The Road to Autonomy
Oh be ye not dismayed
Though ye stumbled and ye strayed.
Kipling—A Song of the English.
He who points out a wrong without being prepared to suggest a remedy presumes upon the patience of his neighbor without good and sufficient cause. Up to this point the wrong has been unfolded, with such ability as was vouchsafed the narrator, “from Genesis to Revelations,” so to speak; also his own attitude as an eye-witness, and its evolution from the Mosaic doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to the more Christian doctrines of the New Testament. Let us now consider the remedy.
In the course of our travels with the army in the earlier chapters of this book, we first followed its northern advance, from Manila over the great central plain drained by the Rio Grande and crossed by the railroad connecting Manila Bay with Lingayen Gulf; its further advance from the northern borders of the plain over the mountains of Central Luzon; and its march from the central mountains to the northern sea, at the extreme northern end of the archipelago. We thus saw in detail the military conquest and occupation of that part of Luzon lying north of the Pasig River. Before leaving that part of the subject, the way the provinces thus occupied were grouped into military districts was indicated. Following the lines of the military occupation, it was shown that Northern Luzon was naturally and conveniently susceptible of division into four groups of provinces, which groups might ultimately be evolved into self-governing commonwealths—States of a Philippine Federal Union, as follows:
| Name of State | Area (sq. m.) | Population |
| Ilocos[1] | 6,500 | 650,000 |
| Cagayan[2] | 12,000 | 300,000 |
| Pangasinan[3] | 4,500 | 625,000 |
| Pampamga[4] | 5,000 | 650,000 |
| Total | 28,000 | 2,225,000 |
It will be remembered that after our narrative had followed the occupation of Northern Luzon by the American forces to practical completion, we turned to that part of Luzon lying south of Manila, and followed the military occupation as it was gradually extended from the Pasig River to the extreme point of Southern Luzon. Before closing the review of that military panorama, suggestions were made for an ultimate grouping of the provinces of Southern Luzon into two governmental units intended to be ultimately evolved into states. Those suggestions contemplated grouping the provinces of the lake region bordering on the Laguna de Bay and the adjacent provinces, into a territory designated for convenience as Cavite.[5] This territory was to include all of Southern Luzon except the hemp peninsula, which lies to the south of the Lake country. It was also suggested in the same connection that the three provinces of the hemp peninsula might form a convenient ultimate State of Camarines. In other words, two states can be made out of Southern Luzon as follows:
| Name of State | Area (sq. m.) | Population |
| Cavite | 8,500 | 700,000 |
| Camarines | 7,000 | 600,000 |
| Total | 15,500 | 1,300,000 |
To recapitulate: All of Luzon except Manila and the vicinity can at once be divided into the six groups of provinces above mentioned—“territories,” having what we are accustomed in the United States to call a “territorial form of government,” and intended to be made states later. Luzon is about the size of Cuba (a little over 40,000 sq. miles), is twice as thickly populated (nearly 4,000,000 to Cuba’s 2,000,000), and is not cursed with a negro question, as Cuba is.