The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 34

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

The conditions with respect to tranquillity in the islands have greatly improved during the last year.

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

The great ma.s.s of the people, however, were domestic and peaceable.

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

On the whole life and property have been as safe as in other civilized countries.

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

Viewing the entire situation the islands are in a peaceable and orderly condition aside from----

various disorders which fill some ten pages of the report.

The inflexible att.i.tude of the Commission from the beginning, of treating each successive disturbance of public order as a purely "local issue," after General Hanc.o.c.k'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 year [467] shows one engagement with the outlaws in Leyte partic.i.p.ated 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 inst.i.tutions 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-cla.s.s country, Spain, which post he still occupies (in 1912).

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar ma.s.sacres 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 att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trative 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.

CHAPTER XXI

GOVERNOR SMITH--1907-9

Oh, but Honey, dis rabbit dess 'bleeged ter climb dis tree.

Uncle Remus.

"On September 20, 1906," says the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1907, [468] "the resignation of the Hon. Henry Clay Ide as Governor-General became effective, and on that date the Hon. James F. Smith was inaugurated as Governor-General of the Philippine Islands."

The year 1907 will be known most prominently to the future history of our Far Eastern possession as the year of the opening of the Philippine a.s.sembly, which momentous event occurred on October 16th. But in the departments both of Politics and Psychology it should be known as the year of the Great Certificate. The Great Certificate was a certificate signed by certain eminent gentlemen on March 28, 1907, which made the preposterous affirmation that a condition of general and complete peace had prevailed throughout the archipelago, except among the non-Christian tribes, for the two years immediately preceding. Taken in its historic setting, that certificate can by no possibility escape responsibility, as "accessory after the fact" at least, to the pretence that a similar condition had prevailed ever since President Roosevelt's final war-whoop of July 4, 1902, published to the American troops in the Islands on the day named. That war-whoop, it will be remembered, was in the form of a presidential proclamation congratulating General Chaffee and "the gallant officers and men under his command" on some "two thousand combats, great and small," and declaring, in effect, that Benevolent a.s.similation was at last triumphantly vindicated, and that opposition to American rule was at an end. The certificate of March 28, 1907, appears at pages 47-8 of the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1907, part 1. If we consider what is now going on in the Islands as "modern" history, and the days of the early fighting as "ancient" history, this certificate will serve as the connecting link between the two. It furnishes the key-note to all that had happened during the American occupation prior to 1907, and the key-note of all that has happened since. Therefore, though somewhat long, it is deemed indispensable to clearness to submit here in full the text of

THE GREAT CERTIFICATE OF 1907

Whereas the census of the Philippine Islands was completed and published on the twenty-seventh day of March, nineteen hundred and five, which said completion and publication of said census was, on the twenty-eighth day of March, nineteen hundred and five, duly published and proclaimed to the people by the governor-general of the Philippine Islands with the announcement that the President of the United States would direct the Philippine Commission to call a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular a.s.sembly, provided that a condition of general and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States should be certified by the Philippine Commission to have continued in the territory of the Philippine Islands for a period of two years after said completion and publication of said census; and

Whereas since the completion and publication of said census there have been no serious disturbances of the public order save and except those caused by the noted outlaws and bandit chieftains, Felizardo and Montalon, and their followers in the provinces of Cavite and Batangas, and those caused in the provinces of Samar and Leyte by the non-Christian and fanatical pulahanes resident in the mountain districts of the said provinces and the barrios contiguous thereto; and

Whereas the overwhelming majority of the people of said provinces of Cavite, Batangas, Samar, and Leyte have not taken part in said disturbances and have not aided or abetted the lawless acts of said bandits and pulahanes; and

Whereas the great ma.s.s and body of the Filipino people have, during said period of two years, continued to be law-abiding, peaceful, and loyal to the United States, and have continued to recognize and do now recognize the authority and sovereignty of the United States in the territory of said Philippine Islands: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Philippine Commission in formal session duly a.s.sembled, That it, said Philippine Commission, do certify, and it does hereby certify, to the President of the United States that for a period of two years after the completion and publication of the census a condition of general and complete peace, with recognition of the authority of the United States, has continued to exist and now exists in the territory of said Philippine Islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes; and be it further

Resolved by said Philippine Commission, That the President of the United States be requested, and is hereby requested, to direct said Philippine Commission to call a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular a.s.sembly of the people of said territory in the Philippine Islands, which a.s.sembly shall be known as the Philippine a.s.sembly.

Let us examine these amiable liberties thus taken with the facts of history by men of irreproachable private character, briefly a.n.a.lyzing their action. Such an examination and a.n.a.lysis are indispensable to a clear understanding by a great free people whose proudest boast is love of fair play, of whether the Filipino people, or any appreciable fraction of them, have ever in the least consented, or do now in the least consent, to our rule, as the small minority among us interested in keeping the Islands, have systematically sought, all these years, to have this nation believe. As the above certificate of 1907 was the last hurdle that Benevolent a.s.similation had to leap on the Benevolent Hypocrisy course over which we had to gallop in order to get from the freeing of Cuba to the subjugation of the Philippines, let us glance back for a moment at the first hurdle or two, leapt when Mr. Taft was in the Philippine saddle.

Judge Taft had said on November 30, 1900:

A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government under the supremacy of the United States [469];

and, pursuant to that idea, he had set up his civil government on July 4, 1901. He never did thereafter admit that he was mistaken in his original theory, but kept on trying to fit the facts to his theory, hoping that after a while they would fit. He "clung to his policy of disinterested benevolence with a tenacity born of conviction,"

to borrow a phrase from Governor-General Smith's inaugural address of 1907. But in this same inaugural address of Governor Smith of 1907, you find, for the first time in all the Philippine state papers, a frank admission of the actual conditions under which the civil government of 1901 was in fact set up. Says he:

While the smoke of battle still hung over the hills and valleys of the Philippines and every town and barrio in the islands was smoking hot with rebellion, she [the United States] replaced the military with a civil regime and on the smouldering embers of insurrection planted civil government. [470]

That confession, made with the bluntness of a most gallant soldier, is as refreshing in its honesty as the Roosevelt war-whoop of 1902. There shall be no tiresome repet.i.tion here concerning the original withholding of the facts from the American people in 1898-9, but to place in juxtaposition Secretary of War Root's representations to the American public in the year last named, and the actual facts as stated earlier in the same year by General MacArthur, one of our best fighting generals, during the thick of the early fighting, in an interview already noticed in its proper chronological place, will forever fix the genesis of the original lack of frankness as to conditions in the Philippines which has naturally and inexorably made frankness as to those conditions impossible ever since. As late as October 7, 1899, Mr. Root--who had not then and has not since been in the Philippines--had said in Chicago, in a speech at a dinner of the Marquette Club:

Well, against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting the Philippine nation? No. There is none. There are hundreds of islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes, speaking more than sixty different languages, and all but one are ready to accept American sovereignty.

As early as the beginning of April, 1899, just after the taking on March 31st of the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General MacArthur, who commanded our troops in the a.s.sault on that place, had said, in an interview with a newspaper man afterwards verified by the General before the Senate Committee of 1902 as substantially correct:

When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. * * * I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * * was opposed to us * * *. But after having come thus far, and having been brought much in contact with both insurrectos and amigos, [471] I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino ma.s.ses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads. [472]

The presidential election of 1900 had been fought out, in the midst of considerable bitterness, on the idea that the Root view was correct and the MacArthur view was altogether mistaken. So that after 1900, the McKinley Administration was irrevocably committed to the Root view. [473] The Philippine Government had, after 1900, diligently set to work to live up to the Root view, and to fit the facts to the Root view by prayer and hope, accompanied by a.s.severation. Hence in 1901 the alleged joyous sobs of welcome with which the Filipino people are, in effect, described in the report of the Philippine Commission for that year as having received the "benign" civil government, said sobs or other manifestations having spread, if the Commission's report is to be taken at its face value, "like wild-fire." Hence also the attempt of 1902 to minimize the insurrection of 1901-2, in Batangas and other provinces of southern Luzon, conducted by what Governor Luke E. Wright, in a speech delivered at Memphis in the latter part of 1902, called "the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent." Hence the quiet placing of the province of Surigao in the hands of the military in 1903 without suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the failure to order out the army in Albay in 1903 and in Samar in 1904. Hence also the prompt use of the army in Samar, Batangas, and Cavite in 1905, after the presidential election was safely over. Hence also the seething state of sedition which smouldered in the Visayan Islands in 1906, punctuated by the outbreak in Leyte of that year.

The psychologic processes by which the distinguished gentlemen who signed the Great Certificate of March 28, 1907, got their own consent to sign it make the most profoundly interesting study, relatively to the general welfare of the world, in all our Philippine experiments so far. They are the final flowering of the plant Political Expediency. They are the weeds of benevolent casuistry that become from time to time unavoidable in a colonial garden tended by a republic based on the consent of the governed and therefore by the law of its own life unfitted to run any other kind of a government frankly. These processes find their origin in the provisions of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act. Three days after President Roosevelt approved the Act, he issued his proclamation of July 4, 1902, above noticed, declaring the insurrection at an end. Section 6 of that Act provided:

Whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands shall have ceased, and a condition of general and complete peace shall have been established therein, and the fact shall be certified to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President, upon being satisfied thereof, shall order a census of the Philippine Islands to be taken by said Philippine Commission.