Now the reason the nation blundered into taking the Philippines was that it believed the Filipinos to be, not a people, but a jumble of savage tribes. But the reason the men who controlled the action of the government at the time took the Philippines was because they believed they would pay. Nevertheless, there was a sufficient number of our fellow-citizens—controlled, some by altruistic motives and some by sordid motives—to cause the nation to follow the lead of those then in control. If the men then in control had taken the people into their confidence, the blunder would never have been made. If the correspondence between Mr. McKinley and the Paris Peace Commission in the fall of 1898, from which the injunction of secrecy was not removed until 1901, had been given out at the time, the treaty would never have been ratified except after some such declaration as to the Philippines as was made concerning Cuba, some reaffirmance of allegiance to faith in our cardinal tenet—the right of every people to pursue happiness in their own way, free from alien domination. The Bacon resolution of 1899, which was along this line, was defeated only by the deciding vote of the presiding officer, the Vice-President of the United States. The passage of that resolution would have prevented the Philippine Insurrection. Had it passed, the Filipinos would no more have had occasion to think of insurrection than the Cubans did. It was Mr. McKinley alone who decided to take the Philippines. Congress was not called together in extra session. The people were not consulted, except from the rear-end of an observation car.
Most people, whether they be lawyers or not, are more or less acquainted with the doctrine of what is called in law a “bona fide purchaser without notice.” No man can claim to be a bona fide purchaser without notice, when he knows enough about the subject matter of his purchase to put him on reasonable notice of the existence of facts which, had he taken the trouble to verify them, would have caused him to halt and not purchase. The correspondence in 1898, made public in 1901, withheld by Mr. McKinley until after his second election in 1900, is sufficient to have made any honest man ask himself some such question as this: “After all, is it not quite possible that those people can run a decent government of their own? Admiral Dewey says they are superior to the Cubans.” But Mr. McKinley did not pursue this inquiry, as it was his duty to do. He took the islands because he believed they would pay, knowing nothing in particular about the Filipinos, except what he had learned from Admiral Dewey’s brief comment, yet hoping in spite of it that they would turn out sufficiently unfit for self-government for the event to vindicate the purchase. To demonstrate that the Filipinos were wholly unfit for the treatment accorded the Cubans was the only possible justification of the initial departure from the traditions of the Republic and from the principles which were its corner-stone. And he made the departure because the business “interests” of the country then believed—erroneously they all now admit—that it would pay. He decided to treat eternal principles as “worn-out formulæ.” Senator Hoar once declined an invitation extended by his own city of Worcester, to deliver a eulogy on Mr. McKinley, because of his Philippine policy. True, he tempers the asperity of this action thus: “It was not because I was behind any other man in admiration or personal affection for that lofty and beautiful character. But * * * if a great Catholic prelate were to die, his eulogy should not be pronounced by a Protestant.”[1] But all Senator Hoar’s speeches against the McKinley Philippine policy were as emphatic as Luther’s ninety-five theses. He was in possession at the time, along with the rest of the Senate, of the correspondence with the Paris Peace Commission made public after the presidential election of 1900.
Ever since Mr. McKinley took the Philippines, it has been the awkward but inexorable duty of the defenders of that good man’s fame to deprecate Filipino capacity for self-government. President Taft’s chief life-work since this century began has been to take care of his martyred predecessor’s fame, by proving that Mr. McKinley guessed right in 1898 when he bought the Philippines and trusted to luck to be able to make out, in spite of what Admiral Dewey had said, a case sufficiently derogatory to Filipino intelligence to justify the purchase and subjugation of the islands at the very time we were freeing Cuba. Obviously, then, the more utterly unfit for self-government in the present or the near future Mr. Taft can make the Filipinos out, the nearer he gets to vindicating the memory of Mr. McKinley, that is, with men of his own, (Mr. Taft’s) high character. He insists on treating as children a people who got up a well-armed army of thirty-odd thousand men in three or four months and held at bay, for two years and a half, some 125,000 husky American soldiers, over five times as many as it took to drive Spain from the Western hemisphere. Physical force is the basis of all government among men. If President Taft had anything of the soldier instinct of his immediate predecessor, he would not sniff demagoguery in the proposition that military efficiency is a better guaranty of capacity for self-government than all the school-books in the world, and that proven passionate willingness to die for freedom from alien domination is the best guaranty conceivable against internecine strife. It was a tremendous struggle with his own conscience that Mr. McKinley went through with before he decided to repudiate the principles on which we took Cuba in order, for a money consideration euphemistically called “trade expansion,” to take the Philippines. He had advices before him at the time making it reasonably certain that this meant trouble with the Filipinos, i.e., bloodshed in the Philippines, the extent of which none could foresee, and about which he was of course apprehensive. In the matter of instructing our Paris Peace Commissioners to insist on Spain’s ceding us the Philippines, Mr. McKinley took no moral ground tenable like a rock, such as truly great men take in great crises of their country’s history. He did not attempt to lead the people. He simply decided that it would be a popular thing to do to take the islands. Fresh from a war entered upon to emancipate the Cubans from alien domination, he took a step which both Admiral Dewey and General Merritt warned him beforehand would probably mean war—to subjugate, against their will, a people superior to the Cubans. And in taking this step, he took into his confidence, neither the people who paid for the war, nor the soldiers who fought it. To deny that his motives were benevolent would be simply stupid. But he followed the mob which shouted from the rear-end of his observation car and repeated by cable to the Paris Peace Commission, what the mob yelled. Ever since the supposed Philippine Klondyke whispered in President McKinley’s ear “Eat of the imperial fruits of a colonial policy,” the archives of this government—the reports of the State, War, and Navy Departments, and the Congressional Documents—have reeked with the inevitable consequences of our fall from our high estate. No man can serve two masters. Philanthropy for pecuniary profit is a paradox. Duplicity ever follows deviation from principle. In our dealings in 1898 with Aguinaldo you find vacillation on the part of military commanders who personally did not know what fear was, and embarrassed hypocrisy in dealing with him on the part of men wearing the shoulder-straps of the American army, athwart the frankness of whose gaze no such shadow had ever fallen before. You find systematic concealment of our intentions in dealing with the insurgents, for fear they would insurge before the Treaty was signed, and thus cause such a revulsion of feeling in our country against the purchase of theirs as to defeat the ratification of the treaty. After that, you find a systematic minimizing of the opposition to our rule, reinforced by subtle depreciation of Filipino intelligence, and backed up by a “peace-at-any-price” policy, periodically punctuated by the horrors of war without its dignity. The denial of Filipino opposition to our rule, which opposition means merely a natural longing for freedom from alien rule, has gradually been abandoned. Nobody now clings to that stale fiction. Also, a long course of chastening, through reconcentration and kindred severities subsequent to the official announcement of a state of general peace, has at last gotten the situation as to public order well in hand. The only question for those who affect that “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” which the men of 1776 had in mind is, “Are the Filipinos a people?” President Taft was originally with Senator Hoar on the Philippine question. At least he was an “anti-expansionist.” In all the heat of subsequent controversy he has never made bold to deny the general proposition of the unalienable right of every people to liberty and the pursuit of happiness in their own way. His position is that the Filipino people must be made an exception to the rule because they are not a people. This is the strongest I can state his proposition for him. It is very difficult to state even with apparent plausibility, anything which denies the right of every community of people to immunity from alien domination. The case must be an extreme one. The issue which the writer raises with the President’s policy is that the Filipinos are a people.
I know of no graver responsibility that an American statesman can take upon himself before the bar of history than to deny the right of any given people to self-government. Certainly any man who denies that right at least assumes the burden of proof that they are unfit to attend to their own affairs. Mr. McKinley assumed it without pretending to know anything much about the Filipinos, the motive being that the Islands would be profitable to us. When Mr. Taft went to the Philippines in 1900, he went, not to investigate the correctness of Mr. McKinley’s assumption, which was implied in the purchase, but to champion it; not to give advice concerning the righteousness of having taken over the Philippines, but to bolster up the policy. He assumed the burden of proof before he knew anything about the facts. The burden has been on him ever since. Any subordinate who helps him to bear that burden, finds favor in his eyes. But the burden is greater than he can bear. The proof fails. The proof shows that the Filipino people ought to be allowed to pursue happiness in their own way instead of being made to pursue it in Mr. Taft’s way. Once you pretend that our true object in the Philippines is the “pursuit of happiness” for them, The Taft policy is condemned by the facts; and that is why I am opposed to it. The record shows this. He admits it. But he insists, with a sigh, that in some other generation they will be happy. Meantime, we are drifting toward our next war carrying in tow 8,000,000 of human beings who, if neutralized and let alone would not be disturbed by our next war, but whose destinies now must be dependent upon the outcome of such war, however little they may be concerned in the issues which bring it about.
The shifty opportunism which once actually held out to the Filipinos the hope of some day becoming a State of the United States of America, has long since lapsed into the silence of shame, because no American ever honestly believed that the American people would ever countenance any such preposterous proposition. And so a free republic based on representative government is face to face with the proposition of having a “crown colony” on its hands which wishes to be, and could soon be made fit to be, a free republic also.
If a federal republic cannot live half slave and half free, can it live with millions of the governed denied a voice in the federal government confessedly forever?
[1] Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. ii., p. 317.