Major Bourns eventually returned to the United States. His work was taken over by an army officer, with the result that two of our best men died very suddenly in that gentleman’s back yard. As I spoke Spanish, and as all sorts of people came to see the commission, I was the logical candidate for this job, which I thereupon inherited.
Each morning, if there was news, I myself laboriously thumped out my notes on the typewriter, making an original and one copy. The copy I took at once to General Lawton. The original I took, later, to General Otis.
General Lawton was firmly convinced that most army officers were unfitted by their training to perform civil functions. He organized municipal governments with all possible promptness in the towns occupied by his troops, and in this work he requested my assistance, which I was of course glad to give. Sr. Felipe Calderon drafted a simple provisional scheme of municipal government which I submitted for criticism to that most distinguished and able of Filipinos, Sr. Cayetano Arellano.[15] When the final changes in it had been made, I accompanied General Lawton on a trip to try putting it into effect. We held elections and established municipal governments in a number of the towns just south of Manila, and in some of those along the Pasig River.
General Otis watched our operations and their results narrowly, and was sufficiently well pleased with the latter to order General Kobbé to follow a similar course in various towns on or near the railroad north of Manila. Kobbé did not profess to know much about municipal government, and asked me to go with him and help until he got the hang of the thing, which I did.
Thus it happened that the first Philippine Commission had a sort of left-handed interest in the first municipal governments established in the islands under American rule.
The College of Medicine and Surgery, Manila
In his endeavour to show that the Commission interfered with military operations, Blount has ascribed certain statements to Major Starr. He says: “... at San Isidro on or about November 8, Major Starr said: ‘We took this town last spring,’ stating how much our loss had been in so doing, ‘but partly as a result of the Schurman commission parleying with the Insurgents, General Otis had us fall back. We have just had to take it again.’”[16]
If Major Starr ever made such a statement he was sadly misinformed. General Lawton was the best friend I ever had in the United States Army. I saw him almost daily when he was in Manila, and he showed me the whole telegraphic correspondence which passed between him and General Otis on the subject of the withdrawal from San Isidro and Nueva Ecija, which was certainly one of the most ill advised moves that any military commander was ever compelled to make. General Lawton’s unremitting attacks had absolutely demoralized the Insurgent force, and my information is that when he finally turned back, Aguinaldo and several members of his cabinet were waiting, ten miles away, to surrender to him when he next advanced, believing that they could never escape from him. I have not the telegraphic correspondence before me, but I remember its salient features. Otis ordered Lawton to withdraw, and Lawton, convinced of the inadvisability of the measure, objected. Otis replied that, with the rainy season coming on, he could neither provision him nor furnish him ammunition. Lawton answered that he had provisions enough to last three weeks and ammunition enough to finish the war, whereupon Otis peremptorily ordered him to withdraw. The Philippine Commission had no more to do with this matter than they had to do with the similar order against advancing which Otis sent Lawton on the day the latter won the Zapote River fight, when the Insurgents were running all over the Province of Cavite. Lawton wanted to push forward and clean the whole place up. The reply to his request to be allowed to do so ran, if memory serves me well, as follows:—