According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his “civil” government on the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles, having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain why I have so frequently put the word “civil” in quotations in referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly speaking, if “civil” does not imply consent of the governed, it at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get criticised afterwards for “subserviency” to the government you are thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug, pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench, never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was any “consent” on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed there a civil régime under a military name. We were now, in the Philippines, serving a military régime under a civil name. We had all of us doubtless—if there was an exception it is immaterial—served on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty, that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins, the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis’s attacks,16 the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective, I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly, by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there, to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, “No, the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct.” But the distinguished Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been since 1909, Governor of the Philippines—and who, before he went out there was a representative of Big Business in Boston—Governor Forbes, and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft, Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness, Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines17 because he liked that kind of a judge.

Having sown the wind by setting up his civil government too soon, let us now observe the whirlwind Governor Taft reaped within six months thereafter. Of course the civil and military folk were at daggers’ points. That goes without saying. But their differences were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos did not get hold of them. To that end, the situation was also diligently concealed in the United States. In his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find President Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of that rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, General Chaffee, and also commending Governor Taft, and telling them how harmoniously they had gotten along together to the credit of their common country. But in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee had relieved General MacArthur, you find the following cablegram:

The most important words of the above telegram are “and here at home.” The “serious effect here at home” so earnestly deprecated was that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal of the police protection of the army from districts in which there were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that “the great majority” were “entirely willing” to American sovereignty. It would also show up Mr. Root’s nonsense about “the patient and unconsenting millions,” so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his pious Philippics against delivering said millions “into the hands of the assassin, Aguinaldo,”19 and would reveal the truth confessed by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July, 1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just completed the suppression of “an insurrection of 7,000,000 people.”

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt’s above cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular waters, a company of General Chaffee’s command, Company C, of the 9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place called Balangiga, in the island of Samar.20 This had made General Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody drama of which General “Jake” Smith was the central figure, whereby Samar was made “a howling wilderness.” But Governor Taft was filled with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty Chaffee with remarks like this: “The people are friendly to the civil government,” and suavely speaking of “the evidence which accumulates on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and protection by the civil government.”21 The same Taft report goes on to deprecate “rigor in the treatment” of the situation and the “consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread and development of the civil government.”

General “Jake” Smith was sent to Samar shortly after the Balangiga massacre, and did indeed make the place a howling wilderness, with his famous “kill-and-burn” orders, instructions to “kill everything over ten years old” and so forth, and the army was in sympathy generally with most of what he did,—except, of course, the unspeakable “10 year old” part—piously exclaiming, as fallible human nature often will in such circumstances, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Now the civil government could have put a stop to all this if it had wanted to. It had the backing of President Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the benefit of such “fear of God”—to use the army’s rather sacrilegious expression about that Samar campaign—as the military arm put into the heart of the Filipino, and went on the even tenor of its way, still maintaining that the Filipinos must like us because the civil government was so benevolent,—as if the Filipinos drew any nice distinctions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or supposed the two did not represent one and the same government, the government of the United States. There was much investigation about that awful Samar campaign afterward. General Smith was court-martialed and partly whitewashed, at least not dismissed. At General Smith’s court-martial, there was some dispute about the alleged orders to “kill and burn,” to “kill everything over ten years old,” etc. But the nature of the campaign may be inferred from General Smith’s famous circular No. 6, which, issued on Christmas eve, 1901, advised his command, in effect, that he did not take much stock in the civil commission’s confidence that the people really wanted peace; that he was “thoroughly convinced” that the wealthy people in the towns of his district were aiding the insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that he proposed to

During all his trial troubles, General Smith “took what was coming to him” without a murmur, and General Chaffee stuck to him as far as he could without assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went to Samar, his superior officer, General Chaffee, was in just the direly vengeful frame of mind he, General Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted him to do, substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put the blame on his chief. But a fearful lesson was given the Filipinos, and the civil government profited by it. General Chaffee was never really pressed on whether he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he did; Governor Taft was never even criticised for not protesting; but with a flourish of presidential trumpets, General Smith was finally made “the goat,” by being summarily placed on the retired list, and that closed the bloody Samar episode of 1901–02. I wonder General Smith has not gone and wept on General Miles’s shoulder and like him become a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston. Some of the best fighting men in the army say that as a soldier in battle General Smith is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation in the following passage of the Scriptures which fits and describes his case:

In his Report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the four principal provinces, including Batangas, which gave trouble shortly after the civil government was set up in that year, and had to be returned to military control, were organized under civil rule “on the recommendation” of the then commanding general (MacArthur)24: It certainly seems unlikely that the haste to change from military rule to civil rule came on the motion of the military. If the Commission ever got, in writing, from General MacArthur, a “recommendation” that any provinces be placed under civil rule while still in insurrection, the text of the writing will show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the will of Mr. McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contemporaneous evidence will show that General MacArthur told them, substantially, that they were “riding for a fall.” In fact, whenever an insurrection would break out in a province after Governor Taft’s inauguration as governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philippines, from the commanding general down, was “I told you so.” They did not say this where Governor Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge that they were much addicted to damning “politics” as the cause of all the trouble.

Governor Taft’s statement in his report for 1901, that the four principal provinces, above named, Batangas and the rest, were organized under civil rule “on the recommendation of General MacArthur,” is fully explained in his testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted from President McKinley’s state papers concerning the Philippines, especially his messages to Congress, the political pressure Mr. McKinley was under from the beginning to make a show of “civil” government, thus emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial opposition to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity for the use of force, so as to palliate American repugnance to forcing a government upon an unwilling people, has been made clear. There were to be no “dark days of reconstruction.” The Civil War in the United States from 1861 to 1865 was a love feast compared with our war in the Philippines. Yet the work of reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated on the theory of consent, so persistently urged by President McKinley before the American people from the beginning, viz., that the insurrection represented only a small faction of the people. We have seen how General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, entertained this notion, and how by the time he took Malolos in March, 1899, he had gotten over this notion, and had—regretfully—recognized that “the whole people are loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents.” And now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of continuous fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on behalf of Mr. McKinley, that he, MacArthur, did not know what he was talking about, and that “the great majority” were for American rule. The representative men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return of the State to military control in 1870. Most of them had been officers of the Confederate army. The Federal commander simply told them that if they could not restrain the lawless element of their own people, he would. By premature setting up of the Philippine civil government, the lawless element was allowed full swing. General MacArthur had been in the Civil War. He knew something about reconstruction. But here were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. McKinley to the effect that civil government, government “essentially popular in form,” was to be set up as fast as territory was conquered. It didn’t make any difference about the government being “essentially popular” just so it was “essentially popular in form.” To the Senate Committee of 1902, Governor Taft said:

Governor Taft then added that he and General MacArthur reached a modus vivendi. When a good soldier once finds out just what his commander-in-chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good faith, to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General MacArthur saw what President McKinley wanted done, he proceeded to co-operate loyally with Governor Taft to carry out the plan. He well knew the country was not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley was bent on crowding civil government forward as fast as territory was conquered, he would make his recommendations on that basis. In the matter of the utter folly of the prematurity with which the civil government was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the terrible consequences to the hapless Filipinos, hereinafter described, which followed, by reason of the premature withdrawal of the police protection of the army and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated, from a country just recovering from some six years of war, General MacArthur’s exemption from responsibility is shown by his reports for 1900 and 1901.26 The former has already been fully examined, and the original sharp differences between him and Governor Taft made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the date of the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, if I mistake not, the day of General MacArthur’s final departure for the United States, the latter washes his hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense, born of political expediency, about there having never been any real fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncertain terms thus:

No, President Taft can never make General MacArthur “the goat” for what General Bell had to do in Batangas Province in 1901–02 to make our “willing” subjects behave. Nor can the ultimate responsibility before the bar of history for the awful fact that, according to the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Atlas of the Philippines of 1899, the population of Batangas Province was 312,192, and according to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903 it was 257,715,28 rest entirely on military shoulders. An attempt to place the responsibility for the prematurity of the civil government on General MacArthur was made by Honorable Henry C. Ide, who was of the Taft Commission of 1900, and later Governor General of the Islands, and is now Minister to Spain, in the North American Review for December, 1907. But Mr. Taft, a man of nobler mould, has at least maintained a decorous silence on the subject except when interrogated by Congress, and when so interrogated, his testimony, above quoted, if analyzed, places the responsibility where it honestly belongs. In 1900 the Taft Commission were not taking much military advice.

Batangas province was first taken under the wing of the peace-at-any-price policy by the Act of the Taft Commission of May 2, 1901, entitled “An Act Extending the Provisions of ‘the Provincial Government Act’29 to the Province of Batangas.” By the Act of the Commission of July 17, 1901, the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol, were restored to military control. When the civil authorities turned those provinces back to military control, they well knew the frame of mind the military were in, and there is no escape from the proposition that they, in effect, said to the military: “Take them and chasten them; go as far as you like. After you are done with them, it will be time enough to pet them again. But for the present we mean business.” General Bell was scathingly criticised on the floor of the United States Senate for what he did in Batangas in 1901–02, but by the time he took hold there it had become a case of “spare the rod and spoil the child.” The substitution by the Commission of kindness, and a disposition to forget what the Filipinos could not forget, for firmness and the policy of making them submit unreservedly to the inevitable,—viz., abandonment of their dream of independence—had created among them a well-nigh ineradicable impression that, for some reason or other, whether due to disapproval in the United States of the so-called “imperial” policy or what not, we were afraid of them. General Bell’s task in Batangas, therefore, was to eradicate this impression all over the archipelago by making an example of the Batangas people.

In General Chaffee’s report for 1902,30 he prefaces his account of General Bell’s operations in Batangas as follows:

This last was a thrust at Governor Taft’s new-found Filipino friends and advisers, in whose lack of sympathy with the cause of their country the Governor so profoundly believed, but in whose continuing co-operation in the killing of his soldiers General Chaffee believed still more profoundly.

General Bell’s famous operations on a large scale in Batangas began January 1, 1902. The great mistake of the Civil Commission, to which they adhered so long, was in supposing that when the respectable military element of the insurgents was pursued to capture or surrender, these last could and would thereafter control the situation. As a matter of fact, whether they could or not, they did not.

In his celebrated circular order dated Batangas, December 9, 1901, General Bell announced:

In his Circular Order No. 5, dated Batangas, December 13, 1901,31 General Bell announced that General Orders No. 100, Adjutant General’s Office, 1863, approved and published by order of President Lincoln, for the government of the armies of the United States in the field, would thereafter be regarded as the guide of his subordinates in the conduct of the war. This order is familiar to all who have ever made any study of military law. Ordinarily, of course, a captured enemy is entitled to “the honors of war,” i. e., he must be held, housed, and fed, unless exchanged, until the close of the war. But where an enemy places himself by his conduct without the pale of the laws of war, i. e., where he does not “play the game according to the rules,” he may be killed on sight, like other outlaws.

Under General Orders No. 100, 1863, men and squads of men who, without commission, without being part or portion of the regularly organized hostile army, fight occasionally only, and with intermittent returns to their homes and avocations, and frequent assumption of the semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character and appearance of soldiers; armed prowlers seeking to cut telegraph wires, destroy bridges and the like, etc., are not entitled to the protection of the laws of war and may be shot on sight. In other words, the game being one of life and death, you must take even chances with your opponent. General Bell’s defenders on the floor of the Senate simply relied on General Orders No. 100. However, there is nothing about reconcentration in that order. We learned that from the Spaniards. In fact we never did succeed in bringing to terms the far Eastern colonies we bought from Spain, until we adopted her methods with regard to them. Another of the expedients adopted by General Bell in Batangas seems harsh, but it was used by Wellington in the latter end of the Napoleonic wars, and by the Germans in the latter end of the Franco-Prussian War. It was to promise the inhabitants of a given territory that whenever a telegraph wire or pole was cut the country within a stated radius thereof, including all human habitations, would be devastated. It is in General Bell’s Circular Order No. 7 of December 15, 1901,32 that we find the genesis of the idea of basing tactics used by Weyler in Cuba on Mr. Lincoln’s General Order 100. He there says:

This order goes on to direct that all food supplies encountered be brought to the towns. Of course this does not mean supplies captured from the enemy’s forces, which may lawfully be destroyed at once. To those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it should be explained that reconcentration means this: You notify, by proclamation and otherwise, all persons within a given area, that on and after a certain day they must all leave their homes and come within a certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named town is usually the centre, there to remain until further orders, and that all persons found outside that zone after the date named will be treated as public enemies. General Bell’s order of December 20th, provided that rice found in the possession of families outside the protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with them to the town which was the centre of the zone, that that found apparently cached for enemy’s use should be confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary.

No person within the reconcentration zones was permitted to go outside thereof—cross the dead line—without a written pass. The Circular Order of December 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate commanders might become infected with the Taft belief in Filipino affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, all the municipal officials, members of the police force, etc., “who have not fully complied with their duty by actively aiding the Americans and rendering them valuable service,” shall be summarily thrown into prison.33 Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, provided that,

subordinate commanders might, under certain prescribed restrictions, put everybody they chose to work on the roads.34 This was an ingenious blow at the wealthy and soft-handed, intended to superinduce submission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds of affection thus sown for the civil government under the reconstruction period which was to follow. In one of Dickens novels there occurs a law firm by the name of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite fond of considering himself, and of being considered by others, as tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. When the widow and the orphan would plead with Mr. Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage, that benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expression of infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could for them, but that they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, “who is a very exacting man,” he would say. In the dual American politico-military régime in the Philippines of 1901–02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, General Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former always seemed to harbor the amiable delusion that the Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as the movants in each proceeding against them, and that on the contrary they were sure to make a favorable contrast in their hearts between the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He seemed blind to the fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was done by any of us, spelled us—U. S.

General Bell’s Circular Order No. 22, also a Christmas Eve product, re-iterates the usual purpose to make the people yearn for civil government, and the usual warning that none of them really and truly want the blessings of American domination and Benevolent Assimilation as they truly should, and adds:

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

Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs the soldier above mentioned had lost many a “bunkie,” there had gone on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy, whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could fill, much appointing to municipal and other offices of Filipinos, many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade business. With this and the Balangiga massacre ever in mind, the men of General Bell’s brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to “make living unbearable” for the Filipino “by acts, not words.” Also, the American soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly, until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell’s 2500 men began that Batangas campaign on New Year’s Day, 1902, giving preference, out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran:

and between songs they would say purringly to one another, “Remember Balangiga.” And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and the ring of his iron heel:

And so on ad libitum. General Bell’s course in Batangas was commended in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as “a model in suppressing insurrections under like circumstances.”36 The Batangas programme was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the Batangas severities and the Samar “kill and burn” orders. I tried in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling, had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them, and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission’s confidence in Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and a personal friend of the Senator’s, whose name he withheld, but for whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to “a reconcentrado, pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is shot”; spoke of “this corpse-carcass stench wafted in” (to where the letter-writer sat writing) as making it “slightly unpleasant here,” and made your flesh crawl thus:

This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell,37 and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations, which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General Bell’s active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents surrendered.38

The truth is General Bell’s “bark” was much worse than his “bite.” The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901–02 lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was 312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the outset to make General Bell’s “bark” sound louder, but now that we are considering his “bite”—how many lives his Batangas lesson to the Filipino people cost—another bit of testimony is tremendously relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due to war, pestilence, and famine “has reduced to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province had.”39 Considering that General Bell’s 1901–’02 campaign in that ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,—how many of the 209 wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered—the Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of “suppressing insurrection under like circumstances.” But it was never again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon’s “corpse-carcass stench” from supposed reconcentrado pens and his “clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the dead,” so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most sobbingly in love with “a benign civil government” and had forgotten all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least; whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon’s army friend’s “clouds of vampire bats softly swirling” over the corpses of reconcentrados, were doing said swirling not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces can see from the letter that it was written from Samar. Moreover, Colonel Wagner afterwards testified before the Senate Committee of 190240 that if there had been any great mortality in the reconcentration camps in Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected practically all those Batangas camps. Nobody who was in the islands at the time doubts but what such conditions may have obtained in some places under General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that any such conditions would have been tolerated under General Bell. General Bell has that aversion to either causing or witnessing needless suffering, which you almost invariably find in men who are both constitutionally brave and temperamentally generous and considerate of others. But the moral sought to be pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration in Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in Samar were hellish, but that, in all matters concerning the Philippines, the army, as in the case of Senator Bacon’s friend, is gagged by operation of law, and its enforced silence is peculiarly an asset in the hands of the party in power seeking to continue in power, in a distant colonial enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his friend’s name, because for an army officer to tell the truth about the Philippines would be likely to get him into trouble with the President of the United States. The President, be it remembered, is also the leader of the political party to which he belongs. That is why the country has never been able to get any light from those who know the most about the Philippines and the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. In 1898 this republic was beguiled into abandonment of the faiths of the founders and started after a gold brick, thinking it was a Klondyke. Then and ever since, the most important and material witnesses concerning the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the army,—which best of all knows the rank folly of it—have been gagged by operation of law. All republics that have heretofore become monarchies, have become so through manipulation of the army by men in power seeking to continue in power. We should either resign our expensive kingship over the Philippines or get a king for the whole business, and be done with it. We have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R.41

“On June 23, 1902,” says General Chaffee, in his report for that year,42 “by Act No. 421 of the Philippine Commission, so much of Act No. 173, of July 17, 1901, as transferred the province of Batangas to military control was revoked. Civil government was re-established in the province at 12 o’clock noon, July 4, 1902.” The rest of the 1,748,573 people herein above mentioned as constituting the population of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in turn made to “want peace and want it badly,” and on July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt issued his proclamation declaring that a state of general and complete peace existed. This is the famous proclamation in which he congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men of his command on “a total of more than 2000 combats, great and small,” most of them subsequent to the Taft roseate cablegrams of 1900, and the still more roseate reports of 1901 from the same source. The proclamation appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, dated July 4, 1902.43 It directed, in the body of it, that it be “read aloud at parade in every military post.” It thanked the officers and enlisted men of the army in the Philippines, in the name of the President of the United States, for the courage and fortitude, the indomitable spirit and loyal devotion with which they had been fighting up to that time, alluded to the impliedly lamb-like or turn-the-other-cheek way in which they had been behaving (no special reference is made either to Batangas, Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully Rooseveltian war-whoop about the “more than 2000 combats, great and small,” above mentioned. It also referred to how, “with admirable good temper and loyalty to American ideals its (the army’s) commanding generals have joined with the civilian agents of the government” in the work of superinducing allegiance to American sovereignty. This document is one of the most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable of men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of ability to mould powerful discordant elements to his will. It put everybody in a good humor. And yet, read at every military post, it served notice on the military that if they knew which side their bread was buttered on, they had better forget everything they knew tending to show the prematurity of the setting-up of the civil government, sheath all tomahawks and scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting for Governor Taft’s exit from office, abstain from chatty letters to United States Senators telling tales out of school, such as the one Senator Bacon had read on the floor of the Senate (already noticed), and dutifully perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as officially announced in the proclamation itself.

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, declares that the insurrection “as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of the United States” is over (p. 3). They then proceed, with evident sincerity, to describe the popularity of themselves and their policies with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in your Congressional district, in the type of man who thinks he could be elected to Congress “in a walk” if he should only announce his candidacy, when as a matter of fact, the great majority of the people of his district are, for some notorious reason connected with his past history among them,—say his war record—very much prejudiced against him. They repeat one of their favorite sentiments about the whole country—always except “as hereinafter excepted”—being now engaged in enjoying civil government. But they casually admit also that “much remains to be done” in suppressing lawlessness and disturbances, so as to perfect and accentuate said “enjoyment.”

Let us see just what the state of the country was in this regard according to their own showing. They say: