Part 32 (1/2)

There is nothing warranting the statement that towns are in ruins. It is not true that there are whole districts in the hands of ladrones. Life and property are as safe here as in the United States. [444]

This was followed by a perfectly true and correct picture of the peace and quiet which then prevailed for the time being everywhere throughout the archipelago, except in Samar, which dark and b.l.o.o.d.y isle was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement as to Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic as any of the Taft cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly inconsiderable ”prowling bands” of outlaws in Samar. Of course n.o.body at home knew the answer to this, so it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar ma.s.sacres proceeded unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th Infantry, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if contemptuous, tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence of a republic trying to make conquered subjects behave without colliding too violently with home sentiment against having conquered subjects; sang their favorite barrack room song,

He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft, But he ain't no friend of mine;

and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did chafe under the restraint, but it at least relieved them from the not altogether inspiring task of chasing Pulajans through jungles and along the slippery mire of precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time permitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to swear fierce blase oaths, not wholly unjustified, about how much better he could run the Islands than they were being run.

On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at Manila as follows:

Since my letter of October 6th, situation appears worse. Additional depredations both on east and west coast. Smith-Bell closing out. [445] Reliable American residing in Wright says that during week ending last Sunday thirteen families living along river Nacbac, barrio of Tutubigan, said pueblo, kidnapped by brigands and carried off to hills. This means some sixty people having farms along river, rice ready to be harvested. Seven of the eleven barrios of Wright have been burned.

Blount.

When I sent that telegram of October 26th, the situation in the pueblo of Wright was typical of the reign of terror throughout the island.

Wright could have been reached by the 18th Infantry (then over at Tacloban, in Leyte), and garrisoned on eight hours' notice. But I had little hope that the telegram would stir the 18th. The best man I had ever personally known well in high station was at the head of the government of the Islands, and as he was my friend, I sat down to think the situation out, determined, with the prejudice which is the privilege of friends.h.i.+p, to a.n.a.lyze his apparent apathy, and to conjecture how many times thirteen families ”having farms along river, rice ready to be harvested” would have to be carried off to the hills by the brigands in order to move the 18th Infantry before the presidential election. Then I wondered just how many seconds it would have taken a British governor-general, backed by unanimous home sentiment concerning the wisdom of having colonies, to have acted, had a great British colonial mercantile house like Smith, Bell & Co. appealed to him for protection of its interests. And that brought me, there on ”the tie-ribs of earth,” as Kipling would phrase it, to the fundamentals of the problem. The British imperial idea of which Kipling is the voice and Benjamin Kidd the accompanist is based, superficially, upon a supposed necessity for the control of the tropics by non-tropical peoples, though fundamentally, it is an a.s.sertion of the right of any people to a.s.sume control of the land and destinies of another when they feel sure they can govern that other better than that other can govern itself. Is this proposition tenable, and if so, within what limits? Is it tenable to the point of total elimination of the people sought to be improved? If not, then how far? How far is incidental sacrifice of human life negligible in the working out of the broader problem of ”the greatest good of the greatest number?” In his article in the North American Review for December, 1907, Governor Ide makes exhaustive answer to ”the doctors who for some months past, in the columns of the North American Review and elsewhere, have published prescriptions for curing the ills of the Filipino people,”

including Senator Francis G. Newlands, Hon. William J. Bryan, and the writer. In the course of disposing of the quack last mentioned, Governor Ide gets on rather a high horse, asking, with much dignified indignation, ”How many people in the United States would have known or cared whether the army was or was not ordered out in Samar in 1904?”

I concede that the solicitude was a super-solicitude, as do the Harvey letters, but like them, I must recognize its reality. However, when Governor Ide reaches this rhapsody of conscious virtue: ”It is inconceivable that the Commission could have been animated by the base and ign.o.ble partisan prejudices thus charged against them,”

capping his climax by triumphantly pointing out that ”Governor-General Wright was a life-long Democrat,” he doth protest too much. For the angelic pinions he thus attaches to himself are at once rudely snapped by the reflection that a very short while after his article came out in the North American Review Governor Wright became Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and a little later took the stump for Taft and Sherman, in 1908. Governor Wright did not stoop to deny or extenuate his share in the matter, and I honor him for it. [446]

But to stick to your own crowd and then deny afterwards that you did so--that is another story. However, let us brush aside such petty attempts to cloud the real issue, which is: How many people would Governor Wright and Vice-Governor Ide have permitted to be ma.s.sacred by the Pulajans in Samar in 1904 before they would have ordered out the military prior to the presidential election? Let us consider the case, not with a view of clouding the issue, but of clearing it. The truth is, Governor Wright was very gravely concerned about the Samar situation from August to November, 1904. Of course it is due to him to make perfectly clear that he did not realize the gravity of that situation as vividly as those of us who were on the ground in Samar, four or five hundred miles away. But the information hereinbefore reviewed, conveyed to him by the Provincial Governor, by Mr. Harvey, the a.s.sistant Attorney General sent to Samar for the express purpose of getting the Manila government in possession of the exact situation, and by myself, was certainly sufficient to make him ”chargeable with notice” of all that happened thereafter, certainly chargeable with knowledge of all that had happened theretofore. Of course there was General Allen, the commander-in-chief of the constabulary, at Manila, presumably speaking well of his command--the right arm of the civil government--presumably giving industrious and tactful aid and comfort to the idea that the authorities could afford to worry along with the constabulary alone until after the presidential election. But that could not discount the actual facts reported from the afflicted province by the officials on the ground. General Allen, it should be noted, remained in Manila all this time. So that any Otis-like ”situation-well-in-hand” bouquets he may have thrown at his subordinates in Samar, and the situation there generally, were mere political hothouse products, surer to be recognized as such by the shrewd kindliness of the truly considerable man at the head of the government than by most any one else he could hand them out to. That man knew, to all intents and purposes, in the great and n.o.ble heart of him, what was really going on in Samar. He knew that ma.s.sacres had been occurring, and that they were likely to keep on occurring. In other words, he knew that preventable sacrifice of life of defenceless people was going on, and that he could put a stop to it any time he saw fit. The question he had to wrestle with was, should he stop it, knowing the ”h.e.l.l fer Sartin” the Democratic orators in the United States would at once luridly describe as ”broke loose” in the Philippines? I insist that there is no use for any holier-than-thou gentleman to become suffused with any glow of indignant conscious rect.i.tude based on the premises we are considering. Better to look a little deeper, on the idea that you are observing your republic in flagrante colonizatione, with as good a man as you ever have had, or ever will have, among you, as the princ.i.p.al actor. Governor Wright's course was entirely right, if the Philippine policy was right. If his course was not right, it was not right because the Philippine policy is fundamentally wrong. Governor Wright of course believed that the Philippine policy was right. I myself did not come finally to believe it was wrong until it was revealed in all its rawness by the period now under discussion. Of course the Governor did not vividly realize that the American women in Catbalogan were not entirely safe. If he had, he would have rushed the troops there, politics or no politics. But native life was politically negligible. What difference would a few score, or even a few hundred, natives of Samar make, compared with that pandemonium of anarchy and bloodshed all over the archipelago which Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide had long been insisting would follow Philippine independence? Was the whole future of 8,000,000 of people to be jeopardized to save a few people in Samar? That was the moral question before the insular government, in its last a.n.a.lysis. And the government faced the proposition squarely, and answered it ”No.”

I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide, that Philippine independence meant anarchy in the Islands, and the orthodox ”b.l.o.o.d.y welter of chaos,” I too might have hesitated to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until the election was safely over. So might yours, reader. Don't be so certain you would not. Practically absolute power, sure of its own benevolence, has temptations to withhold its confidence from the people that you wot not of. Don't condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the policy, and change your republic back to the course set by its founders. Give the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have, instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through the medium of your next great war.

The question of whether the troops should have been ordered out or not at the time above dealt with is by no means without two sides. On the ”b.l.o.o.d.y welter” side, you have the well-known opinions of Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have before you--for the moment--only my little opinion. So instead of having in Governor Wright a Bluebeard, you simply have a man of great personal probity and unflinching moral courage, following his convictions to their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of turning, in the act of colonization. In other words, Mr. American, you see yourself, as others see you. So face the music and look at yourself. In your colony business, you are a house divided against itself, which cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino people far more intimately than either Mr. Taft, Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke their language--which they did not. I had met them both in peace and in war--which they had not. I had held court for months at a time in various provinces of the archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to Mindanao--which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in their homes for years on terms of free and informal intercourse impracticable for any governor-general. It was therefore perfectly natural that I should know them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. I was not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending myself out of office by a.s.senting that our guardians.h.i.+p over the Filipinos should at once be terminated, but I knew there was nothing to the ”b.l.o.o.d.y welter”

proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too altogether a model of freedom from discord, pervaded as it is by parental, filial, and fraternal love, and their patriotism is too universal and genuine, to give the ”b.l.o.o.d.y welter” bugaboo any standing in court.

But whosoever questions for one moment Governor Wright's high personal character, simply does not know the man. To do so, moreover, would fatally cloud the issue I have sought to make clear between his view of the duty of our government and my own. In his moods that reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright used to say: ”Don't shoot the organist, he's doing the best he can.” It is true that his answer to Judge Parker was not a full and frank statement of the case. But did it lie in American human nature, when your antagonist was recklessly over-stating the case in the heat of debate on the eve of a presidential election, to take him into your confidence and tell him all you knew, in simple trusting faith that he would thereafter quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil down to the real issue, viz., how many lives it was permissible to abandon on the ”greatest good to the greatest number” theory, would obviously jeopardize the existence of a government which the Governor of the Philippines naturally believed to be better for all concerned than any other. And there is your cul-de-sac. Hinc illae lachrymae.

We can point with pride to many things we have done in the Philippines, the public improvements, [447] the school system, the better sanitation, and a long list of other benefits conferred. But in the greatest thing we have done for them, we have builded wiser than we knew. ”G.o.d moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” In fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one h.o.m.ogeneous political unit. In a most charming book, ent.i.tled An Englishwoman in the Philippines, [448] we can see our attempts to fit government by two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a squirrel. In one pa.s.sage the British sister describes our programme as one ”to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American methods; but at the same time they have plenty of soldiers to knock him on the head if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it”--”A quaint scheme,” she navely adds, ”and one full of the go-ahead originality of America.”

The more we teach the Filipinos, the more intimately they will become acquainted, in their own way, with the history of the relations between our country and theirs from the beginning, including the taxation without representation, through Congressional legislation (hereinafter noticed) placed or kept on our statute-books by the hemp trust and other special interests in the United States. And they will learn all these things in the midst of a ”growing gulf between the two peoples.” [449]

In fourteen years we have made these unwilling subjects, whom we neither want nor need any more than they want or need us, a unit; a unit for Home Rule in preference to alien domination, it is true; but, nevertheless, a patriotic unit--one people--a potential body politic which can take a modest, but self-respecting place in the concert of free nations, with only a little more additional help from us.

In the handling of an insurrection in any given province with courts and constabulary during the first four or five years after the Taft government of the Philippines was founded, the function of a representative of the office of the Attorney-General, coming from Manila to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large docket and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely a.n.a.logous to that of a grand jury. He originated prosecutions, found ”No Bill,” etc. When Mr. Harvey came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after greeting him, began an informal talk which was akin to the nature of a charge to a grand jury, putting him in possession of the general aspects of the uprising. He was a very just and kindly man, and entered into the spirit of the task. I elaborated on the cla.s.s of cases where the defendant claimed, as most of them did, ”Yes, I joined the band of brigands, but I was made to do so.” It was also indictable to furnish supplies to the public enemy. This presented the cla.s.s of cases where the brigands would swoop down on a town and demand rice, and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons refusing it, and so intimidate the rest into finding rice for them. Also there was the cla.s.s of cases where a man would claim to have been one of the inhabitants of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills in a body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people by becoming part of them. This sort of thing at one time threatened to become epidemic with all the coast towns. It did not, however. A modus vivendi of some sort, sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, would be arranged between the coast people and the hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements enabled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of safety, in lieu of that we should have secured them but did not, by making the hill folk believe that the coast men were against us and for them. At one time the prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente of Balangiga, the man supposed to have engineered the ma.s.sacre of the 9th Infantry in September 1901. I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his arrest. But the native governor of the province, and also Major Dade, the American regular officer commanding the constabulary, satisfied me that we did not have force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the Pulajans, if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata to the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending on his town. To arrest him would therefore mean, in their opinion, that the people of Balangiga would take to the hills for protection, and join the hill folk, or Pulajans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any such example all the coast towns might follow it. So the supposed perpetrator of the 9th Infantry ma.s.sacre was allowed to remain unmolested. The American court was impotent to enforce its processes.

In my ma.s.s of Philippine papers there is one containing a copy of my remarks to the a.s.sistant Attorney-General on his arrival at Catbalogan, above referred to as a.n.a.logous to a charge to a grand jury at home. It is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, and is headed: ”Remarks by the court upon the occasion of the arrival of a.s.sistant Attorney-General Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition growing out of the same.” Certain parts of this contemporary doc.u.ment will doubtless give the reader a more vivid apprehension of the then situation than he can get from mere subsequent description. Of course the visiting representative of the Attorney-General's office was familiar in a general way with the manner of the handling of the Albay insurrection in the previous year, described in the chapter preceding this. In discussing the Samar situation the ”remarks” of the court contain, among other things, this pa.s.sage:

In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there were a great many people who strayed out to the mountains just like cattle. They did not know why or whither they went. As to those persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and myself were unanimous in the opinion that some of them could be indicted under the vagrancy law. There were others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did not appear to have been what you might call ordinary thieves, and we were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law, the limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus you do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the responsibility of sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a connection with bandits which may be but little more than technical. Besides those two cla.s.ses, there were in Albay of course the bandits proper, to whom the bandolerismo [brigandage] law was specially intended to apply. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that this bandolerismo law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever was on the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the wisest legislation, or to say that this is not the very best legislation, under the circ.u.mstances. How we administer the several laws alluded to governing public order, will settle whether or not substantial justice is done.

The men in the United States who in those days were slinging mud at the Philippine trial judges as being ”subservient,” wholly missed the core of the whole matter. In the provinces where so many heavy sentences were imposed, the real situation was that a state of war existed, and the judges believed, and I think correctly, that they were practically a military commission of one, and much more able to give a prisoner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than officers briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting to act as a military commission. We tried those men with as little prejudice as if they had just come from the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding words of the above excerpt from my talk to the a.s.sistant Attorney-General, it will be seen that the court had practically unlimited discretion in the matter of punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court of criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.