“Hay.”[14]
Our proclamation of April 4, 1899, was also taken up at their request and was gone over minutely, sentence by sentence. We were asked to explain certain expressions which they did not fully understand.
They told us that it would be hard for their army to lay down its arms when it had accomplished nothing, and asked if it could be taken into the service of the United States. We answered that some of the regiments might be taken over and employment on public works be found for the soldiers of others.
We endeavoured to arrange for an interview with Aguinaldo, either going to meet him or assuring him safe conduct should he desire to confer with us at Manila.
They left, promising to return in three weeks when they had had time to consider the matters under discussion, but they never came back.
Shortly thereafter there was an odd occurrence. Soon after our arrival we had learned that Mr. Schurman was a man of very variable opinions. He was rather readily convinced by plausible arguments, but sometimes very suddenly reversed his views on an important subject.
At the outset Archbishop Nozaleda made a great impression upon him. The Archbishop was a thoroughgoing Spaniard of the old school, and entertained somewhat radical opinions as to what should be done to end the distressing situation which existed. After talking with him Mr. Schurman seemed to be convinced that we ought to adopt a stern and bloody policy, a conclusion to which Colonel Denby and I decidedly objected.
A little later he made a trip up the Pasig River with Admiral Dewey and others and had a chance to see something of the aftermath of war. It was not at all pretty. It never is. I was waiting for him with a carriage at the river landing on his return and had hard work to keep him away from the cable office. His feelings had undergone a complete revulsion. He insisted that if the American people knew what we were doing they would demand that the war be terminated immediately at any cost and by whatsoever means, and he wanted to tell them all about it at once. By the next morning, however, things fortunately looked rather differently to him.
Mr. Schurman acquired a working knowledge of the Spanish language with extraordinary promptness. Shortly thereafter Colonel Denby and I discovered that when Filipinos came to see the commission in order to impart information or to seek it, he was conferring with them privately and sending them away without our seeing them at all.
Soon after we had made our formal statement of the situation to the President, Mr. Schurman had an interview with an Englishman who had been living in Insurgent territory north of Manila, from which he had just been ejected, in accordance with Luna’s order. This man told him all about the mistakes of the Americans and evidently greatly impressed him, for shortly thereafter he read to us at a commission meeting a draft of a proposed cablegram which he said he hoped we would approve. It would have stultified us, had we signed it, as it involved in effect the abandonment of the position we had so recently taken and a radical change in the policy we had recommended. Mr. Schurman told us that if we did not care to sign it, he would send it as an expression of his personal opinion. Colonel Denby asked him if his personal opinion differed from his official opinion, and received an affirmative reply. We declined to approve the proposed cablegram, whereupon he informed us that if his policy were adopted, he and General Aguinaldo would settle things without assistance from us, and that otherwise he would resign. He inquired whether we, too, would send a cable, and we told him certainly not, unless further information from us was requested. He sent his proposed message, in somewhat modified form, and received a prompt reply instructing him to submit it to the full commission and cable their views.