The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President Taft’s policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person of the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion, viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley’s original instructions to him, lest “the full performance of this obligation” might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend, Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged, then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled to a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it “concerns the honor and conscience of their country.”
Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned, together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then, that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of “civil” government and convey the impression of the state of peace the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God.
The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three distinct stages:
(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.
(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated, patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of provinces, until the summer of 1902.
(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things had been given time to settle down in them to normal.
These last are the “gardens of weeds”—brigandage weeds—above mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from one of the military reports of 1902:
The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the guise of patriotism.[6]
Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.
It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those of the latter’s colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa, etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion: