Colonial Ministry Code. H.M. the Queen has perused with great satisfaction your Excellencyʼs telegram, and commands me to congratulate you in the name of the nation. In view of the opinion of your Excellency and the generals under your orders that the honour of the army is saved, the Government fully authorizes your Excellency to accept the surrender of the rebel chiefs and their Government on the terms specified in your telegram. Please advise the surrender as soon as possible in order to give due and solemn publicity to the event. Receive my sincere congratulations and those of the Government.
Sagasta.
At the period of the above despatches the Peninsular and the Insular authorities were living in a foolʼs paradise with respect to Philippine affairs. Had it been officially admitted that those reforms which the clerical party so persistently opposed, but which the home legislators were willing to concede, had been granted to the rebels as a condition of peace, “the honour of the army” would have suffered in Spanish public opinion. Hence, the Spaniardsʼ conception of national dignity imposed on the Government the necessity of representing the rebel chiefs as repentant, begging for their lives, and craving the means of existence in exile as the result of Spanish military valour.
But abroad, where the ministerial denial, mentioned on p. [414], was published by the foreign press, Aguinaldo was universally spoken of as having been “bought off.”
A wiser government would have learnt a lesson from a sixteen-monthsʼ rebellion and have afterwards removed its causes, if only to ensure the mother countryʼs sovereignty. The probability of the Filipinos being able to subvert Spanish rule by their own unaided efforts was indeed remote, but a review of Spanish colonial history ought to have suggested to the legislators that that extraneous assistance to sedition which promoted emancipation in the former Spanish-American territories might one day be extended to the Filipinos.
The publication of the above documents, however, did little to calm the anger of the Madrid politicians who maintained that Spanish dominion in the Philippines could only be peacefully assured by a certain measure of reform in consonance with the nativesʼ aspirations.
Months afterwards, when Spanish sovereignty in the Archipelago was drawing to a close, the Conde de las Almenas opened a furious debate in the Senate, charging all the Colonial Govs.-General with incompetency, but its only immediate effect was to widen the breach between political parties.
[1] The Katipunan League and Freemasonry were not identical institutions. There were many Freemasons who were leaguers, but not because they were Freemasons, as also there were thousands of leaguers who knew nothing of Freemasonry. There is little doubt that Freemasonry suggested the bare idea of that other secret society called Katipunan, whose signs and symbols were of masonic design, but whose aims were totally different. It is probable, too, that the liberty which Freemasons enjoyed to meet in secret session was taken advantage of by the leaguers. There were risings in the Islands long before the introduction of Freemasonry. This secret society was introduced into the Colony a little before the year 1850. In 1893 the first lodges of the Spanish Grand Orient were opened, and there were never more than 16 lodges of this Order up to the evacuation by the Spaniards. Each lodge had about 30 members, or, say, a total of 500. The Spanish deputy, Dr. Miguel Morayta, in his speech in the Spanish Congress in April, 1904, stated that General Ramon Blancoʼs reply to Father Mariano Gil (the discoverer of the Katipunan) was that the identity of Freemasonry with Katipunan “existed only in the brains of the friars and fanatical Spaniards.”
[2] By intermarriage and blood relationship Don Pedro P. Rojas is allied with several of the best Manila families. His grandfather, Don Domingo Rojas, a prominent citizen in his time, having become a victim of intrigue, was confined in the Fortress of Santiago, under sentence of death. The day prior to that fixed for his execution, he was visited by a friend, and the next morning when the executioner entered his cell, Don Domingo was found in a dying condition, apparently from the effect of poison. Don Domingo had a son José and a daughter Marguerita. On their fatherʼs death, they and Joséʼs son, the present Don Pedro P. Rojas, went to Spain, where Doña Marguerita espoused a Spaniard, Don Antonio de Ayala, and Don José obtained from the Spanish Government a declaration stating that whereas Don Domingo had been unjustly condemned to capital punishment, the Gov.-General was ordered to refund, out of his own pocket, to the Rojas family the costs of the trial. The Rojas and Ayala families then returned to the Philippines, where Don Antonio de Ayala made a considerable fortune in business and had two daughters, one of whom, Doña Cármen, married Don Pedro P. Rojas, and the other wedded Don Jacobo Zobel, an apothecary of large means and of German descent. Don Pedro P. Rojas, who was born in 1848, has two sons and two daughters. The three families belonged to the élite of Manila society, whilst the Rojas and the Ayalas acquired a just reputation both for their enterprising spirit, which largely benefited the Colony, and for their charitable philanthropy towards all classes.