Because the especially cordial relations which existed to the last between Governor Wright and myself2 are familiar to a number of very dear mutual friends, I deem it due both to them and to myself, in view of the contents of the preceding chapter, to state that I see no reason why, in writing a history of the American Occupation of the Philippines, I should omit or slur the facts which convinced me that that occupation ought to terminate as soon as practicable, and that any decent kind of a government of Filipinos by Filipinos would be better for all concerned than the McKinley-Taft programme of Benevolent Assimilation whereof Governor Wright was the legatee. By the thousand and one uncandid threads of that programme, slowly woven from 1898 to 1904, as indicated in the first sixteen chapters of this book, Governor Wright had found himself as hopelessly bound to concealment from the American people of the real situation in Samar in the fall of 1904, as a Gulliver in Lilliput.

When I finally left Samar and came to Manila, in November, 1904, I was not prepared to figure out how or how soon, the blunder we made by the purchase of the Philippine archipelago could be corrected. But my mental attitude toward the whole Philippine problem had undergone a complete change. In 1901 Governor Wright, then Vice-Governor, had written me: “You younger men out here, who have cast your fortunes with this country, are to be, in all likelihood, in the natural course of events, its future rulers.” Up to 1903 I had clung to that idea with the devotion of what was really high and earnest purpose, untroubled with misgivings of any kind. In November, 1903, in Albay, Judge Carson and myself had talked over the long struggle of the civil government to walk without leaning on the military, and, with the readiness of one vested with authority to believe such authority wisely vested, and the readiness of a civilian lawyer to jealously guard the American home idea that the military should be subordinate to the civil authority, I had cordially agreed with a sentiment one day expressed by Judge Carson concerning Governor Taft about “the splendid moral fibre of the man,” meaning in keeping the military from prancing out of the traces. After Governor Taft left the Islands to be Secretary of War (December 23, 1903), and while I was still in Albay, I had learned of the 120 men who had died in the Albay jail while awaiting trial, and thereafter something of the magnitude of the Ola insurrection there, and that had given me pause as to the practical benevolence of the operation of “a benign civil government.” Then the Samar massacres of 1904, and the gory panorama I had there witnessed, had finally convinced me that a republic like ours is wholly unfitted to govern people against their consent. But I did not tell anybody in Manila all these things. I simply pondered them. Grover Cleveland was the only man in the world I would have liked to talk to just then freely and fully. And he was not about. “My heart was heavy with the fate of that unhappy people” as Senator Bacon had said in the Senate in 1902, after visiting the Islands in 1901. I did not condemn Governor Wright. I quite realized that I was “up against” about the largest ethical problem of world politics, one on which the nations are much divided, and that I was not infallible. I did not say to the Governor: “Governor, let’s resign and go home and tell our people that this whole business is a mistake.” Nor did I ever lose faith in Governor Wright personally. If I had, I might just as well have said: “After this, the deluge.” I would simply have lost faith in human nature. I had not then, nor have I since, known a man of higher personal character. I had simply lost faith in Benevolent Assimilation, and begun to take the Filipino people seriously as a potential nation, probably better able to handle their own domestic problems than we will ever be able to handle them for them.

The day after I resigned, Mr. Justice Carson, of the Supreme Court, and Mr. Wilfley, the Attorney-General, came to call on me. My friends knew I was very much troubled over the Samar business. I was doing some grumbling, but without specifying, because to specify would mean that we all of us ought to give up the life careers we had planned for ourselves in the Islands. I knew the old familiar answer a grumbler was sure to get in the Philippines, viz., “Old man, you’ve been out here too long. You better go home.” But I did a little more grumbling to my friends Judge Carson and Mr. Wilfley, during the course of their visit. They could both pretty well guess what was the matter. But Judge Carson and I had come out in 1899, and had served through the war together. He knew all about the Albay business, and somewhat of the Samar business. Wilfley had not come out until the civil government was founded in 1901. Mr. Wilfley said cheerily: “Oh, Blount, you are too conscientious.” I shall never forget what happened then. Judge Carson said, with a ring of something like anger in his tone: “No, Wilfley, I’ll be d—d if he is.” Is it any wonder that ever since I have worn that man, as Hamlet would say, “in my heart’s core”? Here was as brave and true an Irishman as ever gained distinction on battlefield or bench. And he understood. He did not say—which was the implication of Wilfley’s tone—“Old man, you’ve been out here too long, and illness has made you peevish.” He knew what was the matter. He knew that as trial judges he and I had not been small editions of Lord Jeffries, as some of our American critics had implied, BUT HE ALSO KNEW THAT THERE WAS NO METHOD OF DRAWING AN INDICTMENT AGAINST A WHOLE PEOPLE.

Possibly the intensity of my feelings on this great subject, then and ever since, hampers the power of clear expression. Therefore, a word more in attempt at elucidation. In 1898, Judge Carson and I, with many thousands of other young Americans, had trooped down to Cuba, in the wake of the impetuous Roosevelt, to free the inhabitants of that ill-fated island from Spanish rule, drive the Spaniards from the Western Hemisphere, and put a stop to Spain’s pious efforts “to spare the great island from the dangers of premature independence,” as she always expressed her attitude toward Cuba. We had many of us been fired by the catchy Roosevelt utterance which did so much to bring on the Spanish War, viz., “The steps of the White House are slippery with the blood of the Cuban reconcentrados.” Then in 1899, we had gone to the Philippines, and had ever since been engaged there in “sparing the Islands from the danger of premature independence,” and the Samar massacres of 1904 were, to me, the apotheosis of the work. So that after November 8, 1904, I felt “The steps of the White House are slippery with the blood of the people of my district.” It had all been done under the pious pretence that the Filipinos welcomed our rule—a pretence which had taken the form for six years of systematic asseveration that they did so welcome it. Yet it was not true that they, or any appreciable fraction of them, had ever welcomed our rule. And it never will be true. Surely no man can see in this book any scolding or unkindness. It is an attempt merely to bring home to my countrymen a strategic fact, a fact which it is folly to ignore. But to return to the thread of our story.

Four days after the presidential election of 1904, to wit, on November 12th, Governor Wright left Manila and went to Samar, including in his itinerary various others of the southern islands.3 Soon after their return, the seven hundred native troops in Samar were increased to nearly two thousand, and sixteen companies of regulars (say one hundred men to a company) were also thrown into Samar. It took until the end of 1906 to end the trouble. You cannot find in the reports of the civil authorities anything explaining their three or four weeks’ stay in the Visayan Islands in November–December, 1904, that is not absolutely in accord with the original Taft obsession of 1900 about the popularity of the proposed alien “civil” government with its subjects. Governor Wright’s description of the trip says: “The warm hospitality of the Filipino people made this trip of inspection a most agreeable one.” As a matter of fact, on such occasions, the more disaffected a leader of the people was, the more he would seek, by “warm hospitality,” “warm” oratory telling the visiting mighty what the visiting mighty longed to hear, parades, fiestas, etc., to divert suspicion of sedition from himself. The poor creatures had met General Young’s cavalry column in northern Luzon in 1899 with their town bands, doing the only thing they knew of to do to “temper the wind to the shorn lamb”—i.e., to temper it to their several communities—many of them doubtless expecting to be put to the sword by General Young’s troopers, as the Cossacks did the Persians during the brief and sensational sojourn of that brilliant young administrator, Hon. W. Morgan Shuster, in Persia in 1911–12. I have no doubt that high on the list of those extending some of the “warm hospitality” above mentioned appeared the name of Don Jaime de Veyra. Yet in the summer of 1904 Don Jaime had gotten out of a sick bed to attend a convention called to send delegates to the Democratic National Convention in the United States that year,4 and also, in that same year, had run for Governor of Leyte on a platform the principal plank of which was Carthago est delenda—“Carthago” being us, the American régime. De Veyra was defeated that time, but ran again the next time and was elected. While the writer is not one of those who seek to show their “breadth of view” by gossiping with outsiders regarding what is peculiarly our own affair, still, the British view-point of the situation in the Visayan Islands, as conveyed by an Englishwoman whose husband was engaged in mercantile business there in 1904–5, and who therefore was certainly in a position to know the opinion of the little circle of British people at Cebu and Iloilo, may not be superfluous here. This lady, living then at Iloilo, wrote a series of letters to friends back home in England which she afterwards published in book form.5 In a letter dated Iloilo, January 22, 1905 (page 86), she says:

Also an Englishman who was in Samar in 1904–5, a Mr. Hyatt, who, with his brother, served with the American troops there in the bloody Pulajan uprising, afterwards wrote a book called the Little Brown Brother, wherein he fully corroborates Mrs. Dauncey’s appreciation of the situation during that period.

In its blindness to the unanimity of Visayan discontent, as manifested in its report now under consideration, the civil government of the Philippines was not trying wilfully to deceive anybody. It was deceiving itself. It was obeying the law of its life, its existence having been originally predicated on the consent of a great free people to keep in subjection a weaker people eager to be also free, such consent having been obtained through diligent nursing of the original idea that the subject people were not in fact so eager, but were, on the contrary, in a mental attitude of tearful welcome toward the proffered protection of a strong power. In his report for 19056 General William H. Carter, commanding the Department of the Philippines which included Samar and the rest of the Visayan Islands, gives the key to the Commission’s twenty-six-day stay in his district in the following part of said report:

Nowhere in the civil government reports do you find the slightest recognition that these disorders had any relation to each other, or to the fundamental problem of public order, or any political significance whatsoever, each being treated as a purely local issue, the idea that the circumstance of Samar’s having been thrown into pandemonium by the successes of the enemies of the American Government might have encouraged its enemies in the neighboring islands, never seeming to occur to the authors of the said reports. General Carter’s report goes on to state that within five months after the Samar outbreak of July, 1904, seven hundred native troops had been put in the field in that turbulent island. In December, 1904, troops began to be poured into Samar, so that it was not long before the seven hundred native troops had become seventeen hundred or eighteen hundred, and, says General Carter, “in order to free them from garrison work in the towns, sixteen companies of the 12th and 14th Infantry were distributed about the disaffected coasts to enable the people who so desired to come from their hiding places”—whither they had gone because the American flag afforded them no protection—“and undertake the rebuilding of their burned homes.” General Carter avoids touching on the civil government’s (to him well-known) obsession about its popularity, a state of mind which could see no “political” significance in outbreaks of any kind. But he does use this very straightforward language about Samar:

Early in 1905, Hon. George Curry, of New Mexico, who was an officer of Colonel Roosevelt’s regiment in Cuba, and had gone out to the Philippines with a volunteer regiment in 1899, remaining with the civil Government after 1901, was made Governor of Samar. Governor Curry has since been Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, and is now (1912) a member of Congress from the recently admitted State of New Mexico. Governor Curry has told me since he was elected to Congress that it took him all of 1905 and most of 1906, aided by several thousand troops, native and regular, to put down that Samar outbreak. Yet a certificate signed March 28, 1907, by the Governor-General and his associates of the Philippine Commission states that “a condition of general and complete peace” had continued in the Islands for two years previous to the date of the certificate.8 We will come to this certificate in its chronological order later. How many and what sort of uprisings were blanketed in that “forget-it” certificate of 1907 is material to the question whether or not the National Administration has ever been or is now frank with the country about the universality of the desire of the Philippine people for independence and local self-government, and pertinent to the insistently recurring query: “Why should we make of the Philippines an American Ireland?” But inasmuch as, in addition to the Samar uprising which raged all through 1905, another insurrection occurred in that year, which was duly “forgotten” by said certificate, this last movement must now claim our attention.

The provinces which were the theatre of the outbreak last above mentioned were all near Manila. They were: Cavite, a province of 135,000 people almost at the gates of Manila; Batangas, a province of 257,000 inhabitants adjoining Cavite; and Laguna, a province of 150,000 people adjoining both. Some five hundred brigands headed by cut-throats claiming to be patriots were terrorizing whole districts. Far be it from me to lend any countenance to the idea that the leaders of this movement, Sakay, Felizardo, Montalon, and the rest of their gang, were entitled to any respect. But they certainly had a hold on the whole population akin to that of Robin Hood, Little John, and Friar Tuck. In refusing in 1907 to commute Sakay’s death sentence after he was captured, tried, and convicted, Governor-General James P. Smith gives some gruesome details concerning the performance of that worthy, and his followers, yet in dealing with the nature and extent of the trouble they gave the Manila government he says they “assumed the convenient cloak of patriotism, and under the titles of ‘Defenders of the Country’ and ‘Protectors of the People’ proceeded to inaugurate a reign of terror, devastation, and ruin in three of the most beautiful provinces in the archipelago.”9

It has already been made clear that, during the time of the insurrection against both the Spaniards and Americans, the insurrecto forces were maintained by voluntary contributions of the people. Major D. C. Shanks, Fourth U. S. Regular Infantry, who was Governor of Cavite Province in 1905, after calling attention to this fact, adds10:

Again Governor Shanks says, with more of frankness than diplomacy, considering that he was a provincial governor under the civil government:

One of the causes contributory to the Cavite-Batangas-Laguna insurrection is stated in the report of the Governor-General for 1905 thus:

Another of the contributory causes is thus stated:

Consider the benevolent casuistry necessary to include these fellows, and the tremendous following they could get up, and did get up, in Cavite, “the home of insurrection,” and the adjacent provinces, in a certificate to “a condition of general and complete peace” alleged in the certificate to have prevailed for two years prior to March 28, 1907. To make a long story short, on January 31, 1905, a state of insurrection was declared to exist, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in Cavite and Batangas, the regular army of the United States was ordered out, and reconcentration tactics resorted to, as provided by Section 6 of Act 781 of the Commission. This is the act already examined at length, intended to meet cases of impotency on the part of the insular government to protect life and property in any other way. Political timidity is conspicuously absent from the resolution of the Philippine Commission of January 31, 1905, formally recognizing a break in the peerless continuity of the “general and complete peace.” It is virilely frank, the presidential election being then safely over.12 It concludes by authorizing the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and declare martial law, “the public safety requiring it.” Then follows a proclamation of the same date and tenor, by the Governor-General.

It appears from the case cited in the foot-note that in the spring of 1905, one, Felix Barcelon, filed in the proper court a petition for the writ of habeas corpus, alleging that he was one of the reconcentrados corralled and “detained and restrained of his liberty at the town of Batangas, in the province of Batangas,” by one of Colonel Baker’s constabulary minions down there. The writ was denied by the lower court. In one part of the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case it is stated (p. 116) that the petitioner “has been detained for a long time * * * not for the commission of any crime and by due process of law, but apparently for the purpose of protecting him.” The opinion of the court, delivered by Mr. Justice Johnson, very properly held that the detention was lawful under the war power, basing its decision on the authority conferred on the Governor-General of the Philippines by the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, section 5 of which expressly authorizes the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus “when in cases of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion the public safety may require it.” A long legal battle was fought, the court holding that the Executive Department of the Government is the one in which is vested the exclusive right to say when “a state of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion” exists, and that when it so formally declares, that settles the fact that it does exist. At page 98 of the volume above cited13 the court held, as to the above mentioned resolution of the Philippine Commission and the above mentioned executive order declaring a state of insurrection in Cavite and Batangas:

Yet two years later the same “constituted authorities” certified to the President of the United States, in effect, as we shall see, that no open insurrection against the constituted authorities had occurred during the preceding two years. They do not in their certificate ignore Cavite and Batangas. They mention them by name, with a lot of whereases, explaining that after all they really believe that the majority of the people in the provinces aforesaid were not in sympathy with the uprising. However, after they get through with their whereases they face the music squarely, and certify to “the condition of general and complete peace.” Of the “nigger in the woodpile” more anon.

Governor Wright was not a party to the certificate of 1907. He left the Islands on leave November 4, 1905. A speech made by him prior to his departure, as published in a Manila paper, indicates an expectation to return. He never did. In 1906 he was demoted to be Ambassador to Japan, a place of far less dignity, and far less salary, which he resigned after a year or so. Vice-Governor Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2, 1906, on which date he was formally inaugurated as Governor-General.

Just why Governor Wright did not go back to the Philippines as Governor, after his visit to the United States in 1905–6, does not appear. It would seem almost certain that if Secretary of War Taft had wanted President Roosevelt to send him back, he would have gone. Mr. Taft never did frankly tell the Filipinos until 1907 that they might just as well shut up talking about any independence that anybody living might hope to see. Governor Wright began to talk that way soon after Mr. Taft left the Islands. Possibly Governor Wright undeceived them too soon, and thereby made the Philippines more of a troublesome issue in the presidential campaign of 1904. President Roosevelt recognized the sterling worth of the man, by inviting him to succeed Mr. Taft as Secretary of War in 1908. But President Taft did not invite him to continue in that capacity after March 4, 1909. Gossip has it that when the incoming President Taft’s letter to the outgoing President Roosevelt’s last Secretary of War, Governor Wright, was handed to the addressee, and its conventional “hope to be able to avail myself of your services later in some other capacity” was read by him, the outgoing official quietly remarked: “Well, that is a little more round-about than the one Jimmie Garfield14 got, but it’s a dismissal just the same.”

I have always thought that the reason Governor Wright did not go back to the Philippines as Governor after 1905 was that he did not continue to “jolly” the Filipinos, and abstain from ruthlessly crushing their hopes of seeing independence during their lifetime, as Mr. Taft did continuously during his stay out there. The inevitable tendency of the Wright frank talk was from the beginning to discredit the Taft pleasing and evasive nothings. Also, it was followed, as we have seen, by quite a crop of serious disturbances of public order, and somebody had to be “the goat.”

After Governor Wright left the Islands finally on November 4, 1905, Vice-Governor Henry C. Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2, 1906, when he was duly inaugurated as such. He resigned and left the Islands finally in September thereafter.

All through 1905, Governor Curry, as Governor of Samar, which is the third largest island of the archipelago, wrestled with the Pulajan uprising there, aided, as has been stated in the previous chapter, by the native troops, scouts, and constabulary, and also by the regular army. But at the end of 1905 “the situation” was not yet “well in hand.” Since his election to Congress in 1912, Governor Curry has told me that in 1905 many thousands of people of Samar participated actively as part of the enemy’s force in the field during that period. By the spring of 1906 Governor Curry was getting a grip on the situation, and in the latter part of March of that year, some of the main outlaw chiefs agreed to surrender to him. The report of Colonel Wallace C. Taylor, commanding the constabulary of the Third District, which included Samar states1: “After several weeks of negotiating, during which time the camp of the Pulahanes was visited by Governor Curry, and the Pulahan officers visited the settlement at Magtaon”—a settlement in south central Samar—“an understanding was arrived at by which the Pulahanes were to surrender, March 24, 1906. Instead of surrendering as agreed, the Pulahanes, commanded by Nasario Aguilar, made a treacherous attack on the constabulary garrison on the day and hour appointed for the surrender.” The constabulary numbered some fifty men, the pulajans about 130. After the pulajans opened fire they made a rush on the constabulary and a hand-to-hand fight ensued. Colonel Taylor’s report continues:

The explanation of this treachery, as given by Governor Curry, is curious and interesting. The outlaws had intended in good faith to surrender as a result of his negotiation with them, but at the last moment there arrived to witness the surrender certain native officials and other natives bitterly hated by the Pulajans and wholly mistrusted by them. Their arrival caused the outlaws to suspect treachery themselves and that was the cause of their change of plans. It was not until the end of the year 1906 that the various energetic campaigns which followed the Magtaon incident finally began to work more or less complete restoration of public order by gradual elimination of the enemy through killings, captures, and surrenders. An idea of the seriousness and magnitude of these operations may be gathered without going into the details, from the annual report for 1906 of General Henry T. Allen commanding the Philippines Constabulary. This report, dated August 31, 19062, states:

General Allen adds: “The entire 21st Regiment [of Infantry] is also in Samar.” These facts are here given because they relate to the period covered by the certificate of the Philippine Commission of March 28, 1907, heretofore alluded to, and which will be more fully dealt with hereinafter, which stated that “a condition of general and complete peace” had prevailed throughout the archipelago for two years prior to March 28, 1907. Without a brief exposition of all these matters, it would be impossible to enable the reader to feel the pulse of the Filipino people as it stood at the time of the election of their assembly in 1907. The fact of our having been unable to discontinue Filipino-killing altogether for any considerable period from 1899 to the end of 1906 is too obviously relevant to the state of the public mind in 1907 to need elaboration.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 19063 deals at some length with disturbances which occurred in the island of Leyte (area 3000 square miles, population nearly 400,000), beginning in the middle of June. It describes among other things a visit of Governor-General Ide to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, made in consequence of said disturbances, and conferences held by him there with Major-General Wood, commanding all the United States forces in the Philippines, Brigadier-General Lee, commanding the Department of the Visayas (which included Leyte, headquarters, Iloilo), Colonel Borden, commanding the United States forces in the island of Leyte, Colonel Taylor, the chief of the constabulary of the District, etc. Certainly from this formidable gathering of notables, it is clear that there was about to take place in Leyte what our friends of the Lambs’ Club in New York would call “An all star performance.” Leyte was four to five hundred miles from Manila. Yet so serious was the disturbance that the highest military and civil representatives of the American Government in the archipelago deemed it necessary to meet in the island which was the scene of the trouble with a view of handling it. Yet in the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 one finds the usual rotund rhetoric treating the disturbances as of no “political” significance—which was only another way of claiming that they were not serious. It is difficult to handle this aspect of the matter without imputing to the civil authorities intent to deceive, but to leave such an imputation unremoved would be to miss the whole significance of the matter. As has already been made clear, when Judge Taft, Judge Ide, and their colleagues of the Philippine Commission had left Washington for Manila in 1900 Mr. McKinley had assured them he had no doubt that the better element of the Philippine people, once they understood us, would welcome our rule. As soon as they set foot in the Philippine Islands they had at once begun to act upon the theory that there was no real fundamental opposition to us on the part of the people of the Philippines and had continued obstinately to act upon that theory ever since. Certainly the attitude of the civil government toward the disturbances in Leyte in 1906 is not surprising when the mind adverts for a moment to the panorama of the five more or less sanguinary years already fully described hereinbefore and then takes the following bird’s-eye glance at the official reports for those years.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1900, (page 17) had said:

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1901 (page 7) had said:

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1902 (page 3) had said:

referring farther on to “the whole Christian Philippine population” as “enjoying civil government.” If the “enjoyment” thus described had been genuine, continued, profound, and sincere, it would have been another story. But the net attitude of the civil government toward the general health of the body politic, relatively to public order, reminds one of the cheerful gentleman who remarked of his invalid friend, “He seems to be ‘enjoying’ poor health.”

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1903 (page 25) says:

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 (page 1) says:

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1905 (part 1, page 59) says:

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 (page 40) says:

various disorders which fill some ten pages of the report.

The inflexible attitude of the Commission from the beginning, of treating each successive disturbance of public order as a purely “local issue,” after General Hancock’s method with the tariff, is thus sufficiently apparent. They always refuse to see in successive outbreaks in various parts of the Islands any evidence of general and unanimous lack of appreciation for a benign alien civil government. Therefore it was of course clearly a foregone conclusion, in 1906, that Governor Ide, who had been in the Islands all these years, was going to be wholly unable to see anything in the disturbances in Leyte in the least tending to show that American rule was unpopular. And yet it was a matter of common knowledge all over the Visayan Islands that Jaime Veyra, then Governor of Leyte, elected by the people, was one of the most obnoxious anti-Americans in the archipelago. Both the army and constabulary were ordered out in Leyte and a good deal of fighting occurred before order was restored. The report of General Allen, commanding the constabulary for that year4 shows one engagement with the outlaws in Leyte participated in by the constabulary and the 21st Regular Infantry, in which the enemy numbered 450 and left forty-nine dead upon the field. All this period is covered by the certificate of general and complete peace of 1907, in the fall of which year a Philippine legislature was elected. And those of the membership of that body not in favor of Philippine independence were almost as few as the Socialist party in the American House of Representatives, which, I believe, consists of Representative Berger. True, the peace certificate does not ignore the Leyte outbreak. It “forgets and forgives it,” so to speak, as we shall see.

Governor Ide left the Islands finally on September 20, 1906, having resigned. Why he should have resigned, it is difficult to say. Take it all in all, he made a splendid Governor-General, and ought to have been allowed to remain. He knew the Islands from Alpha to Omega and had been there six years. His going out of office to make way for still another Governor-General was wholly uncalled for. So far as the writer is informed, he was, when he left, still blessed with good health. He had filled a very considerable place in the history of his country most creditably. He had drawn up a fine code of laws for the Islands known as the Ide code. He had made a great minister of finance, successfully performing the perilous task of transferring the currency of the country from a silver basis to a gold basis, and in so doing had proven himself fully a match, in protecting the interests of the Government, for the wiley local financiers representing the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the chartered bank of India, Australia, and China, and other institutions run by experienced men of more or less piratical tendencies. As Governor-General of the Islands, his justice, firmness, and courtliness of manner combined to produce an administration in keeping with the dignity of his great office. After returning to the United States, he remained in private life for a time, and was finally given a comparatively unimportant post as minister to a second-class country, Spain, which post he still occupies (in 1912).

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar massacres of 1904, I landed at Seattle, at the end of my last homeward-bound journey across the Pacific, in April, 1905, one of the “natives” of Seattle asked me: “Have those people over there ever got quiet yet?” The question itself seemed an answer to the orthodox official attitude at Manila, which had so long been elaborately denying, as to each successive local outbreak, that such outbreak bore any relation to the original insurrection, or was any wise illustrative of the general state of public feeling in the Islands. At the time the question was asked, the answer was, “Not entirely.” Not until toward the end of 1906 did “Yes” become a correct answer to the question. In other words, there were no more serious outbreaks after 1906, nor was a state of general and complete peace ever finally established until then. Since 1906 there have been occasional despatches from Manila recounting small episodes of bloodshed, several of which have had quite a martial ring. These have related merely to the country of the Mohammedan Moros, who are as wholly apart from the main problem as the American Indian to-day is from our tariff and other like questions. The Moros are indeed what Kipling calls “half savage and half child.” They never did have anything more to do with the Filipino insurrection against us than the American Indian had to do with the Civil War.