The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard.
Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.
Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903, to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was no more hammering it into the American business men having money invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their “little brown brother,” for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans, because, soon after he came into power, he “let the cat out of the bag,” by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft’s “Philippines for the Filipinos” need not cause any specially billowy sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were wholly unfit for self-government—all of which, in effect, meant that Governor Taft had been merely “Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.”
The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and all feel: “Alackaday! Our true friend has departed.” But as Secretary of War Taft, after four years more of trying to please both sides, at home, at last frankly told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the opening of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, practically just what Governor Wright had begun to tell them from the moment his predecessor had exchanged the parting tear with them on the water-front at Manila in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy of uncompromising honesty on the present political situation, may easily be guessed.
Governor Wright’s method of repudiating the Taft straddle took for its key-note, in lieu of “The Philippines for the Filipinos,” the slogan “An Equal Chance for All.” What Governor Wright meant was merely that there would be no more browbeating of Americans to make them love their little brown brother as much as Governor Taft was supposed to love him, but that everybody would be treated absolutely alike and nobody coddled. However, the Filipinos of course knew that they could not compete with American wealth and energy, and so did the Americans in the islands. So what the Wright slogan, unquestionably fair as was its intent, inexorably meant to everybody concerned except the dignified, straightforward and candid propounder of it, was, in effect, the British “White Man’s Burden” or Trust-for-Civilization theory, a theory whereunder the white man who wants some one else’s land goes and takes it on the idea that he can put it to better use than the owner. Thus early did the original “jollying” Mr. Taft had given them become transparent to his little brown brother. Thus early did it become clear to the Filipinos that behind the mask of executive protestations that they shall some day have independence when fit for it, lurks a set determination industriously to earn for an indeterminate number of generations yet to come
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard.
This book has been written, up to this point, in vain, if the preceding chapters have not made clear how much political expediency, looking to the welfare of a party in power naturally seeking to continue in power, necessarily dominates Philippine affairs under American rule. We have observed under the microscope of history, made available by the official documents now accessible, the long battle between the political expediency germ and the independence bug which began in General Anderson’s dealings with Aguinaldo and continued through General Merritt’s and General Otis’s régimes. We have seen General MacArthur’s attempt at a wise surgical operation to excise the independence bug from the Philippine body politic—so that the expediency germ might die a natural death from having nothing to feed on. We have seen that operation interfered with by the Taft Commission during the presidential campaign of 1900, because the men in control of the republic could not ignore considerations of political expediency; and we saw the consequent premature setting up of the civil government in 1901, with all its dire consequences in the then as yet unconquered parts of the archipelago, southern Luzon, and some of the Visayan Islands. We have observed the effective though heroic local treatment administered to the Philippine body politic by General Bell in Batangas in 1901–2, with a view of killing off the independence bug there. We have seen the fierce struggle between some of the bug’s belated spawn and the expediency germ’s now more emboldened forces in Albay in the off year, 1903. We are now to take our fifth year’s course in the colonial department of politico-entomological research, the presidential year 1904.
It was the way the Samar insurrection of 1904–5-6 was handled which finally convinced me that the Filipinos would not kill any more of each other in a hundred years than we have killed, or permitted to be killed, of them, in the fell process of Benevolent Assimilation.