With Cebu and the problems of Cebu behind us, we felt that our long trip was nearly finished. Bohol, Leyte, Samar, Albay, the Camarines and Sorsogon, each in its turn brought us nearer to our comfortable homes in Manila and to relaxation, for which we were beginning to long.
Each district expected us to give them at least a day for business and an evening for festivity, but this was not always possible. At Sorsogon we found a veritable riot of decoration, with fine arches and many flags and every indication that the town had spared no effort to make our visit there a memorable event. In the evening, beside the banquete and baile, there was to have been a torchlight procession, with a triumphal car and a Filipino maiden as the Goddess of Liberty. It was a great pity that we couldn’t stay, but we had to sail that afternoon for Boak, so the programme had to be advanced several hours.
The extraordinary car, or float, which had undoubtedly cost weeks of skilled workmanship, came forth into the blistering sunlight bearing the pretty brown girl in tinsel and white muslin, her long, black hair almost wholly enveloping her as she held aloft the flickering symbol of Enlightenment. It was a Filipino adaptation of the “sacred torch” which we had ourselves been carrying throughout the islands, and I felt that its production was a fitting climax to our laborious progress.
Two days later when we landed in Manila, after organising Marinduque and Batangas, we were able to look back upon a singular experience, an expedition perhaps unique in history, with which was ushered in a new era, not to say a new national existence, for the people of the Philippine Islands.
CHAPTER IX
THE WILD MEN’S COUNTRY
I should like to say here, by way of explanation, which may or may not be necessary, that I am not trying in this narrative to pose as a woman endowed with an especial comprehension of such problems of state as men alone have been trained to deal with. I confess only to a lively interest in my husband’s work which I experienced from the beginning of our association and which nothing in our long life together, neither monotony, nor illness, nor misfortune, has served to lessen; and it would be practically impossible for me to write a record of memories in which he did not figure very largely.
In the settlement of American control in the Philippine Islands Mr. Taft, first as President of the first legislative Commission and, later, as Civil Governor, had to contend with a varied and complex resistance which it would be difficult for one not experienced in politics to comprehend. If it had been Filipino resistance only it would have been fairly easy to overcome, but Filipino resistance was indirectly sanctioned and directly assisted by a strong opposition in the United States to what seemed to us who were on the ground to be the only sensible and really patriotic measures possible under the circumstances.
For reasons which I have tried to convey, as clearly as I am able, my husband was not in favour of a continuation of military rule in the Islands beyond the time when military activity was imperative, nor was he in favour of abandoning a problem which grew daily more difficult and more complicated. So he and his colleagues persisted in the tremendous task of settling a whole people under a sane and sensible form of government.
PHILIPPINE NON-CHRISTIANS. A BONTOC IGORROTE (TOP, LEFT,) A MORO AND TWO KALINGA CHIEFS (WITH SHIELDS)