Copyright, 1912
By
James H. Blount

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To
JOHN DOWNEY WORKS
OF CALIFORNIA
AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN
AS EVER
GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
WHO
BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT
INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION
IS
INDEFINITE DRIFTING
HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK
AS IT PROGRESSED
LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF
AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN
AND
THE CONTAGIOUS SERENITY OF
CONFIDENCE THAT RIGHT WILL PREVAIL
THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED BY
The Author

To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date.

This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.

The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for the last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously, and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary to the end.

At a time when all our military and fiscal experts agree that having the Philippines on our hands is a grave strategic and economic mistake, fraught with peril to the nation’s prestige in the early stages of our next great war, we are keeping the Filipinos in industrial bondage through unrighteous Congressional legislation for which special interests in America are responsible, in bald repudiation of the Open Door policy, and against their helpless but universal protest, a wholly unprotected and easy prey to the first first-class Power with which we become involved in war. Yet all the while the very highest considerations of national honor require us to choose between making the Filipino people free and independent without unnecessary delay, as they of right ought to be, or else imperilling the perpetuity of our own institutions by the creation and maintenance of a great standing army, sufficient properly to guard overseas possessions.

A cheerful blindness to the inevitable worthy of Mark Tapley himself, the stale Micawberism that “something is bound to turn up,” and a Mrs. Jellyby philanthropy hopelessly callous to domestic duties, expenses, and distresses, have hitherto successfully united to prevent the one simple and supreme need of the situation—a frank, formal, and definite declaration, by the law-making power of the government, of the nation’s purpose in the premises. What is needed is a formal legislative announcement that the governing of a remote and alien people is to have no permanent place in the purposes of our national life, and that we do bona fide intend, just as soon as a stable government, republican in form, can be established by the people of the Philippine Islands, to turn over, upon terms which shall be reasonable and just, the government and control of the islands to the people thereof.

The essentials of the problem, being at least as immutable as human nature and geography, will not change much with time. And whenever the American people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty consistent with taxation without representation and unanimous protest by the governed, they will at once set about to secure to a people who have proven themselves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, generous, and tractable in peace, the right to pursue happiness in their own way, in lieu of somebody else’s way, as the spirit of our Constitution, and the teachings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand.

After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so-called “Expansion,” the first of the seven as a volunteer officer in Cuba during and after the Spanish War, the next two in a like capacity in the Philippines, and the remainder as a United States judge in the last-named country, the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, sustained in spirit, at parting, by cordial farewells, oral and written, personal and official, but convinced that foreign kindness will not cure the desire of a people, once awakened, for what used to be known as Freedom before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philippines; and that to permanently eradicate sedition from the Philippine Islands, the American courts there must be given jurisdiction over thought as well as over overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an indictment against a whole people.

Seven other years of interested observation from the Western Hemisphere end of the line have confirmed and fortified the convictions above set forth.

If we give the Filipinos this independence they so ardently desire and ever clamor for until made to shut up, “the holy cause,” as their brilliant young representative in the American House of Representatives, Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at once spoiled, as the American hemp and other special interests so contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and his compatriot, Señor Osmeña, the Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and the rest of the leaders of the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of contention is merely the hiss of the same old serpent of tyranny which has always beset the pathway of man’s struggle for free institutions.

When first the talk in America, after the battle of Manila Bay, about keeping the Philippines, reached the islands, one of the Filipino leaders wrote to another during the negotiations between their commanding general and our own looking to preservation of the peace until the results of the Paris Peace Conference which settled the fate of the islands should be known, in effect, thus: “The Filipinos will not be fit for independence in ten, twenty, or a hundred years if it be left to American colonial office-holders drawing good salaries to determine the question.” Is there not some human nature in that remark? Suppose, reader, you were in the enjoyment of a salary of five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars a year as a government official in the Philippines, how precipitately would you hasten to recommend yourself out of office, and evict yourself into this cold Western world with which you had meantime lost all touch?

The Filipinos can run a far better government than the Cubans. In 1898, when Admiral Dewey read in the papers that we were going to give Cuba independence, he wired home from Manila:

After a year in Cuba and nearly six in the Philippines, two as an officer of the army that subjugated the Filipinos, and the remainder as a judge over them, I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey, but with this addition, viz., that the people of those islands, whatever of conscious political unity they may have lacked in 1898, were welded into absolute oneness as a people by their original struggle for independence against us, and will remain forever so welded by their incurable aspirations for a national life of their own under a republic framed in imitation of ours. Furthermore, the one great difference between Cuba and the Philippines is that the latter country has no race cancer forever menacing its peace, and sapping its self-reliance. The Philippine people are absolutely one people, as to race, color, and previous condition. Again, American sugar and tobacco interests will never permit the competitive Philippine sugar and tobacco industries to grow as Nature and Nature’s God intended; and the American importers of Manila hemp—which is to the Philippines what cotton is to the South—have, through special Congressional legislation still standing on our statute books—to the shame of the nation—so depressed the hemp industry of the islands that the market price it brings to-day is just one half what it brought ten years ago.

If three strong and able Americans, familiar with insular conditions and still young enough to undertake the task, were told by a President of the United States, by authority of Congress, “Go out there and set up a stable native government by July 4, 1921,1 and then come away,” they could and would do it; and that government would be a success; and one of the greatest moral victories in the annals of free government would have been written by the gentlemen concerned upon the pages of their country’s history.

We ought to give the Filipinos their independence, even if we have to guarantee it to them. But, by neutralization treaties with the other great Powers similar to those which safeguard the integrity and independence of Switzerland to-day, whereby the other Powers would agree not to seize the islands after we give them their independence, the Philippines can be made as permanently neutral territory in Asiatic politics as Switzerland is to-day in European politics.

James H. Blount.

1406 G Street, N. W.,
Washington, D. C.,
July 4, 1912.

P.S.—The preparation of this book has entailed examination of a vast mass of official documents, as will appear from the foot-note citations to the page and volume from which quotations have been made. The object has been to place all material statements of fact beyond question. For the purpose of this research work, Mr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, was kind enough to extend me the privileges of the national library, and it would be most ungracious to fail to acknowledge the obligation I am under, in this regard, to one whom the country is indeed fortunate in having at the head of that great institution. I should also make acknowledgment of the obligation I am under to Mr. W. W. Bishop, the able superintendent of the reading-room, for aid rendered whenever asked, and to my life-long friends, John and Hugh Morrison, the most valuable men, to the general public, except the two gentlemen above named, on the whole great roll of employees of the Library of Congress.

J. H. B.

     Pages

Chapter I

Mr. Pratt’s Serenade      1–15

Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at Singapore, in the British Straits Settlements, finding Aguinaldo a political refugee at that place at the outbreak of our war with Spain, April 21, 1898, arranges by cable with Admiral Dewey, then at Hong Kong with his squadron, for Aguinaldo to come to Hong Kong and thence to Manila, to co-operate by land with Admiral Dewey against the Spaniards, Pratt promising Aguinaldo independence, without authority. Mr. Pratt is later quietly separated from the consular service.

Chapter II

Dewey and Aguinaldo      16–45

After the battle of Manila Bay, May 1, 1898, Admiral Dewey brings Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong, whither he had proceeded from Singapore, lands him at Cavite, and chaperones his insurrection against the Spaniards until the American troops arrive, June 30th.

Chapter III

Anderson and Aguinaldo      46–66

General Anderson’s official dealings with Aguinaldo from June 30, 1898, until General Merritt’s arrival, July 25th,

Chapter IV

Merritt and Aguinaldo      67–87

General Merritt’s five weeks’ sojourn in the Islands, from July 25, 1898, to the end of August, including fall of Manila, August 13th, and our relations with Aguinaldo during period indicated.

Chapter V

Otis and Aguinaldo      88–106

Dealings and relations between, September–December, 1898.

Chapter VI

The Wilcox-Sargent Trip      107–120

Two American naval officers make an extended tour through the interior of Luzon by permission of Admiral Dewey and with Aguinaldo’s consent, in October–November, 1898, while the Paris peace negotiations were in progress. What they saw and learned.

Chapter VII

The Treaty of Paris      121–138

An account of the negotiations, October-December, 1898. How we came to pay Spain $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection. Treaty signed December 10, 1898.

Chapter VIII

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation      139–151

President McKinley’s celebrated proclamation of December 21, 1898, cabled out to the Islands, December 27, 1898, after the signing of the Treaty of Paris on the 10th, and intended as a fire-extinguisher, in fact acted merely as a firebrand, the Filipinos perceiving that Benevolent Assimilation meant such measure of slaughter as might be necessary to “spare them from the dangers of” the independence on which they were bent.

Chapter IX

The Iloilo Fiasco      152–163

By order of President McKinley, General Otis abstains from hostilities to await Senate action on Treaty of Paris.

Chapter X

Otis and Aguinaldo (Continued)      164–185

Still waiting for the Senate to act.

Chapter XI

Otis and the War      186–223

Covering the period from the outbreak of February 4, 1899, until the fall of that year.

Chapter XII

Otis and the War (Continued)      224–269

From the fall of 1899 to the spring of 1900.

Chapter XIII

Macarthur and the War      270–281

Carries the story up to the date of the arrival of the Taft Commission, sent out in the spring of 1900, to help General MacArthur run the war.

Chapter XIV

The Taft Commission      282–344

Shows how the Taft Commission, born of the McKinley Benevolent Assimilation theory that there was no real fundamental opposition to American rule, lived up to that theory, in their telegrams sent home during the presidential campaign of 1900, and in 1901 set up a civil government predicated upon their obstinate but opportune delusions of the previous year.

Chapter XV

Governor Taft—1901–2      345–402

Shows the prematurity of a civil government set up under pressure of political expediency, and the disorders which followed.

Chapter XVI

Governor Taft—1903      403–436

Shows divers serious insurrections in various provinces amounting to what the Commission itself termed, in one instance, “a reign of terror”—situations so endangering the public safety that to fail to order out the army to quell the disturbances was neglect of plain duty, such neglect being due to a set policy of preserving the official fiction that peace prevailed, and that Benevolent Assimilation was a success.

Chapter XVII

Governor Taft—1903 (Continued)      437–445

Shows the essentially despotic, though theoretically benevolent, character of the Taft civil government of the Philippines, and its attitude toward the American business community in the Islands.

Chapter XVIII

Governor Wright—1904      446–498

Shows the change of the tone of the government under Governor Taft’s successor, his consequent popularity with his fellow-country men in the Islands, and his corresponding unpopularity with the Filipinos. Shows also a long series of massacres of pacificos by enemies of the American government between July and November, 1904, permitted out of super-solicitude lest ordering out the army and summarily putting a stop to said massacres might affect the presidential election in the United States unfavorably to Mr. Roosevelt, by reviving the notion that neither the Roosevelt Administration nor its predecessor had ever been frank with the country concerning the state of public order in the Islands.

Chapter XIX

Governor Wright—1905      499–514

Shows the prompt ordering of the army to the scene of the disturbances after the presidential election of 1904 was safely over, and the nature and extent of the insurrections of 1905.

Chapter XX

Governor Ide—1906      515–523

Describes the last outbreak prior to the final establishment of a state of general and complete peace.

Chapter XXI

Governor Smith—1907–9      524–557

Describes divers matters, including a certificate made March 28, 1907, declaring that a state of general and complete peace had prevailed for the two years immediately the preceding. Describes also the formal opening of First Philippine Assembly by Secretary of War Taft in October, 1907, and his final announcement to them that he had no authority to end the uncertainty concerning their future which is the corner-stone of the Taft policy of Indefinite Tutelage, and that Congress only could end that uncertainty.

Chapter XXII

Governor Forbes—1909–12      558–570

Suggests the hypocrisy of boasting about “the good we are doing” the Filipinos when predatory special interests are all the while preying upon the Philippine people even more shamelessly than they do upon the American people, and by the same methods, viz.: legislation placed or kept on the statute-books of the United States for their special benefit, the difference being that the American people can help themselves if they will, but the Philippine people cannot.

Chapter XXIII

“Non-Christian” Worcester      571–586

Professor Worcester, the P. T. Barnum of the “non-Christian tribe” industry, and his menagerie of certain rare and interesting wild tribes still extant in the Islands, specimens of which you saw at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903–4; by which device the American people have been led to believe the Igorrotes, Negritos, etc., to be samples of the Filipino people.

Chapter XXIV

The Philippine Civil Service      587–594

Showing how imperatively simple justice demands that Americans, who go out to enter the Philippine Civil Service should, after a tour of duty out there, be entitled, as matter of right, to be transferred back to the Civil Service in the United States, instead of being left wholly dependent on political influence to “place” them after their final return home.

Chapter XXV

Cost of the Philippines      595–603

In life, and money, together with certain consolatory reflections thereon.

Chapter XXVI

Congressional Legislation      604–622

Showing how a small group of American importers of Manila hemp—hemp being to the Philippines what cotton is to the South—have so manipulated the Philippine hemp industry as to depress the market price of the main source of wealth of the Islands below the cost of production; also other evils of taxation without representation.

Chapter XXVII

The Rights of Man      623–632

Industrial slavery to predatory interests and physical slavery compared.

Chapter XXVIII

The Road to Autonomy      633–646

Shows how entirely easy would be the task of evolving the American Ireland we have laid up for ourselves in the Philippines into complete Home Rule by 1921, the date proposed for Philippine independence in the pending Jones bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in March, 1912.

Chapter XXIX

The Way Out      647–655

Shows how, by neutralization treaties with the other powers, as proposed in many different resolutions, of both Republican and Democratic origin, now pending in Congress, whereby the other powers should agree not to annex the Islands after we give them their independence, the Philippines can be made permanently neutral territory in Asiatic politics exactly as both Switzerland and Belgium have been for nearly a hundred years in European politics.

Index      657

     Page

The Capture of Aguinaldo, March 23, 1901—The Central Fact of the American Military Occupation      Frontispiece
From the Drawing by F. C. Yohn
Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Bird’s-eye View of the Philippine Archipelago, Showing Preponderating Importance of Luzon      228

Outline Sketch of the Theatre of Operations in Luzon, 1899      232

Sketch Map of the Philippines      At End