A year and twenty days after his decisive victory Admiral Dewey sailed from Manila in his flagship. Wherever the British ensign flew he was received with every demonstration of honour and respect both by naval and military officers and by civilians. His reception in New York was marked by an almost delirious enthusiasm. But long before he arrived, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, disgusted with the conduct of the campaign, made a speech at the Miami University and denounced the President for neglect of duty which brought on the war in the Philippines.
He said: “If the bitterest enemy of the United States had sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest trouble in the shortest time, he could have devised for that end no policy more successful than the one we have already pursued.” It must be added that Mr. Whitelaw Reid, perhaps to prevent being accused of having sympathy with the enemy, denounced Aguinaldo and the Tagals as rebels, savages and treacherous barbarians, unfit for citizenship or self-government, and declared that the Philippines belong to America by right of conquest.
I suppose Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or perhaps any citizen of the United States, has a right to denounce his own President, and certainly the management of the Philippine annexation has been bad from the beginning.
But I think Mr. McKinley was badly served by the Peace Commission. They seem to me to have made many and egregious mistakes.
1. They took General Merritt’s opinion that the Tagals would submit, and accepted Mr. Foreman’s assurance of Tagal plasticity and accommodating nature.
2. They disregarded the intimation of D. Felipe Agoncillo, the accredited agent of the Tagals, that these would accept no settlement to which they were not parties.
3. They treated several millions of civilised Christian people like a herd of cattle to be purchased with the ranch.
4. Under Article VIII., they guaranteed the religious orders the possession of estates already taken from them.
5. Under Article IX., they gave the expelled friars the right to return and exercise their profession.
To illustrate their careless procedure, I may add that they did not even accurately determine the boundaries of the Archipelago to be ceded, and now, in August 1900, $100,000 is to be paid to Spain for Sibutu and Cagayan Sulu Islands, left out by mistake. If any man has a right to say, “Save me from my friends,” that man is William McKinley.