Part 32 (2/2)

In the last a.n.a.lysis, the righteousness or unrighteousness of a civil government in a country not yet entirely subjugated, depends on whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation with constabulary whose ”prisoners of war” are tried, to see what they may have done, if anything, by one-man courts, or whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation as any other great power on earth but ourselves would have completed it, with an army, trying the prisoners by military commission. Unless you yourself were a traitor to your country, you considered as criminal attempts to subvert your government by cut-throats that no one of the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan Cailles down, would have hesitated to have shot summarily. But you sought to make the punishment in each case fit the crime, by ascertaining as dispa.s.sionately as if the defendant were fresh from the moon, just what each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, or an American military commission would have had such people shot in bunches, as not ent.i.tled to be treated as prisoners of war. The trouble with the civil government did not lie in its judiciary, but in its constabulary. It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners by the constabulary, and their failure, because not numerous enough, to protect peaceably inclined people, which made it a fact that turning the situation over to the military would have meant less sacrifice of the innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merciful to kill a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go, with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves, merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign ”civil” government.

In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. Harvey and the writer sailed close to the wind, by holding only those responsible who had taken active parts in the sacking and burning of villages and the ma.s.sacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or later some officious prosecuting attorney of less n.o.ble mould than Harvey would ask me to convict some poor creature of brigandage for giving a little rice to the brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so, and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all by expressing my sentiments, in the decision, concerning the failure to give adequate protection to defenceless people, along the lines indicated in this chapter. No such case was in fact presented. I broke down under the strain of graver cases early in November and left Samar forever, bound for Manila.

Before I left, the whole island was seething with sedition. I was told by a credible American that the chief deputy sheriff of the court, an ex-insurgent officer, one of the ”peace-at-any-price”

policy appointees, had remarked among some of his own people where he did not expect the remark to be repeated: ”I see no use persecuting our brethren in the hills.” The munic.i.p.al officials of the provincial capital, Catbalogan, were suspected by the native provincial governor, and the latter in turn was suspected by the Manila government. In fact the whole political atmosphere of the island had become full of rumor and suspicion as to who was for the government, and who was against the government. I left Samar, November 8th, which was the day of the presidential election of 1904, determined to try no more insurrections. By that time nearly everybody in the island was more or less guilty of sedition, and I did not know the method of drawing an indictment against a whole people.

CHAPTER XIX

GOVERNOR WRIGHT--1905

My heart is heavy with the fate of that unhappy people.

Speech of Hon. A. O. Bacon in U. S. Senate. [450]

Because the especially cordial relations which existed to the last between Governor Wright and myself [451] are familiar to a number of very dear mutual friends, I deem it due both to them and to myself, in view of the contents of the preceding chapter, to state that I see no reason why, in writing a history of the American Occupation of the Philippines, I should omit or slur the facts which convinced me that that occupation ought to terminate as soon as practicable, and that any decent kind of a government of Filipinos by Filipinos would be better for all concerned than the McKinley-Taft programme of Benevolent a.s.similation whereof Governor Wright was the legatee. By the thousand and one uncandid threads of that programme, slowly woven from 1898 to 1904, as indicated in the first sixteen chapters of this book, Governor Wright had found himself as hopelessly bound to concealment from the American people of the real situation in Samar in the fall of 1904, as a Gulliver in Lilliput.

When I finally left Samar and came to Manila, in November, 1904, I was not prepared to figure out how or how soon, the blunder we made by the purchase of the Philippine archipelago could be corrected. But my mental att.i.tude toward the whole Philippine problem had undergone a complete change. In 1901 Governor Wright, then Vice-Governor, had written me: ”You younger men out here, who have cast your fortunes with this country, are to be, in all likelihood, in the natural course of events, its future rulers.” Up to 1903 I had clung to that idea with the devotion of what was really high and earnest purpose, untroubled with misgivings of any kind. In November, 1903, in Albay, Judge Carson and myself had talked over the long struggle of the civil government to walk without leaning on the military, and, with the readiness of one vested with authority to believe such authority wisely vested, and the readiness of a civilian lawyer to jealously guard the American home idea that the military should be subordinate to the civil authority, I had cordially agreed with a sentiment one day expressed by Judge Carson concerning Governor Taft about ”the splendid moral fibre of the man,” meaning in keeping the military from prancing out of the traces. After Governor Taft left the Islands to be Secretary of War (December 23, 1903), and while I was still in Albay, I had learned of the 120 men who had died in the Albay jail while awaiting trial, and thereafter something of the magnitude of the Ola insurrection there, and that had given me pause as to the practical benevolence of the operation of ”a benign civil government.” Then the Samar ma.s.sacres of 1904, and the gory panorama I had there witnessed, had finally convinced me that a republic like ours is wholly unfitted to govern people against their consent. But I did not tell anybody in Manila all these things. I simply pondered them. Grover Cleveland was the only man in the world I would have liked to talk to just then freely and fully. And he was not about. ”My heart was heavy with the fate of that unhappy people” as Senator Bacon had said in the Senate in 1902, after visiting the Islands in 1901. I did not condemn Governor Wright. I quite realized that I was ”up against” about the largest ethical problem of world politics, one on which the nations are much divided, and that I was not infallible. I did not say to the Governor: ”Governor, let's resign and go home and tell our people that this whole business is a mistake.” Nor did I ever lose faith in Governor Wright personally. If I had, I might just as well have said: ”After this, the deluge.” I would simply have lost faith in human nature. I had not then, nor have I since, known a man of higher personal character. I had simply lost faith in Benevolent a.s.similation, and begun to take the Filipino people seriously as a potential nation, probably better able to handle their own domestic problems than we will ever be able to handle them for them.

The day after I resigned, Mr. Justice Carson, of the Supreme Court, and Mr. Wilfley, the Attorney-General, came to call on me. My friends knew I was very much troubled over the Samar business. I was doing some grumbling, but without specifying, because to specify would mean that we all of us ought to give up the life careers we had planned for ourselves in the Islands. I knew the old familiar answer a grumbler was sure to get in the Philippines, viz., ”Old man, you've been out here too long. You better go home.” But I did a little more grumbling to my friends Judge Carson and Mr. Wilfley, during the course of their visit. They could both pretty well guess what was the matter. But Judge Carson and I had come out in 1899, and had served through the war together. He knew all about the Albay business, and somewhat of the Samar business. Wilfley had not come out until the civil government was founded in 1901. Mr. Wilfley said cheerily: ”Oh, Blount, you are too conscientious.” I shall never forget what happened then. Judge Carson said, with a ring of something like anger in his tone: ”No, Wilfley, I'll be d--d if he is.” Is it any wonder that ever since I have worn that man, as Hamlet would say, ”in my heart's core”? Here was as brave and true an Irishman as ever gained distinction on battlefield or bench. And he understood. He did not say--which was the implication of Wilfley's tone--”Old man, you've been out here too long, and illness has made you peevish.” He knew what was the matter. He knew that as trial judges he and I had not been small editions of Lord Jeffries, as some of our American critics had implied, BUT HE ALSO KNEW THAT THERE WAS NO METHOD OF DRAWING AN INDICTMENT AGAINST A WHOLE PEOPLE.

Possibly the intensity of my feelings on this great subject, then and ever since, hampers the power of clear expression. Therefore, a word more in attempt at elucidation. In 1898, Judge Carson and I, with many thousands of other young Americans, had trooped down to Cuba, in the wake of the impetuous Roosevelt, to free the inhabitants of that ill-fated island from Spanish rule, drive the Spaniards from the Western Hemisphere, and put a stop to Spain's pious efforts ”to spare the great island from the dangers of premature independence,”

as she always expressed her att.i.tude toward Cuba. We had many of us been fired by the catchy Roosevelt utterance which did so much to bring on the Spanish War, viz., ”The steps of the White House are slippery with the blood of the Cuban reconcentrados.” Then in 1899, we had gone to the Philippines, and had ever since been engaged there in ”sparing the Islands from the danger of premature independence,”

and the Samar ma.s.sacres of 1904 were, to me, the apotheosis of the work. So that after November 8, 1904, I felt ”The steps of the White House are slippery with the blood of the people of my district.” It had all been done under the pious pretence that the Filipinos welcomed our rule--a pretence which had taken the form for six years of systematic a.s.severation that they did so welcome it. Yet it was not true that they, or any appreciable fraction of them, had ever welcomed our rule. And it never will be true. Surely no man can see in this book any scolding or unkindness. It is an attempt merely to bring home to my countrymen a strategic fact, a fact which it is folly to ignore. But to return to the thread of our story.

Four days after the presidential election of 1904, to wit, on November 12th, Governor Wright left Manila and went to Samar, including in his itinerary various others of the southern islands. [452] Soon after their return, the seven hundred native troops in Samar were increased to nearly two thousand, and sixteen companies of regulars (say one hundred men to a company) were also thrown into Samar. It took until the end of 1906 to end the trouble. You cannot find in the reports of the civil authorities anything explaining their three or four weeks' stay in the Visayan Islands in November-December, 1904, that is not absolutely in accord with the original Taft obsession of 1900 about the popularity of the proposed alien ”civil” government with its subjects. Governor Wright's description of the trip says: ”The warm hospitality of the Filipino people made this trip of inspection a most agreeable one.” As a matter of fact, on such occasions, the more disaffected a leader of the people was, the more he would seek, by ”warm hospitality,” ”warm” oratory telling the visiting mighty what the visiting mighty longed to hear, parades, fiestas, etc., to divert suspicion of sedition from himself. The poor creatures had met General Young's cavalry column in northern Luzon in 1899 with their town bands, doing the only thing they knew of to do to ”temper the wind to the shorn lamb”--i.e., to temper it to their several communities--many of them doubtless expecting to be put to the sword by General Young's troopers, as the Cossacks did the Persians during the brief and sensational sojourn of that brilliant young administrator, Hon. W. Morgan Shuster, in Persia in 1911-12. I have no doubt that high on the list of those extending some of the ”warm hospitality” above mentioned appeared the name of Don Jaime de Veyra. Yet in the summer of 1904 Don Jaime had gotten out of a sick bed to attend a convention called to send delegates to the Democratic National Convention in the United States that year, [453] and also, in that same year, had run for Governor of Leyte on a platform the princ.i.p.al plank of which was Carthago est delenda--”Carthago”

being us, the American regime. De Veyra was defeated that time, but ran again the next time and was elected. While the writer is not one of those who seek to show their ”breadth of view” by gossiping with outsiders regarding what is peculiarly our own affair, still, the British view-point of the situation in the Visayan Islands, as conveyed by an Englishwoman whose husband was engaged in mercantile business there in 1904-5, and who therefore was certainly in a position to know the opinion of the little circle of British people at Cebu and Iloilo, may not be superfluous here. This lady, living then at Iloilo, wrote a series of letters to friends back home in England which she afterwards published in book form. [454] In a letter dated Iloilo, January 22, 1905 (page 86), she says:

The Americans give out and write in their papers that the Philippine Islands are completely pacified, and that the Filipinos love Americans and their rule. This, doubtless with good motives, is complete and utter humbug, for the country is honeycombed with insurrection and plots; the fighting has never ceased; and the natives loathe the Americans and their theories, saying so openly in their native press and showing their dislike in every possible fas.h.i.+on. Their one idea is to be rid of the U. S. A.

* * * and to be free of a burden of taxation which is heavier than any the Spaniards laid on them.

Also an Englishman who was in Samar in 1904-5, a Mr. Hyatt, who, with his brother, served with the American troops there in the b.l.o.o.d.y Pulajan uprising, afterwards wrote a book called the Little Brown Brother, wherein he fully corroborates Mrs. Dauncey's appreciation of the situation during that period.

In its blindness to the unanimity of Visayan discontent, as manifested in its report now under consideration, the civil government of the Philippines was not trying wilfully to deceive anybody. It was deceiving itself. It was obeying the law of its life, its existence having been originally predicated on the consent of a great free people to keep in subjection a weaker people eager to be also free, such consent having been obtained through diligent nursing of the original idea that the subject people were not in fact so eager, but were, on the contrary, in a mental att.i.tude of tearful welcome toward the proffered protection of a strong power. In his report for 1905 [455] General William H. Carter, commanding the Department of the Philippines which included Samar and the rest of the Visayan Islands, gives the key to the Commission's twenty-six-day stay in his district in the following part of said report:

Within a few days after the rendition of the annual report for last year [456] a serious outbreak occurred in the Gandara valley, Samar. This was followed by disorders in all the other large islands of the department, Negros, Panay, Cebu, and Leyte.

Nowhere in the civil government reports do you find the slightest recognition that these disorders had any relation to each other, or to the fundamental problem of public order, or any political significance whatsoever, each being treated as a purely local issue, the idea that the circ.u.mstance of Samar's having been thrown into pandemonium by the successes of the enemies of the American Government might have encouraged its enemies in the neighboring islands, never seeming to occur to the authors of the said reports. General Carter's report goes on to state that within five months after the Samar outbreak of July, 1904, seven hundred native troops had been put in the field in that turbulent island. In December, 1904, troops began to be poured into Samar, so that it was not long before the seven hundred native troops had become seventeen hundred or eighteen hundred, and, says General Carter, ”in order to free them from garrison work in the towns, sixteen companies of the 12th and 14th Infantry were distributed about the disaffected coasts to enable the people who so desired to come from their hiding places”--whither they had gone because the American flag afforded them no protection--”and undertake the rebuilding of their burned homes.” General Carter avoids touching on the civil government's (to him well-known) obsession about its popularity, a state of mind which could see no ”political” significance in outbreaks of any kind. But he does use this very straightforward language about Samar:

Whatever may have been the original cause of the outbreak, it was soon lost sight of when success had drawn a large proportion of the people away from their homes and fields. * * * Except in the largest towns it became simply a question of joining the Pulajans or being harried by them. In the absence of proper protection thousands joined in the movement.

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