It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the rural population of a whole district out of house and home, and make them come to town to live indefinitely on such public charity as may drain through the itching fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning meantime their growing crops, and the household effects they cannot bring with them, is depriving people of their property, and restraining them of their liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, in the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine Report, page 116, during an insurrection in Batangas, to control which, the presidential election of 1904 being then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court of the Philippines held that detention of people as reconcentrados under such circumstances “for the purpose of protecting them” was not an illegal restraint of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been suspended. This decision held it to be both the prerogative and the duty of the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when the public safety so required.
I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, the former wise and just judge, in whom is now vested by law the mighty power of filling vacancies on the highest court in this great country of ours, will seriously contend that that reconcentration law is not in direct violation of the above quoted section of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, for the government of the Philippines, and therefore null and void. The truth is, it was a piece of careless legislation, dealing with conditions that were essentially war conditions, under a government which was forever vowing that peace conditions existed, and determined not to admit the contrary. The civil government was like Lot’s wife. It could not look back.
The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual provision permitting the governor to declare martial law in a given locality in his discretion. But the reconcentration law passed by the Philippine Commission was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority, so as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces to which it might be applied, regardless of how many lives it might cost. In its last analysis the reconcentration law was at once an admission of a duty to order out the military and a declaration of intention to neglect that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who enacted it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives how to maintain order themselves by letting them stew in the dregs of their own insurrection. Yet no one can read the Commission’s own description of the widespread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without seeing, from their own showing, how obvious was their duty to have waited, originally, until law and order were restored, by not interfering with the war itself until it was over, and by keeping the country properly garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it was over, until something like real peace conditions should exist, on which to begin the work of post-bellum reconstruction. After all, it all gets us back to the original pernicious programme outlined in President McKinley’s annual message to Congress of December, 1899, wherein was announced the intention to send out the Taft Commission, which message also announced, in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley’s purpose to begin the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient and unconsenting millions “loyal to our rule” should be rescued from the clutch of the hated Tagals.
Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the moral quality of executive action putting it in operation was not unlike that which would attach should the Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering the state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a dozen towns around Boston, issue a proclamation something like this:
The situation has grown so serious that your local police force, as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the situation. You will all, therefore, thrust your tooth-brushes, night-gowns, and a change of clothing, into the family grip, and assemble on the Boston Common and in the public gardens, there to remain until the necessity for this order ceases to exist, and we will there take the best care of you we can, as was done in the case of the San Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order out the military.
If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought at the time to the validity of the reconcentration law, in its relation to the “due process of law” clause of the Philippine Government Act, which none of them probably did, he must simply have justified the means by the benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so much better than Congress possibly could, the needs of the local situation. But if you read this law in the light of a knowledge of its practical operation, there is more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon’s friend’s “corpse-carcass stench” and “clouds of vampire bats softly swirling out on their orgies over the dead” than there is of benevolence. It really was unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted reconcentration to the native police and constabulary the native governors had, and it was wholly indefensible for them to take the liberty of violating an act of Congress in order to live up to their pet fiction about the war being “entirely over.”
After the term of court at Surigao in the month of May, 1903, I was sent to Misamis province, where I remained until September, handling an insurrection down there. This province also was nominally in a state of peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of the existence of the insurrection by suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Curiously enough, as I wrote Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of disturbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their movement was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection in Albay I dealt with later, but they were by no means unmitigated cut-throats. I have often wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed purpose was to subvert the existing government. The use of this word “insurrection” in connection with these various disturbances recalls a pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the Supreme Bench of the Islands. Some of my friends, members of the bar of my district, got up a petition to the then Governor-General setting forth in most partial terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in the Philippines, in the candor of informal social intercourse, all of us always called a spade a spade, i.e., we called an insurrection an insurrection, instead of referring to the disturbance in the guarded and euphemistic terms which you find in all the official reports intended for home consumption. So in their petition, these gentlemen recited, among my other supposed qualifications, that I had held court in three different provinces “during insurrections in the same.”
The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to deal with during Governor Taft’s administration as Governor of the Philippines. This was the insurrection headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of this man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Government in connection with the Albay disturbances of 1902–3 is in the report of the colonel commanding the constabulary for the district which included Albay, Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903.[11] This report contains a sort of diary of events for the year preceding the date of it. An entry for October 28, 1902, begins:
Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon Ola, chief of the ladrones in this province, with a view of inducing him to surrender.
Think of this great government negotiating with the leader of a band of thieves who were openly and flagrantly defying its authority! The entry proceeds: