They stated that their orders were not to allow us to disembark, and that they were powerless to allow us to come in without express orders from their government.
In regard to the Treaty of Paris, the spokesman, Lawyer Melliza, said:
International law forbids a nation to make a contract in regard to taking the liberties of its colonies.
Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said “the law of righteousness,” instead of “international law,” his proposition, thus amended, would have been incontrovertible. On September 19, 1911, one of the great newspapers of this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members of the Congress of the United States, and to “The Fourth Estate” also, the newspaper editors, a circular letter proposing that we sell the Philippine Islands to Japan. A member of the United States Senate sent this answer:
I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands means selling the inhabitants. The question of traffic in human beings, whether by wholesale or retail, was forever settled by the Civil War.
About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia had an editorial on the Denver Post’s proposition, the most conspicuous feature of which was that Japan was too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate selling the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the matter at length.
No; Lawyer Melliza’s proposition has no standing in international law yet. But it has with what Mr. Lincoln’s First Inaugural called “the better angels of our nature,” if we stop to reflect.
Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to General Miller is the following:
I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could occupy the city would they agree to it. He replied most emphatically that they would.
At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on the treaty was in progress in the United States Senate, there was hardly a province in that archipelago where you would not have encountered the same inflexible adherence to the Aguinaldo government.