review and elsewhere, have
published prescriptions for curing the ills of the Filipino people,"
including Senator Francis G. Newlands, Hon. William J. Bryan, and the
writer. In the course of disposing of the quack last mentioned,
Governor Ide gets on rather a high horse, asking, with much dignified
indignation, "How many people in the United States would have known or
cared whether the army was or was not ordered out in Samar in 1904?"
I concede that the solicitude was a super-solicitude, as do the Harvey
letters, but like them, I must recognize its reality. However, when
Governor Ide reaches this rhapsody of conscious virtue: "It is
inconceivable that the Commission could have been animated by the
base and ignoble partisan prejudices thus charged against them,"
capping his climax by triumphantly pointing out that "Governor-General
Wright was a life-long Democrat," he doth protest too much. For the
angelic pinions he thus attaches to himself are at once rudely snapped
by the reflection that a very short while after his article came out
in the North American Review Governor Wright became Secretary of War
in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and a little later took the stump
for Taft and Sherman, in 1908. Governor Wright did not stoop to deny
or extenuate his share in the matter, and I honor him for it. [446]
But to stick to your own crowd and then deny afterwards that you did
so--that is another story. However, let us brush aside such petty
attempts to cloud the real issue, which is: How many people would
Governor Wright and Vice-Governor Ide have permitted to be massacred
by the Pulajans in Samar in 1904 before they would have ordered out
the military prior to the presidential election? Let us consider the
case, not with a view of clouding the issue, but of clearing it. The
truth is, Governor Wright was very gravely concerned about the Samar
situation from August to November, 1904. Of course it is due to him
to make perfectly clear that he did not realize the gravity of that
situation as vividly as those of us who were on the ground in Samar,
four or five hundred miles away. But the information hereinbefore
reviewed, conveyed to him by the Provincial Governor, by Mr. Harvey,
the Assistant Attorney General sent to Samar for the express purpose
of getting the Manila government in possession of the exact situation,
and by myself, was certainly sufficient to make him "chargeable with
notice" of all that happened thereafter, certainly chargeable with
knowledge of all that had happened theretofore. Of course there
was General Allen, the commander-in-chief of the constabulary, at
Manila, presumably speaking well of his command--the right arm of
the civil government--presumably giving industrious and tactful aid
and comfort to the idea that the authorities could afford to worry
along with the constabulary alone until after the presidential
election. But that could not discount the actual facts reported
from the afflicted province by the officials on the ground. General
Allen, it should be noted, remained in Manila all this time. So that
any Otis-like "situation-well-in-hand" bouquets he may have thrown
at his subordinates in Samar, and the situation there generally,
were mere political hothouse products, surer to be recognized as
such by the shrewd kindliness of the truly considerable man at the
head of the government than by most any one else he could hand them
out to. That man knew, to all intents and purposes, in the great and
noble heart of him, what was really going on in Samar. He knew that
massacres had been occurring, and that they were likely to keep on
occurring. In other words, he knew that preventable sacrifice of life
of defenceless people was going on, and that he could put a stop to it
any time he saw fit. The question he had to wrestle with was, should he
stop it, knowing the "Hell fer Sartin" the Democratic orators in the
United States would at once luridly describe as "broke loose" in the
Philippines? I insist that there is no use for any holier-than-thou
gentleman to become suffused with any glow of indignant conscious
rectitude based on the premises we are considering. Better to look
a little deeper, on the idea that you are observing your republic in
flagrante colonizatione, with as good a man as you ever have had, or
ever will have, among you, as the principal actor. Governor Wright's
course was entirely right, if the Philippine policy was right. If his
course was not right, it was not right because the Philippine policy
is fundamentally wrong. Governor Wright of course believed that the
Philippine policy was right. I myself did not come finally to believe
it was wrong until it was revealed in all its rawness by the period now
under discussion. Of course the Governor did not vividly realize that
the American women in Catbalogan were not entirely safe. If he had,
he would have rushed the troops there, politics or no politics. But
native life was politically negligible. What difference would a few
score, or even a few hundred, natives of Samar make, compared with
that pandemonium of anarchy and bloodshed all over the archipelago
which Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide had long been insisting would
follow Philippine independence? Was the whole future of 8,000,000 of
people to be jeopardized to save a few people in Samar? That was the
moral question before the insular government, in its last analysis. And
the government faced the proposition squarely, and answered it "No."
I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with Messrs. Taft,
Wright, and Ide, that Philippine independence meant anarchy in the
Islands, and the orthodox "bloody welter of chaos," I too might have
hesitated to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and
my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until the election
was safely over. So might yours, reader. Don't be so certain you
would not. Practically absolute power, sure of its own benevolence,
has temptations to withhold its confidence from the people that you
wot not of. Don't condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the policy, and
change your republic back to the course set by its founders. Give
the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have,
instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through
the medium of your next great war.
The question of whether the troops should have been ordered out
or not at the time above dealt with is by no means without two
sides. On the "bloody welter" side, you have the well-known opinions
of Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have before
you--for the moment--only my little opinion. So instead of having in
Governor Wright a Bluebeard, you simply have a man of great personal
probity and unflinching moral courage, following his convictions to
their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of turning, in the
act of colonization. In other words, Mr. American, you see yourself,
as others see you. So face the music and look at yourself. In your
colony business, you are a house divided against itself, which
cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino people far more
intimately than either Mr. Taft, Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke
their language--which they did not. I had met them both in peace and
in war--which they had not. I had held court for months at a time in
various provinces of the archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to
Mindanao--which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in their homes
for years on terms of free and informal intercourse impracticable
for any governor-general. It was therefore perfectly natural that I
should know them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. I was
not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending myself out of office
by assenting that our guardianship over the Filipinos should at once
be terminated, but I knew there was nothing to the "bloody welter"
proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too altogether a model
of freedom from discord, pervaded as it is by parental, filial, and
fraternal love, and their patriotism is too universal and genuine,
to give the "bloody welter" bugaboo any standing in court.
But whosoever questions for one moment Governor Wright's high personal
character, simply does not know the man. To do so, moreover, would
fatally cloud the issue I have sought to make clear between his
view of the duty of our government and my own. In his moods that
reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright used to say: "Don't shoot
the organist, he's doing the best he can." It is true that his
answer to Judge Parker was not a full and frank statement of the
case. But did it lie in American human nature, when your antagonist
was recklessly over-stating the case in the heat of debate on the
eve of a presidential election, to take him into your confidence
and tell him all you knew, in simple trusting faith that he would
thereafter quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil down to
the real issue, viz., how many lives it was permissible to abandon on
the "greatest good to the greatest number" theory, would obviously
jeopardize the existence of a government which the Governor of the
Philippines naturally believed to be better for all concerned than
any other. And there is your cul-de-sac. Hinc illae lachrymae.
We can point with pride to many things we have done in the
Philippines, the public improvements, [447] the school system, the
better sanitation, and a long list of other benefits conferred. But in
the greatest thing we have done for them, we have builded wiser than
we knew. "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." In
fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one homogeneous
political unit. In a most charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in
the Philippines, [448] we can see our attempts to fit government by
two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without
sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a
squirrel. In one passage the British sister describes our programme
as one "to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may,
in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American
methods; but at the same time they have plenty of soldiers to knock
him on the head if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the
Americans think he is fit for it"--"A quaint scheme," she naively adds,
"and one full of the go-ahead originality of America."
The more we teach the Filipinos, the more intimately they will become
acquainted, in their own way, with the history of the relations
between our country and theirs from the beginning, including the
taxation without representation, through Congressional legislation
(hereinafter noticed) placed or kept on our statute-books by the hemp
trust and other special interests in the United States. And they will
learn all these things in the midst of a "growing gulf between the
two peoples." [449]
In fourteen years we have made these unwilling subjects, whom we
neither want nor need any more than they want or need us, a unit; a
unit for Home Rule in preference to alien domination, it is true; but,
nevertheless, a patriotic unit--one people--a potential body politic
which can take a modest, but self-respecting place in the concert of
free nations, with only a little more additional help from us.
In the handling of an insurrection in any given province with
courts and constabulary during the first four or five years after
the Taft government of the Philippines was founded, the function of
a representative of the office of the Attorney-General, coming from
Manila to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large docket
and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely analogous to that of a
grand jury. He originated prosecutions, found "No Bill," etc. When
Mr. Harvey came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I
suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after greeting him,
began an informal talk which was akin to the nature of a charge to
a grand jury, putting him in possession of the general aspects of
the uprising. He was a very just and kindly man, and entered into
the spirit of the task. I elaborated on the class of cases where
the defendant claimed, as most of them did, "Yes, I joined the band
of brigands, but I was made to do so." It was also indictable to
furnish supplies to the public enemy. This presented the class of
cases where the brigands would swoop down on a town and demand rice,
and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons refusing it,
and so intimidate the rest into finding rice for them. Also there was
the class of cases where a man would claim to have been one of the
inhabitants of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills in a
body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people by becoming part of
them. This sort of thing at one time threatened to become epidemic with
all the coast towns. It did not, however. A modus vivendi of some sort,
sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, would be arranged between
the coast people and the hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements
enabled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of safety, in
lieu of that we should have secured them but did not, by making the
hill folk believe that the coast men were against us and for them. At
one time the prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to
authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente of Balangiga,
the man supposed to have engineered the massacre of the 9th Infantry
in September 1901. I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his
arrest. But the native governor of the province, and also Major Dade,
the American regular officer commanding the constabulary, satisfied me
that we did not have force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the
Pulajans, if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata to
the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending on his town. To
arrest him would therefore mean, in their opinion, that the people
of Balangiga would take to the hills for protection, and join the
hill folk, or Pulajans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any
such example all the coast towns might follow it. So the supposed
perpetrator of the 9th Infantry massacre was allowed to remain
unmolested. The American court was impotent to enforce its processes.
In my mass of Philippine papers there is one containing a copy of my
remarks to the Assistant Attorney-General on his arrival at Catbalogan,
above referred to as analogous to a charge to a grand jury at home. It
is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, and is headed:
"Remarks by the court upon the occasion of the arrival of Assistant
Attorney-General Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in
Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition growing out of the
same." Certain parts of this contemporary document will doubtless
give the reader a more vivid apprehension of the then situation than
he can get from mere subsequent description. Of course the visiting
representative of the Attorney-General's office was familiar in a
general way with the manner of the handling of the Albay insurrection
in the previous year, described in the chapter preceding this. In
discussing the Samar situation the "remarks" of the court contain,
among other things, this passage:
In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there were
a great many people who strayed out to the mountains just like
cattle. They did not know why or whither they went. As to those
persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and myself were unanimous in the
opinion that some of them could be indicted under the vagrancy
law. There were others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did
not appear to have been what you might call ordinary thieves,
and we were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law,
the limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus you
do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the responsibility of
sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a connection with
bandits which may be but little more than technical. Besides those
two classes, there were in Albay of course the bandits proper,
to whom the bandolerismo [brigandage] law was specially intended
to apply. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that this
bandolerismo law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever
was on the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the
purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the wisest
legislation, or to say that this is not the very best legislation,
under the circumstances. How we administer the several laws
alluded to governing public order, will settle whether or not
substantial justice is done.
The men in the United States who in those days were slinging mud at
the Philippine trial judges as being "subservient," wholly missed
the core of the whole matter. In the provinces where so many heavy
sentences were imposed, the real situation was that a state of war
existed, and the judges believed, and I think correctly, that they were
practically a military commission of one, and much more able to give
a prisoner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than officers
briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting to act as a military
commission. We tried those men with as little prejudice as if they had
just come from the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding words
of the above excerpt from my talk to the Assistant Attorney-General,
it will be seen that the court had practically unlimited discretion
in the matter of punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court
of criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.
In the last analysis, the righteousness or unrighteousness of a civil
government in a country not yet entirely subjugated, depends on whether
more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation
with constabulary whose "prisoners of war" are tried, to see what
they may have done, if anything, by one-man courts, or whether more
innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation as
any other great power on earth but ourselves would have completed it,
with an army, trying the prisoners by military commission. Unless you
yourself were a traitor to your country, you considered as criminal
attempts to subvert your government by cut-throats that no one of
the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan Cailles down,
would have hesitated to have shot summarily. But you sought to
make the punishment in each case fit the crime, by ascertaining
as dispassionately as if the defendant were fresh from the moon,
just what each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, or
an American military commission would have had such people shot in
bunches, as not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war. The trouble
with the civil government did not lie in its judiciary, but in its
constabulary. It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners
by the constabulary, and their failure, because not numerous enough,
to protect peaceably inclined people, which made it a fact that turning
the situation over to the military would have meant less sacrifice of
the innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merciful to kill
a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go,
with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will
promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror
from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the
untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves,
merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman
Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign "civil" government.
In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. Harvey and the
writer sailed close to the wind, by holding only those responsible
who had taken active parts in the sacking and burning of villages and
the massacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or later some
officious prosecuting attorney of less noble mould than Harvey would
ask me to convict some poor creature of brigandage for giving a little
rice to the brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so,
and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all by expressing my
sentiments, in the decision, concerning the failure to give adequate
protection to defenceless people, along the lines indicated in this
chapter. No such case was in fact presented. I broke down under the
strain of graver cases early in November and left Samar forever,
bound for Manila.