To this end I am considering the advisability of the return [to the islands] of the commission [the Schurman Commission] or such of the members thereof as can be secured.
In Cuba, General Wood began the work of reconstruction at Havana with a central government and the best men he could get hold of, and acted through them, letting his plans and purposes percolate downward to the masses of the people. Not so in the Philippines. Reconstruction there was to begin by establishing municipal governments, to be later followed by provincial governments, and finally by a central one; in other words, by placing the waters of self-government at the bottom of the social fabric among the most ignorant people, and letting them percolate up, according to some mysterious law of gravitation apparently deemed applicable to political physics. Of course, these poor people simply always took their cue from their leaders, knowing nothing themselves that could affect the success of this project except that we were their enemies and that they might get knocked in the head if they did not play the game. “I have believed,” says Mr. McKinley, in his message to Congress of December, 1899, “that reconstruction should not begin by the establishment of one central civil government for all the islands, with its seat at Manila, but rather that the work should be commenced by building up from the bottom.” Whereat, the young giant America bowed, in puzzled hope, and worldly-wise old Europe smiled, in silent but amused contempt.
If at the time he formulated this scheme for their government Mr. McKinley had known anything about the Philippines, or the Filipinos, he would have known that what he so suavely called “building from the bottom” was like trying to make water run up hill, i.e., like starting out to have ideas percolate upward, so that through “the masses” the more intelligent people might be redeemed. The “nigger in the woodpile” lay in the words “essentially popular in form.” Of course no government by us “essentially popular” was possible at the time. But a government “popular in form” would sound well to the American people, and, if they could be kept quiet until after the presidential election of 1900, maybe the supposed misunderstanding on the part of the Filipinos of the benevolence of our intentions might be corrected by kindness. Accordingly, the following spring, cotemporaneously with General Otis’s final departure from Manila to the United States, in which free country he might say the war was over as much as he pleased without being molested with round-robins by Bob Collins, O. K. Davis, John McCutcheon, and the rest of those banes of his insular career, who so pestiferously insisted that the American public ought to know the facts, the Taft Commission was sent out, to “aid” General MacArthur, as the Schurman Commission had “aided” General Otis.[3]
It would seem fairly beyond any reasonable doubt that the official information the Taft Commission were given by President McKinley concerning the state of public order they would find in the islands on arrival was in keeping with the information solemnly imparted to Congress by him in December thereafter, which was as follows: “By the spring of this year (1900) the effective opposition of the dissatisfied Tagals”—always the same minimization of the task of the army as a sop to the American conscience—“was virtually ended.” Then follows a glowing picture of how the Filipinos are going to love us after we rescue them from the hated Tagal, but with this circumspect reservation: “He would be rash who, with the teachings of contemporary history, would fix a limit” as to how long it will take to produce such a state of affairs. Looking at that mighty panorama of events from the dispassionate standpoint now possible, it seems to me that Mr. McKinley’s whole Philippine policy of 1899–1900 was animated by the belief that the more the Philippine situation should resemble the really identical Cuban one in the estimation of the American people, the more likely his Philippine policy was to be repudiated at the polls in the fall of 1900. The Taft Commission left Washington for Manila in the spring of 1900, after their final conference with the President who had appointed them and was a candidate for re-election in the coming fall, as completely committed as circumstances can commit any man or set of men to the programme of occupation which was to follow the subjugation of the inhabitants, and to the proposition of present incapacity for self-government, its corner-stone; to say nothing of the embarrassment felt at Washington by reason of having stumbled into a bloody war with people whom we honestly wanted to help, had never seen, and had nothing but the kindliest feelings for. While the serene and capacious intellect of William H. Taft was still pursuing the even tenor of its way in the halls of justice (as United States Circuit Judge for the 8th Circuit), the Philippine programme was formulated at Washington. Judge Taft went to Manila to make the best of a situation which he had not created, to write the lines of the Deus ex machina for a Tragedy of Errors up to that point composed wholly by others. It has been frequently stated and generally believed that when Mr. McKinley sent for him and proposed the Philippine mission, Judge Taft replied, substantially: “Mr. President, I am not the man for the place. I don’t want the Philippines.” To which Mr. McKinley is supposed to have replied: “You are the man for the place, Judge. I had rather have a man out there who doesn’t want them.” The point of the original story lay in what Mr. McKinley said. The point of the repetition of it here lies in what Mr. Taft said, the inference therefrom being that he did not think the true interests of his country “wanted” them, and that had he been called into President McKinley’s council sooner he would have so advised; an inference warranted by his subsequent admission that “we blundered into colonization.”[4]
It is utterly fatal to clear thinking on this great subject, which concerns the liberties of a whole people, to treat Judge Taft’s reports as Commissioner to, and later Governor of, the Philippines as in the nature of a judicial decision on the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government. When he consented to go out there, he went, not to review the findings of the Paris Peace Commission, but at the urgent solicitation of an Administration whose fortunes were irrevocably committed to those findings, including the express finding that they were unfit for self-government, and the implied one that we must remain to improve the condition of the inhabitants. He was thus not a judge come out to decide on the fitness of the people for self-government, but an advocate to make the best possible case for their unfitness, and its corollary, the necessity to remain indefinitely, just as England has remained in Egypt. The war itself convinced the whole army of the United States that Aguinaldo would have been the “Boss of the Show” had Dewey sailed away from Manila after sinking the Spanish fleet. The war satisfied us all that Aguinaldo would have been a small edition of Porfirio Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have-been would have been, very decidedly, “a going concern,” although Aguinaldo probably would have been able to say with a degree of accuracy, as Diaz might have said in Mexico for so many years, “The Republic? I am the Republic.” The war demonstrated to the army, to a Q. E. D., that the Filipinos are “capable of self-government,” unless the kind which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea for all the ills of government among men without regard to their temperament or historical antecedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos can control the masses of the people in their several districts as completely as a captain ever controlled a company.[5] While the municipal officials of the McKinley-Taft municipal kindergarten were stumbling along with the strange new town government system imported from America, and atoning to their benignant masters for mistakes by writing them letters about how benignant they—the teachers—were, they—the pupils,—according to the contemporaneous description by the commanding general of the United States forces in the islands, were running a superbly efficient municipal system throughout the whole archipelago, “simultaneously and in the same sphere as the American governments, and in many instances through the same personnel,”[6] in aid of the insurrection. General MacArthur humorously adds that the town officials “acted openly in behalf of the Americans and secretly in behalf of the insurgents, and, with considerable apparent solicitude for the interest of both.” In short, the war at once demonstrated their “capacity for self-government” and made granting it to them for the time being unthinkable. For the war was fought not on the issue of the capacity, but on the issue of the granting. The Treaty of Paris settled the “capacity” part. The army in 1898, 1899, and 1900 can hardly be said to have had any much more decided opinion on the capacity branch of the subject, than Perry did about the Japanese in 1854. The Paris Peace Commission having solemnly decided the “capacity part” adversely to the Filipinos and the war having followed, thereafter Mr. Taft went out to make out the best case possible in support of the action of the Peace Commission and, ex vi termini, in support of everything made necessary by the fact of the purchase. Unless some one goes out to present to the American people the other side of the case, they will never arrive at a just verdict.
Committed, a priori, to the task of squaring the McKinley Administration with its course as to Cuba, the only course possible for the Taft Commission was to set up a benevolent government based upon the incompetency of the governed, which, being a standing affront to the intelligence of the people, earns their hatred, however it may crave their love. By the very bitterness of the opposition it permits yet disregards, it binds itself ever more irrevocably to remain a benevolent engenderer of malevolence. Government and governed thus get wider apart as the years go by, and, the raison d’être of the former being the mental deficiencies of the latter, it must, in self-defence, assert those deficiencies the more offensively, the more vehemently they are denied. What hope therefore can there be that the light that shone upon Saul on the road to Damascus will ever break upon the President? What hope that he will ever re-attune his ears to the voice of the Declaration of Independence, calling down from where the Signers (we hope without untoward exception) have gone, crying: “William, William, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the right of a people to pursue happiness in their own way”? The difference between the President and the writer is that both went out to scoff and the latter remained—much longer—to pray.
The Taft Commission arrived at Manila on June 3, 1900, loaded to the guards with kindly belief in the stale falsehood wherewith General Otis, ably assisted by his press censor, had been systematically soothing Mr. McKinley’s and the general American conscience during the whole twenty months he had commanded the Eighth Army Corps,[7] viz., that the insurrection was due solely to “the sinister ambitions of a few selfish leaders,” and did not represent the wishes of the whole people. It is true that the insurrection originally started under Admiral Dewey’s auspices and under the initial protection of his puissant guns was headed by a group of men most of whom, including Aguinaldo, were Tagalos. But all Filipinos look alike, the whole seven or eight millions of them. They differ from one another not one whit more than one Japanese differs from another. And they all feel alike on most things,[8] because they all have the same customs, tastes, and habits of thought. Said Governor Taft to the Senate Committee in 1902:
While it is true that there are a number of Christian “tribes,” so-called,—I do not know the number, possibly eight or ten, or twelve,—that speak different languages, there is a homogeneity in the people in appearance, in habits, and in many avenues of thought. To begin with, they are Catholics.”[9]
Certainly this should forever crucify the stale slander, still ignorantly repeated in the United States at intervals, which seeks to make the American people think the great body of the Filipino people are still in a tribal state, ethnologically.[10] A Tagalo leader is about as much a “tribal” leader as is a Tammany “brave” of Irish antecedents. In fact there is much in common between the two. Both are clannish. Both have a genius for organization that is simply superb. Both are irrepressible about Home Rule. Countless generations ago the Filipinos were lifted by the Spanish priests out of the tribal state, and the educated people all speak Spanish. But the original tribal dialects, which the Spanish priests patiently mastered and finally reduced for them to a written language, still survive in the several localities of their origin. So that every Filipino of a well-to-do family is brought up speaking two languages, Spanish, and the local dialect of his native place, which is the only language known to the poorer natives of the same neighborhood. Surely even the valor of ignorance can see that we are presumptuously seeking to reverse the order of God and nature in assuming that an alien race can lead a people out of the wilderness better than could a government by the leading men of their own race to whom the less favored look with an ardent pride that would be a guarantee of loyal and inspiring co-operation. You can beat a balking horse to death but you cannot make him wag his tail, or otherwise indicate contentment or a disposition to cordial co-operation which will make for progress. Mr. Bryan has visited the Philippines, and his evidence is simply cumulative of mine, as mine, based on six years’ acquaintance with the Filipinos, is simply cumulative of Admiral Dewey’s testimony of 1898, so often cited hereinbefore, and of the opinion of Hon. George Curry, a Republican member of Congress from New Mexico who served eight years in the Philippines, and believes they can safely be given their independence by 1921. Mr. Bryan says:
So far as their own internal affairs are concerned, they do not need to be subject to any alien government.