Indeed it is not until 1907 that, we find Mr. Taft’s paternal solicitude for his step-daughter, Miss Filipina, finally reconciling itself to the idea that while this generation seems to want Home Rule as irreconcilably as Ireland herself and “wont be happy ’til it gets it,” yet inasmuch as Home Rule is not, in his judgment, good for every people, this generation is therefore a wicked and perverse generation, and hence the Filipinos must simply resign themselves to the idea of being happy in some other generation. This attitude was freely stated before the Millers’ convention at St. Louis, May 30, 1907, the speech being reported in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat the next day. Said Mr. Taft on that occasion, after admitting that the Islands had been a tremendous financial drain on us:
If, then, we have not had material recompense, have we had it in the continuing gratitude of the people whom we have aided?
Answering this, in effect, though not in so many words, “Alas, no,” he adds, with a sigh which is audible between the lines:
He who would measure his altruism by the thankfulness of those whom he aids, will not persist in good works.
Thus we see the Mark Tapley optimism of 1902 become in 1907 a species of solicitude which Dickens describes in Bleak House as “Telescopic Philanthropy,” in the chapter by that title in which he introduces the famous Mrs. Jellyby, mother of a large and interesting family, “a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public,” who “has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present devoted to the subject of Africa, with a general view to the cultivation of the coffee berry—and the natives,”—to the woeful neglect of her own domestic concerns and her large and expensive family of children. Since 1907, Mr. Taft has frankly abandoned his early delusion about the consent-of-the-governed, and boldly takes the position, up to that time more or less evaded, that the consent of the governed is not at all essential to just government.
The apotheosis of Uncle Sam as Mrs. Jellyby is to be found in one of Mr. Taft’s speeches wherein he declared that the present Philippine policy was “a plan for the spread of Christian civilization in the Orient.”
Thus has it been that, under the reactionary influence of a colonial policy, this republic has followed its frank abandonment of the idea that all just government must derive its origin in the consent of the governed by a further abandonment of the idea that Church and State should be kept separate. I do not wish to make President Taft ridiculous, and could not if I would. Nor do I seek to belittle him in the eyes of his people,—for we are “his people,” for the time being. No one can belittle him. He is too big a man to be belittled by anybody. Besides, he is, in many respects beyond all question, a truly great man. But he is not the only great man in history who has made egregious blunders. And there is no question that we are running there on the confines of Asia, in the Philippines, a superfluous governmental kindergarten whose sessions should be concluded, not suddenly, but without unnecessary delay. The two principal reasons for retaining the Filipinos as subjects, or “wards,” or by whatever euphemism any one may prefer to designate the relation, are, first, that a Filipino government would not properly protect life and property, and second, that although they complain much at taxation without representation through tariff and other legislation placed or kept on the statute books of Congress through the influence and for the benefit of special interests in the United States, yet that such taxation without representation is not so grievous as to justify them in feeling as we did in 1776. Whether these reasons for retaining the Filipinos as subjects indefinitely are justified by the facts, must depend upon the facts. If they are not, the question will then arise, “Would a Filipino government be any worse for the Filipinos than the one we are keeping saddled on them over their protest?”
In his letter of instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, Mr. McKinley first quoted the noble concluding language with which the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila gave an immediate and supremely comforting sense of security to a city of some three hundred thousand people who had then been continuously in terror of their lives for three and one half months, thus:
This city, its inhabitants, * * * and its private property of all description * * * are placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army;