I remained in charge of the First Judicial District for more than a year, and during that period tried few or no crimes of a political character, that is to say, indictments for sedition or the like—attempts to subvert the government. The district comprised a total population of about a half million people, more than one-eighth of the population of Luzon, and a total area of over 13,000 square miles, nearly one-third of all Luzon. But remember, this was in northern Luzon, where the work of pacification was lucidly completed by the army before the “peace-at-any-price” policy began. We will see what happened in my friend Judge Carson’s district, and in the rest of southern Luzon later. The principal broad general fact I now recall, in connection with the administration of justice in the First Judicial District during the year or more I had it, is that the main volume of business on the court calendars was crimes of violence of a strictly non-political character due to lack of efficient police protection in the several communities, consequent on withdrawal of military garrisons. The country was in an unsettled state. The aftermath of war, lawless violence, was virulently present, and the presence of troops scattered through a province, under such circumstances, is a wonderful moral force to restrain lawlessness. However high the purpose, however kindly the motive, the setting up of a civil government in the Philippines at the time it was set up, when the country was far from ready for it, was a terrible mistake. Of course no one man in a given province or judicial district had a bird’s-eye view of the whole situation and the whole panorama at the time, such as we can get at this distance, in retrospect. Of course it did not lie in human nature for the men responsible for the mistake to see it at first, and, the die once cast, they had to keep on, with intermittent resort to military help, the extent of which help was always minimized thereafter. To show how little the general state of the archipelago was understood by American provincial officials busy in a given part of it, and getting little or no news of the outside world, I remained in the First Judicial District from July, 1901, to August, 1902, and heard nothing of the great insurrection in southern Luzon, in Batangas, and the adjacent provinces, which raged during the winter of 1901–02, except a vague rumor that there was trouble down there. The Filipinos did, however. Of course for Mr. Root to be able to furnish in December, 1901, a report, as Secretary of War, to the President, for consumption by Congress and the people of this country, to the effect that his volunteer army had been mustered out on schedule time, June 30, 1901, and a “civil” government set up and in due operation, was a nice showing, calculated to sooth latent public discontent with wading through slaughter to over-seas dominion. Reports thereafter of disturbances could always be waived aside as merely local in character, and not serious. If it were stoutly asserted that everything was quiet all over the archipelago except in certain parts of certain localities, naming them, that sounded well, and as the public at home simply skipped the unpronounceable names, not caring much whether they represented molecules or hemispheres, all went well. For instance, most of the provinces of the archipelago were organized under “civil” government prior to the inauguration of Governor Taft, which occurred, July 4, 1901, and on July 17th, thereafter, Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol were restored to military control.[12] I suppose the fact that Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol had been so restored was duly announced at the time in the Associated Press despatches from Manila. But what light did it throw on the situation? Who knew whether any one of these names represented a mountain lair, a country village, a remote islet, or a large and populous province? As a matter of fact, each was a province, and the total population of the three provinces was 1,180,655,[13] and their total area 4651 square miles.[14] The eminent gentlemen charged with the government of the Islands, once they committed themselves to their “civil” government, persisted always in treating the insurrection, as General Hancock’s campaign speeches used to treat the tariff—as “a local issue.” The true analogy, that of a house on fire, with the fire partly but not wholly under control, and momentarily subject to gusts of wind, never seems to have occurred to them. Here were provinces aggregating nearly twelve hundred thousand people, officially admitted to be still in insurrection within less than two weeks after the announcement of the inauguration of a civil government, which included them, with its implied assertion of a state of peace as to them.
If to the three provinces above named you add the province of Samar, later of dark and bloody fame, you have a fourth province as to which not only had there been no “civil” government organized on paper, but no claim yet made by any one that we had ever conquered it. We had been so busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not yet had time to bother very much with Samar. The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its population 266,237. (See the census tables already cited.) In their report dated October 15, 1901,[15] you find the Commission admitting that “the insurrection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu” and “parts of” Laguna and Tayabas provinces. Now the euphemistic limitation implied in the words “parts of” is quite negligible, for any serious purpose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather constantly on the move, and the population in all the “parts of” any province that was still holding out backed up the combatants morally and materially, with information as to our movements, supplies, etc., whenever the insurgent detachments, in the course of their peregrinations, happened to pass through those “parts.” So, to make a recapitulation presenting the political situation admitted by the Commission to exist a little over three months after the inauguration of civil government, we have the insurrection still in progress as follows:
| Province | Area (sq. m.) | Population |
| Batangas | 1,201 | 257,715 |
| Cebu | 1,939 | 653,727 |
| Bohol | 1,511 | 269,223 |
| Laguna | 629 | 148,606 |
| Tayabas | 5,993 | 153,065 |
| Samar | 5,276 | 266,237 |
| Total | 16,549 | 1,748,573 |
According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his “civil” government on the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles, having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.
Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain why I have so frequently put the word “civil” in quotations in referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly speaking, if “civil” does not imply consent of the governed, it at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get criticised afterwards for “subserviency” to the government you are thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug, pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench, never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was any “consent” on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed there a civil régime under a military name. We were now, in the Philippines, serving a military régime under a civil name. We had all of us doubtless—if there was an exception it is immaterial—served on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty, that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins, the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis’s attacks,[16] the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective, I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly, by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there, to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, “No, the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct.” But the distinguished Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been since 1909, Governor of the Philippines—and who, before he went out there was a representative of Big Business in Boston—Governor Forbes, and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft, Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness, Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines[17] because he liked that kind of a judge.
Having sown the wind by setting up his civil government too soon, let us now observe the whirlwind Governor Taft reaped within six months thereafter. Of course the civil and military folk were at daggers’ points. That goes without saying. But their differences were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos did not get hold of them. To that end, the situation was also diligently concealed in the United States. In his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find President Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of that rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, General Chaffee, and also commending Governor Taft, and telling them how harmoniously they had gotten along together to the credit of their common country. But in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee had relieved General MacArthur, you find the following cablegram:
Executive Mansion, Washington,
October 8, 1901.
Chaffee, Manila: I am deeply chagrined, to use the mildest possible term, over the trouble between yourself and Taft. I wish you to see him personally, and spare no effort to secure prompt and friendly agreement in regard to the differences between you. Have cabled him also. It is most unfortunate to have any action which produces friction and which may have a serious effect both in the Philippines and here at home. I trust implicitly that you and Taft will come to agreement.
Theodore Roosevelt.[18]
The most important words of the above telegram are “and here at home.” The “serious effect here at home” so earnestly deprecated was that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal of the police protection of the army from districts in which there were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that “the great majority” were “entirely willing” to American sovereignty. It would also show up Mr. Root’s nonsense about “the patient and unconsenting millions,” so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his pious Philippics against delivering said millions “into the hands of the assassin, Aguinaldo,”[19] and would reveal the truth confessed by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July, 1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just completed the suppression of “an insurrection of 7,000,000 people.”