Major-general Elwell S. Otis and staff arrived at Manila August 21, 1898.1 He relieved General Merritt and succeeded to the command of the American troops in the Philippines, August 29th. Archbishop Chapelle, who was papal delegate to the Philippines in 1900, once said to the writer at Manila, in that year, that General Otis was “of about the right mental calibre to command a one-company post in Arizona.” The impatience manifested in the remark was due to differences between him and the commanding-general about the Friar question. The remark itself was of course intended, and understood, as hyperbole. But the selection of General Otis to handle the Philippine situation was a serious mistake. He was past sixty when he took command. He continued in command from August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900, a period of some twenty months. The insurrection was held in abeyance for some five months after he took hold, the leaders hoping against hope that the Treaty of Paris would leave their country to them as it did Cuba to the Cubans; and during all that time General Otis was apparently unable to see that war would be inevitable in the event the decision at Paris was adverse to Filipino hopes. A member of General Otis’s staff once told me in speaking of the insurrection period that his chief pooh-poohed the likelihood of an outbreak right along up to the very day before the outbreak of February 4, 1899, occurred. Before the insurrection came he would not see it, and after it came he—literally—did not see it; that is to say, during fifteen months of fighting he commanded the Eighth Army Corps from a desk in Manila and never once took the field. His Civil War record was all right, but he was now getting well along in years. He was also a graduate of the Harvard Law School of the Class of 1861, rather prided himself on being “a pretty fair jack-leg lawyer,” and had a most absorbing passion for the details of administrative work. They used to say that the only occasion on which General Otis ever went out of Manila the whole time he was there was when he went up the railroad once to Angeles to see that a proper valuation was put on a then recently deceased Quartermaster’s Department mule. When he left the Islands he remarked to a newspaper man that he had had but one “day off” since he had been there. Unswerving devotion to a desk in time of war, on the part of the commanding general of the army in the field, seemed to him an appropriate subject for just pride. This showed his limitations. He was a man wholly unable to see the essentials of an important situation, or to take in the whole horizon. He was known to the Eighth Corps, his command, as a sort of “Fussy Grandpa,” his personality and general management of things always suggesting the picture of a painfully near-sighted be-spectacled old gentleman busily nosing over papers you had submitted, and finding fault to show he knew a thing or two. However, he had many eminently respectable traits, and did the best he knew how, though wholly devoid of that noble serenity of vision which used to enable Mr. Lincoln, amid the darkest and most tremendous of his problems, to say with a smile to Horace Greeley: “Don’t shoot the organist, he’s doing the best he can.”

Before General Otis relieved General Merritt, the latter had written Aguinaldo politely requesting him to move his troops beyond certain specified lines about the city,2 and Aguinaldo had replied August 27th, agreeing to do so, but asking that the Americans promise to restore to him the positions thus vacated in the event under the treaty the United States should leave the Philippines to Spain.3 August 31st, Otis notified Aguinaldo, then still at Bacoor, his first capital, that General Merritt had been unexpectedly called away, and that he, Otis, being unacquainted with the situation must take time before answering the Aguinaldo letter to Merritt of the 27th. On September 8th, he did answer, in a preposterously long communication of about 3000 words, which says, among other things: “I have not been instructed as to what policy the United States intends to pursue in regard to its legitimate holdings here”; and therefore declines to promise anything about restoring the insurgent positions in the event we should leave the Islands to Spain under the treaty. Commenting on this in the North American Review for February, 1900, General Anderson says: “I believe we came to the parting of the ways when we refused this request.” General Anderson was right. General Merritt had on August 21st sent Aguinaldo a memorandum by the hand of Major J. Franklin Bell which promised: “Care will be taken to leave him [Aguinaldo] in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government.”4 In the rôle of political henchman for President McKinley, which General Otis seems to have conceived it his duty to play from the very beginning in the Philippines, it thus appears that he was not troubled about keeping unsullied the faith and honor of the government as pledged by his predecessor. His 3000-word letter to Aguinaldo of September 8th ignores Merritt’s promise as coolly as if it had never been made. His only concern appears to have been to leave the government free to throw the Filipinos overboard if it should wish to. He peevishly implies later on that Aguinaldo’s requests in this regard were merely a cloak for designs against us (p. 40). But his real reason is given in a sort of stage “aside”—a letter to the Adjutant-General of the army dated September 12, 1898, wherein he explains: “Should I promise them that in case of the return of the city to Spain, upon United States evacuation, their forces would be placed by us in positions which they now occupy, I thoroughly believe that they would evacuate at once. But, of course, under the international obligations resting upon us * * * no such promise can be given.”5 In the sacred name of National Honor what of the Merritt promise? You only have to turn a few pages in the War Department Report for 1899 from the Merritt promise to the Otis repudiation of it. Yes, General Anderson was right. It was when General Otis practically repudiated in writing the written promise of his predecessor, General Merritt, that we “came to the parting of the ways” in our relations with the Filipinos. Let no American suppose for a moment that the author of this volume is engaged in the ungracious, and frequently deservedly thankless task of mere muck-raking. He never met General Otis but once, and then for a very brief official interview of an agreeable nature. He is only attempting to make a small contribution to the righting of a great wrong unwittingly done by a great, free, and generous people to another people then struggling to be free—a wrong which he doubts not will one day be righted, whether he lives to see it so righted or not. General Otis’s letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of September 12th, above quoted, shows that he was holding himself in readiness to carry out in the Philippines any political programme the Administration might determine upon, which would mean that he would afterwards come home and tell how entirely righteous that programme had been. Had the Administration hearkened back to Admiral Dewey’s suggestion that the Filipinos were far superior to the Cubans, and decided to set before General Otis in the Philippines the same task it had set before General Wood in Cuba, we would have heard nothing about Filipino “incapacity for self-government.” General Otis would have taken his cue from the President, his commander-in chief, and said: “I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey.” Then he would have gone to work in a spirit of generous rivalry to do in the Philippines just what Wood did in Cuba. And the task would have been easier. Had the Administration taken the view urged by Judge Gray, as a member of the Paris Peace Commission, that “if we had captured Cadiz and the Carlists had helped us [we] would not owe duty to stay by them at the conclusion of the war,”6 and therefore we were not bound to see the Filipinos through their struggle, General Otis would have adopted that view with equal loyalty and in the presidential campaign of 1900, he would have furnished the Administration with arguments to justify that course. This would have been an easy task, also, for two of Spain’s fleets had been destroyed by us, leaving her but one to guard her home coast cities, and making the sending of reinforcements to the besieged and demoralized garrison of Manila impossible. The native army she relied on throughout the archipelago had gone over bodily to the patriot cause, and there was no hope of successful resistance to it. But General Otis did not have the boundless prestige of Admiral Dewey and so volunteered no advice. As soon as the Administration chose its course, he set to work to prove the correctness of it. From him, of course, came all the McKinley Administration’s original arguments against doing for the Filipinos as we did in the case of Cuba. He was the only legitimate source the American people could look to at that time to help them in their dilemma. They were standing with reluctant feet where democracy and its antithesis meet, and Otis was their sole guide. But the guide was of the kind who wait until you point and ask “Is that the right direction?” and then answer “Yes.” Four days after General Otis sent his above quoted letter of September 12th, to Adjutant-General Corbin, Mr. McKinley signed his instructions to the Paris Peace Commissioners, directing them to insist on the cession of Luzon at least, the instructions being full of eloquent but specious argument about the necessity of establishing a guardianship over people of whom we then knew nothing. From that day forward General Otis bent himself to the task of showing the righteousness of that course. “I will let nothing go that will hurt the Administration,” was his favorite expression to the newspaper correspondents when they used to complain about his press censorship. Hypocrisy is defined to be “a false assumption of piety or virtue.” The false assumption of piety or virtue which has handicapped the American occupation of the Philippines from the beginning, and which will always handicap it, until we throw off the mask and honestly set to work to give the Filipinos a square deal on the question of whether they can or cannot run a decent government of their own if permitted, is traceable back to the Otis letter to the Adjutant-General of September 12, 1898, ignoring General Merritt’s promise to leave Aguinaldo “in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government” in case we should, under the terms of the treaty of peace, leave the Islands to Spain.

General Otis’s letter of September 8th to Aguinaldo is apparently intended to convince him that he ought to consider everything the Americans had done up to date as exactly the correct thing, according to the standards of up-to-date, philanthropic, liberty-loving nations which pity double-dealing as mediæval; and that he should cheer up, and feel grateful and happy, instead of sulking, Achilles-like, in his tents; and furthermore—which was the crux—that he must move said tents. General Otis does not forget “that the revolutionary forces under your command have made many sacrifices in the interest of civil liberty (observe, he does not call it independence) and for the welfare of your people”; admits that they have “endured great hardships, and have rendered aid”; and avers, as a reason for Aguinaldo’s evacuating that part of the environs of Manila occupied by his troops: “It [the war with Spain] was undertaken by the United States for humanity’s sake * * * not for * * * aggrandizement or for any national profit.” After stating, as above indicated, that he does not yet know what the policy of the United States is to be “in regard to its legitimate holdings here,” General Otis proceeds to declare that in any event he will not be a party to any joint occupation of any part of the city, bay, and harbor of Manila—the territory covered by the Peace Protocol of August 13th—and that Aguinaldo must effect the evacuation demanded in the letter of General Merritt “before Tuesday the 15th” (of September), i.e., within a week. Aguinaldo finally withdrew his troops, after much useless parleying and much waste of ink.

There was some of the parleying and ink, however, that was not wholly wasted. But to properly appreciate it as illustrative of the fortitude and tact which the early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in a remarkable degree, some prefatory data are essential.

Aguinaldo’s capital was then at Bacoor, one of the small coast villages you pass through in going by land from Manila to Cavite. From Manila over to Cavite by water is about seven miles, and by land about three or four times that. The coast line from Manila to Cavite makes a loop, so that a straight line over the water from Manila to Cavite subtends a curve, near the Cavite end of which lies Bacoor. Thus, Bacoor, being at the mercy of the big guns at Cavite, and also easily accessible by a land force from Manila, to say nothing of Dewey’s mighty armada riding at anchor in the offing, was a good place to move away from. There it lay, right in the lion’s jaws, should the lion happen to get hungry. Aguinaldo had reflected on all this, and had determined to get himself a capital away from “the city, bay, and harbor of Manila,” that is to say, to take his head out of the lion’s jaws. General Otis’s demand of September 8th that he move his troops out of the suburbs of Manila determined him to move his capital as well. He moved it to a place called Malolos, in Bulacan province. Bulacan lies over on the north shore of Manila Bay, opposite Cavite province on the south shore. Malolos is situated some distance inland, out of sight and range of a fleet’s guns, and about twenty-odd miles by railroad northwest of Manila. Malolos was also desirable because it was in the heart of an insurgent province having a population of nearly a quarter of a million people, a province which, by reason of being on the north side of the bay, was sure to be in touch, strategically and politically, with all Luzon north of the Pasig River, just as Cavite province, the birthplace of Aguinaldo, and also of the revolutionary government, had been with all Luzon south of the Pasig. Should the worst come to the worst—and as has already been indicated, the insurgents played a sweepstake game from the beginning for independence, with only war as the limit—northern Luzon had more inaccessible mountains from which to conduct such a struggle for an indefinite period than southern Luzon. But while the Otis demand of September 8th decided the matter of the change of capital, Aguinaldo could not afford to tell his troops that he was moving them from the environs of Manila because made to. He was going to accept war cheerfully when it should become necessary to fight for independence, but he still had some hopes of the Paris Peace Conference deciding to do with the Philippines as with Cuba, and wished to await patiently the outcome of that conference. Besides, he was getting in shipments of guns all the time, as fast as the revenues of his government would permit, and thus his ability to protract an ultimate war for independence was constantly enlarging by accretion. The Hong Kong conference of the Filipino revolutionary leaders held in the city named on May 4, 1898, at which Aguinaldo presided, and which mapped out a programme covering every possible contingency, has already been mentioned. Its minutes say:

On the other hand, the minutes of this same meeting as we saw recognized that America might be tempted into entering upon a career of colonization, once she should get a foothold in the islands. The programme of Aguinaldo and his people was thus, from the beginning, not to precipitate hostilities until it should become clear that, in the matter of land-grabbing, the gleam of hope held out by the American programme for Cuba was illusive. According to the minutes of the meeting alluded to, such a contingency would, of course, “drive them, the Filipinos * * * to a struggle for their independence, even if they should succumb to the weight of the yoke,” etc. Such a struggle, as all the world knows, did ultimately ensue. That part of the parleying following Otis’s demand of September 8th (that Aguinaldo move his troops) which was not useless was this: In order to “save their face,” with the rank and file of their army, the Filipino Commissioners asked General Otis “if I [Otis,] would express in writing a simple request to Aguinaldo to withdraw to the lines which I designated—something which he could show to the troops.”8 So, on September 13th, General Otis wrote such a “request,” and Aguinaldo moved his troops as demanded, but no farther than demanded. He wanted to be in the best position possible in case the United States should finally leave the Philippines to Spain, and always so insisted. Long afterward General Otis insinuated in his report that this insistence, which was uniformly pressed until after the Treaty was signed, was mere dishonest pretence, to cloak warlike intentions against the United States. Yet, as we have seen above, one of our Peace Commissioners at Paris, Judge Gray, just about the same time, was taking that contingency quite as seriously as did Aguinaldo. And early in May, 1898, our Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Long, had cabled Admiral Dewey “not to have political alliances with the insurgents * * * that would incur liability to maintain their cause in the future.”9 Before moving his troops pursuant to the Otis demand of September 8th, the Otis “request” was duly published to the insurgent army, and as the insurgents withdrew, the American troops presented arms in most friendly fashion. “They certainly made a brave show,” says Mr. Millet (Expedition to the Philippines, p. 255), “for they were neatly uniformed, had excellent rifles, marched well, and looked very soldierly and intelligent.” “The withdrawal,” says General Otis (p. 10), “was effected adroitly, as the insurgents marched out in excellent spirits, cheering the American forces.” Absolute master of all Luzon outside Manila at this time, with complete machinery of government in each province for all matters of justice, taxes, and police, an army of some 30,000 men at his beck, and his whole people a unit at his back, Aguinaldo formally inaugurated his permanent government—permanent as opposed to the previous provisional government—with a Constitution, Congress, and Cabinet, patterned after our own,10 just as the South American republics had done before him when they were freed from Spain, at Malolos, the new capital, on September 15, 1898. The next day, September 16th, at Washington, President McKinley delivered to his Peace Commissioners, then getting ready to start for the Paris Peace Conference, their letter of instructions, directing them to insist on the cession by Spain to the United States of the island of Luzon “at least.”11 In other words, the day after the little Filipino republic, gay with banners and glad with music, started forth on its journey, Mr. McKinley signed its death-warrant. The political student of 1912 may say just here, “Oh, I read all that in the papers at the time, or at least it was all ventilated in the Presidential campaign of 1900.” Mr. McKinley’s instructions to the Paris Peace Commission were not made public until after the Presidential election of 1900. To be specific, they were first printed and given out to the public in 1901, in Senate Document 148, having been extracted from the jealous custody of the Executive by a Senate resolution. It was not until then that the veil was lifted. By that time, no American who was not transcendental enough to have lost his love for the old maxim, “Right or wrong, my country,” cared to hear the details of the story. The Filipinos and “our boys” had been diligently engaged in killing each other for a couple of years, and the American people said, “A truce to scolding; let us finish this war, now we are in it.”

But to return from the death-warrant of the Philippine republic signed by Mr. McKinley on September 16th, to its christening, or inauguration, the day before. Mr. Millet gives an intensely interesting account of the inaugural ceremonies of September 15th, which as Manila correspondent of the London Times and Harper’s Weekly he had the good fortune to witness. Says he:

It seems there had been a strike of the native employees of the railway up the road.

Then came a tirade from Higgins, ending with, “I am going to lay this * * * before Aguinaldo to-day, and I shall expect you to arrange an interview for my friend and myself.” Then, turning to the astonished Millet, he said in English: “It does these chaps good to be talked to straight from the shoulder. Since they came to Malolos, the earth isn’t big enough to hold them.”

This scene on the train is, decidedly, as Thomas Carlyle would say, “of real interest to universal history.” Mr. Millet’s Government was a lion about to eat a lamb, but the head of his nation, Mr. McKinley, clothed with absolute authority in the premises for the nonce, was balking at the diet. Now, Mr. Millet rather admired the British boldness, just as a Northern man likes to hear a Southerner talk straight from the shoulder to a “darkey.” As soon as the era of good feeling was over, our people quit treating the Filipinos as Perry did the Japanese in 1854, and began calling them “niggers.” In fact the commanding general found it necessary a little later to put a stop to this pernicious practice among the soldiers by issuing a General Order prohibiting it. But Mr. Millet’s admiration would have been somewhat toned down had he known what we found out later. The real secret of Higgins’s personal arrogance was this. The Filipino government needed his railroad in its business. During the war which followed, the insurgents long controlled a large part of this railway, from Manila to Dagupan, which was the only railway in the Philippines. The railway properties suffered much damage incident to the war, and—just how willingly is beside the question—the company rendered material aid to the insurgent cause. So much did they render, that when Higgins had the assurance later to want our Government to pay the damages his properties had suffered at the hands of the insurgents, our government at Manila promptly turned his claim down. Subsequently the London office of his company actually inveigled the British Foreign Office into making representation to our State Department about the matter—obviously a very grave step, in international law. The claim was promptly turned down by Washington also, and, happily, that “closed the incident.”13

Having exploded Mr. Millet’s bubble, let us resume the thread of his story:

Then follows a detailed account of being introduced, after some ceremony, to Aguinaldo, who is described as “a small individual, in full evening black suit, and flowing black tie.” Higgins made his complaint about the strikers, and Aguinaldo said, “I will attend to this matter of the strikers,” and then changed the topic, asking if the visitors did not wish to attend the opening of the Congress—which they did.

From Mr. Millet’s account, it is evident that, like Admiral Dewey and most of the Americans who first dealt with the Filipinos except Generals Anderson, MacArthur, and J. F. Bell, he failed to take the Filipinos as seriously as the facts demanded. At that time the Japanese had not yet taught the world that national aspirations are not necessarily to be treated with contumely because a people are small of stature and not white of skin. Consul Wildman at Hong Kong at first wrote the State Department quite peevishly that Aguinaldo seemed much more concerned about the kind of cane he should wear than about the figure he might make in history. Wildman did not then know, apparently, that canes, with all Spanish-Filipino colonial officialdom, were badges of official rank, like shoulder-straps are with us. The reader will also remember the toothbrush incident hereinbefore reproduced, told by Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee, in 1902. That incident, naturally enough, amused the Committee not a little. But we who know the Filipino know it was merely an awkward and embarrassed answer due to diffidence, and made on the spur of the moment to cloak some real reason which if disclosed would not seem so childish.

Misunderstanding is the principal cause of hate in this world. When you understand people, hatred disappears in a way strikingly analogous to the disappearance of darkness on the arrival of light. The more you know of the educated patriotic Filipino, the more certain you become that the government we destroyed in 1898 would have worked quite as well as most any of the republics now in operation between the Rio Grande and Patagonia. The masses of the people down there, the peons, are probably quite as ignorant and docile as the Filipino tao (peasant), and I question if the educated men of Latin America, the class of men who, after all, control in every country, could, after meeting and knowing the corresponding class in the Philippines, get their own consent to declare the latter their inferiors either in intelligence, character, or patriotism.

But to return to the inauguration. Mr. Millet saw the inaugural ceremonies in the church, and heard Aguinaldo’s address to the Congress. Of the audience he says “few among them would have escaped notice in a crowd for they were exceptionally alert, keen, and intelligent in appearance.” Of this same Congress and government, Mr. John Barrett, who was American Minister to Siam about that time, and is now (1912) head of the Bureau of American Republics at Washington—an institution organized and run for the purpose of persuading Latin-America that we do not belong to the Imperial International Society for the Partition of the Earth and that we are not in the business of gobbling up little countries on pretext of “policing” them—said in an address before the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce on January 12, 1899:

The present Philippine Assembly had not had its first meeting when I left the Islands in the spring of 1905. It was organized in 1907. In the summer of 1911, I had the pleasure of renewing an old and very cordial acquaintance with Dr. Heiser, Director of Public Health of the Philippine Islands, who is one of the most considerable men connected with our government out there, and is also thoroughly in sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present form. The Doctor is a broad-gauged man likely to be worth to any government, in matters of Public Health, whatever such government could reasonably afford to pay in the way of salary, and is doubtless well-paid by the Philippine Insular Government. He can hardly be blamed, therefore, for being in sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present form. Doctor Heiser is a man of too much genuine dignity to be very much addicted to slang, but when I asked him about the Philippine Assembly, I think he said it was “a cracker-jack.” At any rate, I have never heard any legislative body spoken of in more genuinely complimentary terms than those in which he described the Philippine Assembly. I learned from him incidentally that their “capacity for self-government” is so crude, however, as yet, that the members have not yet learned to read newspapers while a colleague whose seat is next to theirs is addressing the house and trying to get the attention of his fellows, nor do they keep up such a buzz of conversation that the man who has the floor cannot hear himself talk. They listen to the programme of the public business.

Some five years ago in an article written for the North American Review concerning the Philippine problem, the author of the present volume said, among other things: “During nearly four years of service on the bench in the Philippines the writer heard as much genuine, impassioned, and effective eloquence from Filipino lawyers, saw exhibited in the trial of causes as much industrious preparation, and zealous, loyal advocacy of the rights of clients, as any ordinary nisi prius judge at home is likely to meet with in the same length of time.”14 Any country that has plenty of good lawyers and plenty of good soldiers, backed by plenty of good farmers, is capable of self-government. As President Schurman of Cornell University, who headed the first Philippine Commission, the one that went out in 1899, said in closing his Founder’s Day Address at that institution on January 11, 1902: “Any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos is better than the best possible government of Filipinos by Americans.” The Malolos government which Mr. Millet saw inaugurated on September 15, 1898, would probably have filled this bill. Had the Filipino people then possessed the consciousness of racial and political unity as a people which was developed by their subsequent long struggle against us for independence, and which has been steadily developing more and more under the mild sway of a quasi-freedom whose princely prodigality in spreading education is marred only by its declared programme that no living beneficiary thereof may hope to see the independence of his country, and that the present generation must resign itself to tariff schedules “fixed” at Washington, there is no reasonable doubt that the original Malolos government of 1898 would have been a very “decent kind of government.”

All through the last four months of 1898, the two hostile armies faced each other in a mood which it needed but a spark to ignite, awaiting the outcome of the peace negotiations arranged for in September, commenced in October, and concluded in December. While they are thus engaged about Manila, let us turn to a happier picture, the situation in the provinces under the Aguinaldo government.

In the last chapter, we saw Aguinaldo’s republic formally established at Malolos, September 15th, claiming jurisdiction over all Luzon. In Chapter IV., entitled “Merritt and Aguinaldo,” we saw the political condition of southern Luzon in August, 1898, and the following months, and verified the correctness of Aguinaldo’s claims as to complete mastery there then. Let us now examine the state of affairs in northern Luzon in the fall of 1898.

In Senate Document 196, 56th Congress, 1st Session, dated February 26, 1900, transmitted by Secretary of the Navy Long, in response to a Senate resolution, may be found a report of a tour of observation through the half of Luzon Island which lies north of Manila and the Pasig River, made between October 8 and November 20, 1898,—note the dates, for the Paris Peace Conference began October 1st and ended December 10th,—by Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and Naval Cadet L. R. Sargent. This report was submitted by them to Admiral Dewey under date of November 23, 1898, and by him forwarded to the Navy Department for its information, with the comment that it “in my opinion contains the most complete and reliable information obtainable in regard to the present state of the northern part of Luzon Island.” The Admiral’s endorsement was not sent to the Senate along with the report. It appears in a book afterwards published by Paymaster Wilcox in 1901, entitled Through Luzon on Highways and Byways. The book is merely an elaboration of the report, and reproduces most of the report, if not all of it, verbatim. The book of Paymaster Wilcox may be treated as, practically, official, for historical purposes. The preface recites that in October, 1898, American control was effective only in Manila and Cavite, that the insurgents, under Aguinaldo, who had proclaimed himself President of the whole Archipelago, immediately after Dewey’s victory, were in supposedly complete possession of every part of the Island outside of these two cities, that their lines were so close to the outposts of our army that their people could at times converse with our soldiers, and that General Otis’s authority did not extend much beyond a three-mile radius from the centre of Manila, while Admiral Dewey held and operated the navy-yard at Cavite. “Even the country between Manila and Cavite was in the hands of Aguinaldo, so much so that our officers had been refused permission to land at any intermediate point by water, and were prohibited from traversing the distance by road.” Wilcox and Sargent procured leave of absence from Admiral Dewey to make their trip. They went first to Malolos, but failed to get anything in the way of safe-conduct from Aguinaldo. He is described, however, as of “great force of character * * * and he dominates all around him with a power that seems peculiar to himself.” Wilcox had seen him before at Cavite. “He adroitly read between the lines that the Government of the United States did not then, nor would it at any future time, recognize his authority,” says the writer.

Our travellers left Manila, October 8, 1898, on the Manila-Dagupan Railway, for a place called Bayambang, which is the capital of Pangasinan province, about one hundred miles north of Manila. In Pangasinan “the people were all very respectful and polite and offered the hospitality of their homes.” From Bayambang they struck off from the railroad and proceeded eastward comfortably and unmolested a day’s journey, to a town in the adjoining province of Nueva Ecija (Rosales) where they received a cordial reception at the hands of the Presidente (Mayor)—Aguinaldo’s Presidente of course, not the Presidente left over from the Spanish régime. “At this time all the local government of the different towns was in the hands of Aguinaldo’s adherents,” says the descriptive itinerary we are following. The tourists were provided at Rosales by order of Aguinaldo with a military escort, “which was continued by relays all the way to Aparri” (the northernmost town of Luzon, at the mouth of the Cagayan River). Paymaster Wilcox says he carried five hundred Mexican dollars in his saddle-bags, but used only a trifling portion of this amount, “for in every town my entertainment was given without pay.” They went from Rosales to Humingan, in Nueva Ecija. At Humingan they were again entertained by the Presidente at dinner, with music following, and comfortably housed. The Presidente made many inquiries about “the War with Spain and their own future.” Their future, as revealed by the raised curtain of a year later, was that their country was being overrun by Lawton’s Division of the Eighth Army Corps, the author of this volume having passed through this same town of Humingan in November, 1899, as an officer of the scouts used to develop fire for General Lawton’s column. They journeyed eastward through the province of Nueva Ecija from Humingan to a little village (Puncan) in the foothills of the mountains they planned to cross. Of this place and the hospitality there, our traveller remarks: “I shall never forget the welcome of the local official” the Presidente. Thence they proceeded a few more stages and parasangs, northward over the Caranglan pass, into Nueva Vizcaya province, the watershed of north central Luzon, and thence down the valley of the Cagayan River via Iligan and Tuguegarao to Aparri, being always hospitably entertained in every town through which they passed by the Presidente or Mayor of the town, the local representative of the Philippine republic. In the New York Independent of September 14, 1899, Cadet Sargent, in an article about this trip, gives the words of the new Filipino national Hymn, which he describes as sung with great enthusiasm everywhere he and Wilcox were entertained in the various towns. I desire to preserve a sample verse of it here. The music it is set to is much like the Marseillaise—quite as stirring:

which, being interpreted, means:

Had another Sargent and another Wilcox made a similar trip through the provinces of southern Luzon about this same time, under similar friendly auspices, before we turned friendship to hate and fear and misery, in the name of Benevolent Assimilation, they would, we now know, have found similar conditions.

Some suspicions were aroused on one or two occasions, but once the local authorities became convinced that the trip was being made by consent of “The Illustrious Presidente” (Aguinaldo—“El Egregio Presidente” is the Spanish of it) all was sunshine again. The Mayor of each town—the Presidente—would receive from the escort coming with them from the last town they had stopped at, a letter from the Mayor, or Presidente, of said last town; the old escort would return to their town, and a new one would be provided to give them safe-conduct to the next town. This was no new-fangled scheme of Aguinaldo’s. It was an ancient custom of the Spanish Government, and was an ideal nucleus of administration for the new government. Curiously enough, the army knew practically nothing of this trip in the days of the early fighting. All that country was to us a terra incognita, until overrun by Captain Bacthelor, with a part of the 25th Infantry in the fall of 1899, the following year. So was the rest of the archipelago a like terra incognita, until likewise slowly conquered by hard fighting. That is why we so utterly failed to understand what a wonderfully complete “going concern” Aguinaldo’s government had become throughout the Philippine archipelago before the Treaty of Paris was signed. Descending from the watershed of north central Luzon in the province of Nueva Viscaya already mentioned, our travellers reached the town of Carig, in the foothills which fringe that side of the watershed. There they were met by Simeon Villa, military commander of Isabela province, the man who was chief of staff to Aguinaldo afterwards, and was captured by General Funston along with Aguinaldo in the spring of 1901. Villa’s immediate superior was Colonel Tirona, at Aparri, the colonel commanding all the insurgent forces of the Cagayan valley. Villa was accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The latter is an old acquaintance of the author of the present volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish army committed under Villa’s orders just prior to, or about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He was found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under President Roosevelt’s amnesty of 1902. He was guilty, but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan valley used to say, in being tortured to death, got only the same sort of medicine he had often administered thereabouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory of the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases. Villa was a Tagal and had come up from Manila with the expedition commanded by Colonel Tirona, which expedition was fitted out with guns furnished Aguinaldo by Admiral Dewey, or, if not furnished, permitted to be furnished. But Guzman was a member of one of the wealthiest and most influential native families of that province (Isabela). General Otis’s reports are full of the most inexcusable blunders about how “the Tagals” took possession of the various provinces and made the people do this or that. Villa’s relations with Guzman were just about those of a New Yorker or a Bostonian sent up to Vermont in the days of the American Revolution to help organize the resistance there, in conjunction with one of the local leaders of the patriot cause in the Green Mountain State. Both were members of the Katipunan, the Filipino Revolutionary Secret Society, an organization patterned after Masonry, membership in which was always treated by the Spaniards as sedition, and usually visited with capital punishment. Nearly every Filipino of any spirit belonged to it on May 1, 1898, the date of the naval battle of Manila Bay. It is the all-pervading completeness of this organization at that time—it could give old Tammany Hall cards and spades—which explains the astonishing rapidity of Aguinaldo’s political success, i.e., the astonishing rapidity with which the Malolos Government acquired control of Luzon between May and October, 1898. Their cabalistic watchword was “Paisano” (fellow-countryman), their battle cry “Independence.” In the fall of 1898, at the time of this Wilcox-Sargent trip through Luzon, the Filipinos really “had tasted the sweets of Independence,” to use the phrase of the people of Iloilo in declining on that ground to surrender to General Miller in December thereafter and electing the arbitrament of war. The writer is perhaps as familiar with the history of that Cagayan valley as almost any other American. It is true there were cruelties practised by the Filipinos on the Spaniards. But they were ebullitions of revenge for three centuries of tyranny. They do not prove unfitness for self-government. I for one prefer to follow the example set by the Roosevelt amnesty of 1902, and draw the veil over all those matters. With the Spaniards it was a case of Sauve qui peut. With the Filipinos, it was a case, as old man Dimas Guzman, father to this Lieutenant Ventura we have just met, used to put it, of Me las vais a pagar, which, liberally interpreted, means, “The bad quarter of an hour has arrived for the Spaniards. The day of reckoning has come.” I sentenced both Dimas and Ventura to life imprisonment for being accessory to the murder of the Spanish officer above named, Lieutenant Piera. Villa officiated as archfiend of the gruesome occasion. I am quite sure I would have hung Villa without any compunction at that time, if I could have gotten hold of him. I tried to get hold of him, but Governor Taft’s Attorney-General, Mr. Wilfley, wrote me that Villa was somewhere over on the mainland of Asia on British territory, and extradition would involve application to the London Foreign Office. The intimation was that we had trouble enough of our own without borrowing any from feuds that had existed under our predecessors in sovereignty. I have understood that Villa is now practising medicine in Manila. More than one officer of the American army that I know, afterwards did things to the Filipinos almost as cruel as Villa did to that unhappy Spanish officer, Lieutenant Piera. On the whole, I think President Roosevelt acted wisely and humanely in wiping the slate. We had new problems to deal with, and were not bound to handicap ourselves with the old ones left over from the Spanish régime.

It appears that Villa became a little suspicious of the travellers. He detained them at Carig seven days. Finally there came a telegram from his chief at Aparri, Colonel Tirona, to our two travellers, which read: “I salute you affectionately, and authorize Villa to accompany you to Iligan.” At Iligan, the capital of Isabela province, the travellers were lavishly entertained. They were given a grand baile (ball) and fiesta (feast), a kind of dinner-dance, we would call it. To the light Messrs. Sargent and Wilcox throw on the then universal acknowledgment of the authority of the Aguinaldo government, and the perfect tranquillity and public order maintained under it, in the Cagayan valley, I may add that as judge of that district in 1901–2 there came before me a number of cases in the trial of which the fact would be brought out of this or that difference among the local authorities having been referred to the Malolos Government for settlement. And they always waited until they heard from it. The doubting Thomas will attribute this to the partiality of the Filipinos to procrastination in general. I know it was due to the hearty co-operation of the people with, and their loyalty to, the then existing government, and to their pride in it. Mr. Sargent tells a characteristic story of Villa, whose vengeful feeling toward the Spaniards showed on all occasions. The former Spanish governor of the province was of course a prisoner in Villa’s custody. Villa had the ex-governor brought in, for the travellers to see him, and remarked, in his presence to them, “This is the man who robbed this province of $25,000 during the last year of his office.” From Iligan our travellers proceeded to Aparri, cordially received everywhere, and finding the country in fact, as Aguinaldo always claimed in his proclamations of that period seeking recognition of his government by the Powers, in a state of profound peace and tranquillity—free from brigandage and the like. At Aparri the visitors were cordially welcomed by Colonel Tirona, and much fêted. While they were there, Tirona transferred his authority to a civil régime. Says Paymaster Wilcox:

He then goes on to describe the inauguration of civil government in Cagayan province. I hope all this will not weary the American reader. It was vividly interesting to me when I read it for the first time thirteen years afterward, in 1911, because it was such unexpected information, so surprising. It will be equally interesting to all other Americans who participated in putting down the subsequent insurrection and in setting up the Taft civil government in that same valley three years later. I was in that town, for a similar purpose, with Governor Taft in 1901, after a bloody war which almost certainly would not have occurred had the Paris Peace Commission known the conditions then existing, just like this, all over Luzon and the Visayan Islands. Of course the Southern Islands were a little slower. But as Luzon goes, so go the rest. The rest of the archipelago is but the tail to the Luzon kite. Luzon contains 4,000,000 of the 8,000,000 people out there, and Manila is to the Filipino people what Paris is to the French and to France. Luzon is about the size of Ohio, and the other six islands that really matter,1 are in size mere little Connecticuts and Rhode Islands, and in population mere Arizonas or New Mexicos. Describing the ceremonies of the inauguration of civil government in Cagayan, the Wilcox-Sargent report to Admiral Dewey says:

Does not such language in an official report made by officers of the navy to Admiral Dewey in November, 1898, show an undercurrent of deep feeling at the position the Administration had put Admiral Dewey in with Aguinaldo, when it decided to take the Philippines, and accordingly sent out an army whose generals ignored his protégé?

The speech of the provincial governor was followed, says the Wilcox-Sargent report (same page) by speeches from “the other officers who constitute the provincial government, the heads of the three departments—justice, police, and internal revenue. Every town in this province has the same organization.” Article III. of Aguinaldo’s decree of June 18th, previous, providing an organic law or constitution for his provisional government (see Chapter II., ante) had provided precisely the organization which Wilcox and Sargent thus saw working at Aparri and throughout the Cagayan valley in October, 1898. The importance of all this to the question of how the Filipinos feel toward us to-day, in this year of grace, 1912, and to the element of righteousness there is in that feeling, is too obvious to need comment. Americans interested in business in the Philippines come back to this country from time to time and give out interviews in the papers declaring that the Filipinos do not want independence. What they really mean is that it makes no difference whether they want it or not, they are not going to get it. And it is precisely these Americans, and their business associates in the United States, who have gotten through Congress the legislation which enables them to give the Filipino just half of what he got ten years ago for his hemp, and other like legislation, and the Filipinos know it. The gulf in the Philippines between the dominant and the subject race will continue to widen as the years go by, so long as indirect taxation without representation continues to be perpetrated at Washington for the benefit of special interests having a powerful lobby. If the American people themselves are groaning under this very sort of thing, and apparently unable to help themselves, what is the a priori probability as to our voteless and therefore defenceless little brown brother. Like the sheep before the shearer, he is dumb. But to return to our travellers and their journey.

Colonel Tirona provided them with a letter addressed to Colonel Tiño at Vigan, the chief town of the west coast of Luzon and the capital of the province of Ilocos Sur, which province fronts the China Sea. Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent proceeded aboard the Norwegian steamer from Aparri westward, doubling the northwest corner of Luzon, and steaming thence due south to the nearest port. Vigan was the Filipino military headquarters of the western half of northern Luzon, just as Aparri was at the same time of the eastern half. On the west coast the travellers were treated always courteously, but with considerable suspicion. The explanation is easy. That region is in closer touch with Manila, and with what is going on and may be learned at the capital, than is the Cagayan valley which our tourists had just left. They bade the commanding officer at Vigan good-bye, November 13, 1898. Passing south through Namacpacan (which the command I was with took a year or so later), they came to San Fernando de Union, some twenty miles farther south along the coast road. Here they met Colonel Tiño and presented their letter from Tirona. He gave them a dinner, of course. How a Filipino does love to entertain, and make you enjoy yourself! Talk about your “true Southern hospitality”! You get it there. “Speeches were made, and great things promised by the Philippine republic in the near future” says Mr. Wilcox. After the dinner and speech-making came the inevitable dance. After that Colonel Tiño started them off on their journey southward toward Manila duly provided with carriages. Passing Aringay on November 18, 18983 our travellers finally reached Dagupan, the northern terminus of the Manila-Dagupan Railway, and there took a train for Manila, 120 miles away.

In his report covering the fall of 1898, General Otis always scoldingly says of the Filipinos that in all the parleyings of his commissioners with Aguinaldo’s commissioners before the outbreak, the latter never did know what they really wanted. The truth was they believed the Americans were going to do with them exactly as every other white race they knew of had done with every other brown race they knew of, but they did not tell General Otis so. Mr. Wilcox, a more friendly witness of that same period states their position thus at page twenty of the report to Admiral Dewey: “They desire the protection of the United States at sea, but fear any interference on land.” “On one point they seemed united, viz., that whatever our government may have done for them, it had not gained the right to annex them,” adding, in relation to the physical preparations to make good this contention, in the event of war, “The Philippine Government has an organized force in every province we visited.”

The whole tone of the Wilcox-Sargent report and the subsequent Wilcox book is an implied reiteration, after intimate, extended, and friendly contact with the people of all Luzon north of the Pasig River, of Admiral Dewey’s telegram sent to the Navy Department, June 23, 1898: “The people are far superior in intelligence and capacity for self-government to the people of Cuba and I am familiar with both races.” In fact Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent do not raise the question of “capacity for self-government” at all, any more than Commodore Perry did when similarly welcomed in 1854 by the Japanese.