Part 24 (1/2)
UNITED STATES PHILIPPINE COMMISSION
President's Office, Manila, June 17, 1901.
Major-General Arthur MacArthur, U. S. A.,
Military Governor of the Philippine Islands, Manila.
Sir:
I am directed by the commission to inform you that it has made the following appointments under the recent Judicial Act pa.s.sed June 11, 1901:
You will observe that among our appointees are five army officers: Brigadier General James F. Smith, Lieutenant James H. Blount, Jr., 29th Infantry, Captain Adam C. Carson, 28th Infantry; Captain Warren H. Ickis, 36th Infantry; and Lieutenant George P. Whitsett, 32d Infantry.
It is suggested that it would be well for these officers to resign their positions in the United States military service to the end that they may accept the civil positions, take the oath of office, and immediately begin their new duties.
I have the honor to be, very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
(Signed) Wm. H. Taft, President.
Official extract copy respectfully furnished Lieutenant James H. Blount, Jr., 29th Infantry, U. S. Vols., Manila, P. I. Your resignation, if offered in compliance with above letter, will be accepted upon the date preferred.
By command of Major-General MacArthur:
(Signed) E. H. Crowder Lieutenant-Colonel and Judge Advocate, U. S. A. Secretary.
Military Secretary's Office, June 18, 1901.
General Smith had come out as colonel of the 1st Californias, and had won his stars on the field of battle, as has already been described in an earlier chapter. He went from the army to the Supreme Bench--at Manila. The archipelago had been divided by the Taft Commission into fifteen judicial districts, containing three or four provinces each,--each district court to be a nisi prius or trial court. Judge Carson (Va.) went to the Hemp Peninsula District in the extreme south of Luzon, already described, and four years later to the Supreme Bench, where he still is. Judge Ickis (Ia.) went to Mindanao, and later died of the cholera down there. Judge Whitsett (Mo.) went to Jolo (the little group of islets near British North Borneo), but his wife died soon afterward, and he resigned and came home. The writer (Ga.) went to northern Luzon, to the First District hereinafter noticed.
Just here it may be remarked that the reader will need no long complicated description of the details of the organization of the new government, interspersed with unp.r.o.nounceable names, if he will simply a.s.sume the view-point Governor Taft had in the beginning. Governor Taft simply a.n.a.logized his situation to that of a governor of a State or Territory at home. His fifty provinces were to him fifty counties, twenty-five of them in the main island of Luzon, which, as heretofore stated, is about the size of Ohio or Cuba (forty odd thousand square miles), and contains half the population and over one-third the total land area of the archipelago. However, each of his provincial governors was liberally paid, and the authority of a governor of a province was, on a small scale, more like that of one of our own state chief executives than like the authority and functions of the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of a county with us. For instance, the governors.h.i.+p of Cebu, with its 2000 square miles of territory and 650,000 inhabitants, was quite as big a job as the governors.h.i.+p of New Mexico, or some other one of our newer States.
So that the task on which Governor Taft entered July 4, 1901, was the governing of a potential ultimate federal union in miniature, containing nearly eight millions of people. One slight mistake I think he made was in providing that the governors of the provinces should be ex-officio sheriffs of the Courts of First Instance (of the fifteen several judicial districts aforesaid). This was to enable the Judges of First Instance to keep a weather eye on the provincial governors, the judiciary at first being largely American, and it being the programme to have native governors, some of them recently surrendered insurgent generals, as rapidly as practicable and advisable. The scheme was good business, but not tactful. It subtracted some wind from the gubernatorial sails to be a sheriff, a provincial governor under the Spanish regime having been quite a vice-regal potentate. But the judges were as careful to treat their native governors with the consideration the authority vested in them called for as Governor Taft himself would have been. So no substantial harm was done, and the real power in the provinces of questionable loyalty remained where it belonged, in American hands.
Just after Governor Taft's inauguration, the four newly appointed district judges just out of the army called on the governor. Judge Carson was the spokesman, though without pre-arrangement. He said: ”Governor, we have called to pay our respects and say goodbye before going to the provinces. We have been acting under military orders so long, that while we are not here to get orders, we would like to have any parting suggestions that may occur to you.” Governor Taft said: ”Well, Gentlemen, all I can think of is to remind you that if what we have all heard is true the Spanish courts usually operated to the delay of justice, rather than to the dispensing of it. So just go ahead to your respective districts, and get to work, remembering that you are Americans.” So we did. Of course none of us loaned ourselves for a moment to the amiable Taft fiction that ”the great majority of the people are entirely willing to government under the supremacy of the United States.” We had all had a share in the subjugation of the Islands as far as it had progressed at that time, and had seen the Filipinos fight--unskilfully and ineffectively, it is true (because they none of them understood the use of two sights on a rifle, and simply could not hit us much), but pluckily enough. We knew the Filipinos well, and our att.i.tude was simply that of ”Pharaoh and the Sergeant,” in Kipling's ballad of the conquest of Egypt. However, we knew nothing of the Egyptians, except what we had learned in the Bible, gave no thought to whether our occupation was to be ”temporary”
like the British occupation of Egypt since 1882, or temporary like the American occupation of Cuba in 1898. That was a matter for the people of the United States to determine later. But somebody had to govern the Islands, and there we were, and there were the Islands. In the scheme of things some one had to do that part of the world's work, and, as the salaries were liberal, we went to the work, not concerning ourselves with amiable fictions of any kind. I think our att.i.tude was really one of more intimately sympathetic understanding of the Filipinos than that of Governor Taft himself, because we had all known them longer, and all spoke their language, i. e., the language of the educated and representative men (Spanish), and knew their ways, their foibles, and their many indisputably n.o.ble traits. But we did not start out to play the part of political wet-nurses. Our att.i.tude was, if Mr. Filipino does not behave, we will make him.
Judge Carson and myself had one peculiar qualification for fidelity to the Taft policies for which we were ent.i.tled to no credit. We instinctively resented any suggestion comparing the Filipinos to negroes. We had many warm friends among the Filipinos, had shared their generous hospitality often, and in turn had extended them ours. Any such suggestion as that indicated implied that we had been doing something equivalent to eating, drinking, dancing, and chumming with negroes. And we resented such suggestions with an anger quite as cordial and intense as the canons of good taste and loyal friends.h.i.+p demanded. I really believe that the southern men in the Philippines have always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any other Americans out there, and for the reasons just suggested. Not only is the universal American willingness to treat the educated Asiatic as a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights going to redeem him from the down-trodden condition into which British and other European contempt for him has kept him, but the American from the South out there is a guarantee that he shall never be treated as if he were an African. The African is aeons of time behind the Asiatic in development; the latter is aeons ahead of us in the mere duration of his civilization. The Filipino has many of the virtues both of the European and the Asiatic. Christianity has made him the superior in many respects, of his neighbor and racial cousin, the j.a.panese. And Spanish civilization has produced among them many educated gentlemen whom it is an honor to call friend.
The five lawyers, who on ceasing to be volunteer officers became judges, had other incentives also to make the Taft Government a success. The possession of power is always pleasant. We knew the military folk were going to stand by and watch the civil government, and prophesy failure. This of course put us on our metal to impress upon the dictatorial gentry of the military profession, with didactic firmness, the fundamental importance to all American ideals that the military should be subordinate to the civil authority.
The First Judicial District to which the writer was first a.s.signed comprised four provinces, Ilocos Norte, in the Ilocano country, the province situated at the extreme northwestern corner of Luzon, in the military district the conquest of which by General Young has already been fully described; and the three provinces of the Cagayan valley, [371] overrun by Captain Batchelor on his remarkable march from the mountains to the sea in November, 1899, also already described. Here I remained for a year, and then came home on leave, desperately ill; being given, on returning to the Islands after my recovery, an a.s.signment in one of the southern islands, hereinafter dealt with.
We volunteers were all commissioned as judges as of the 15th of June, though none of us I believe were mustered out until June 30th. The day after I was notified of my appointment as judge, as above set forth, desiring to enter upon my judicial emoluments, which were several times those I was receiving as a soldier, I removed the shoulder-straps and collar ornaments from my white duck suit, and went over and took the oath of office before the Chief Justice of the Islands. We had not yet been mustered out of the army, but as above stated, Governor Taft had suggested to General MacArthur that we resign without waiting for the day of muster out, so we could get to work that much sooner, and General MacArthur had notified us that if we cared to resign at once as suggested, he would cable our resignations to Was.h.i.+ngton. Immediately after qualifying before the Chief Justice, I left his office and on emerging from the court-house hailed a carromata, [372] but the driver said No, he would not carry me. I suggested in a very rudimental way, in rather rudimental Spanish suited to him, that he was a common carrier, and as such under a duty to transport me. He said his horse was tired. His horse did not look tired. He would not have thus casually toyed with veracity if I had had my shoulder-straps on. An autoridad (a representative of const.i.tuted authority) is to the ma.s.ses of the Filipino people something which instinctively challenges their respect and obedience, more especially where the ”authority” is firm and just. Respect for authority is their most conspicuous civic trait, and it is on this element in the lower ninety, on the intelligence and capacity to guide them of the upper ten, and on the ardent patriotism of both, that I predicate my difference with President Taft as to the capacity of the Filipino people for self-government. However, as I was to all appearances not an ”authority,” this ignorant man treated me as merely one of the Americans who, having invaded his country, apparently were not sure whether they were afraid of his people or not. Again I tried diplomacy, offering him an exorbitant fare. ”Nothing doing.” It was about siesta time, and he would not budge. Here then was the civil government proposition in a nutsh.e.l.l, to take the ignorant people and teach them their rights under theoretically free inst.i.tutions, instead of letting their own people do it in their own way; to reason directly with such people as this cochero (hackman), to begin at the bottom of the social scale right on the jump, the idea being to fit them, the sacred (?) majority, to know their rights and ”knowing dare maintain”
them against the educated minority, as if the latter did not have a greater natural interest in their welfare than any stranger could possibly have. That I indulged all these reflections at the time I of course do not mean to say. The significance of the incident has of course deepened in the light of the subsequent years. At any rate, I did not succeed in budging that cochero. I walked home, forego the difference between the military and the judicial salary for the two weeks remaining before muster-out day, put my shoulder-straps back on, and kept them on until June 30, 1901. [373]
When I first landed on the China seacoast of the district I was to preside over, I was met by quite a reception committee of the leading men, who conducted me with great courtesy to the provincial capital. A little later the justices of the peace paid their respects. One of them came thirty miles to do so. The court-room was very long, and when I first spied this last man, he was at the other end of the room bowing very low. He would bow, then advance a few steps, then bow again, then resume the forward march toward me. I reminded myself of some ancient king, so profound were his obeisances. At first I thought to myself, ”He bows too low, he must have been up to some devilment lately!” Experience showed me later that it was simply one of the ever-present manifestations of the respect of the Filipino for const.i.tuted authority. They positively love to show their respect for authority, just as a good soldier loves to show his respect for an officer. Here some American remarks: ”Ah, but that is not good proof of capacity for self-government. They would not 'cuss out' the party in power enough.” I answer: Who made you the judge to say that our particular form of government and our particular way of doing things is better for each and every other people under the sun than any they can devise for themselves? But there was of course another possible reason for the profundity of the obeisances of my judicial subordinate above mentioned. When I reached that province of Ilocos Norte in July, 1901, the people were in a state of submission that was simply abject. They had at first worked the amigo business on General Young, and treachery of that kind had been so inexorably followed by dire punishment, that every home in the country had its lesson. Yet that was the only way. The poor devils did not seem to know when they were licked. This is not maudlin sentiment. It is a protest against the cotemporary libel on Filipino patriotism about ”the great majority”