[46] Under the Spaniards, these were two provinces. They were combined by us.
[47] A province in Latin countries corresponds more nearly to what we call a county than to anything else familiar to our system of political divisions.
[48] For the details of this march, see War Department Report, 1900, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 309. Captain Batchelor had neither orders nor permission to do what he did. When he cut loose from the command he belonged to, he took very long chances on finding subsistence for his men in the unknown country he had set out to conquer, to say nothing of the highly probable chances of annihilation of his whole command. When an officer commanding troops does this in time of war, he does so at his peril, and signal success is his only salvation.
[49] Area tables, Philippine Census, vol. i., p. 58.
[50] Population tables, Philippine Census, vol. ii., p. 123.
[51] Though Nueva Vizcaya is not in the Cagayan valley, but on a plateau of the great divide, still, its streams all flow into the Cagayan valley, and that term will be used in this book, as it is colloquially in the Philippines, to include not only the Cagayan valley proper, but also the adjoining tributary province of Nueva Vizcaya.
[52] The only thing of interest to the American people that ever happened over there was the capture of Lieutenant Gilmore of the Navy, and his men, at Baler, on the Pacific coast, in Principe, a capture which, it will be recollected, was followed by long captivity, and ultimately terminated in rescue. The interested student will see these two provinces on the American maps of the islands, but they were each attached by the Taft government for administration purposes to another province, and do not appear in the American census list of provinces. Therefore, they cut no figure in the census totals, either of area or population.
[53] The officer on whom public attention in the United States was later focussed by an alleged order, charged to have been issued by him in a campaign in Samar to “kill everything over ten years old.” This alleged order was called by the American newspapers of the period “Jake Smith’s Kill and Burn Order.”
[54] The figures as to Principe are mere arbitrary guesses, the exact figures used being fixed on merely to get convenient round numbers, there being no statistics as to Principe.
[55] Of course the Filipinos should be consulted as to what provinces should constitute each state, but I am simply sketching a tentative governmental scheme based upon the way our army perfected its original grip on public order and the general administrative situation.