To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date.
This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.
The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for the last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously, and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary to the end.
At a time when all our military and fiscal experts agree that having the Philippines on our hands is a grave strategic and economic mistake, fraught with peril to the nation’s prestige in the early stages of our next great war, we are keeping the Filipinos in industrial bondage through unrighteous Congressional legislation for which special interests in America are responsible, in bald repudiation of the Open Door policy, and against their helpless but universal protest, a wholly unprotected and easy prey to the first first-class Power with which we become involved in war. Yet all the while the very highest considerations of national honor require us to choose between making the Filipino people free and independent without unnecessary delay, as they of right ought to be, or else imperilling the perpetuity of our own institutions by the creation and maintenance of a great standing army, sufficient properly to guard overseas possessions.
A cheerful blindness to the inevitable worthy of Mark Tapley himself, the stale Micawberism that “something is bound to turn up,” and a Mrs. Jellyby philanthropy hopelessly callous to domestic duties, expenses, and distresses, have hitherto successfully united to prevent the one simple and supreme need of the situation—a frank, formal, and definite declaration, by the law-making power of the government, of the nation’s purpose in the premises. What is needed is a formal legislative announcement that the governing of a remote and alien people is to have no permanent place in the purposes of our national life, and that we do bona fide intend, just as soon as a stable government, republican in form, can be established by the people of the Philippine Islands, to turn over, upon terms which shall be reasonable and just, the government and control of the islands to the people thereof.
The essentials of the problem, being at least as immutable as human nature and geography, will not change much with time. And whenever the American people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty consistent with taxation without representation and unanimous protest by the governed, they will at once set about to secure to a people who have proven themselves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, generous, and tractable in peace, the right to pursue happiness in their own way, in lieu of somebody else’s way, as the spirit of our Constitution, and the teachings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand.
After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so-called “Expansion,” the first of the seven as a volunteer officer in Cuba during and after the Spanish War, the next two in a like capacity in the Philippines, and the remainder as a United States judge in the last-named country, the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, sustained in spirit, at parting, by cordial farewells, oral and written, personal and official, but convinced that foreign kindness will not cure the desire of a people, once awakened, for what used to be known as Freedom before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philippines; and that to permanently eradicate sedition from the Philippine Islands, the American courts there must be given jurisdiction over thought as well as over overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an indictment against a whole people.
Seven other years of interested observation from the Western Hemisphere end of the line have confirmed and fortified the convictions above set forth.
If we give the Filipinos this independence they so ardently desire and ever clamor for until made to shut up, “the holy cause,” as their brilliant young representative in the American House of Representatives, Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at once spoiled, as the American hemp and other special interests so contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and his compatriot, Señor Osmeña, the Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and the rest of the leaders of the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of contention is merely the hiss of the same old serpent of tyranny which has always beset the pathway of man’s struggle for free institutions.
When first the talk in America, after the battle of Manila Bay, about keeping the Philippines, reached the islands, one of the Filipino leaders wrote to another during the negotiations between their commanding general and our own looking to preservation of the peace until the results of the Paris Peace Conference which settled the fate of the islands should be known, in effect, thus: “The Filipinos will not be fit for independence in ten, twenty, or a hundred years if it be left to American colonial office-holders drawing good salaries to determine the question.” Is there not some human nature in that remark? Suppose, reader, you were in the enjoyment of a salary of five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars a year as a government official in the Philippines, how precipitately would you hasten to recommend yourself out of office, and evict yourself into this cold Western world with which you had meantime lost all touch?