in Batangas, and the adjacent provinces, which raged during the winter
of 1901-02, except a vague rumor that there was trouble down there. The
Filipinos did, however. Of course for Mr. Root to be able to furnish
in December, 1901, a report, as Secretary of War, to the President,
for consumption by Congress and the people of this country, to the
effect that his volunteer army had been mustered out on schedule time,
June 30, 1901, and a "civil" government set up and in due operation,
was a nice showing, calculated to sooth latent public discontent with
wading through slaughter to over-seas dominion. Reports thereafter of
disturbances could always be waived aside as merely local in character,
and not serious. If it were stoutly asserted that everything was
quiet all over the archipelago except in certain parts of certain
localities, naming them, that sounded well, and as the public at home
simply skipped the unpronounceable names, not caring much whether they
represented molecules or hemispheres, all went well. For instance,
most of the provinces of the archipelago were organized under "civil"
government prior to the inauguration of Governor Taft, which occurred,
July 4, 1901, and on July 17th, thereafter, Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol
were restored to military control. [374] I suppose the fact that
Batangas, Cebu, and Bohol had been so restored was duly announced
at the time in the Associated Press despatches from Manila. But
what light did it throw on the situation? Who knew whether any one
of these names represented a mountain lair, a country village, a
remote islet, or a large and populous province? As a matter of fact,
each was a province, and the total population of the three provinces
was 1,180,655, [375] and their total area 4651 square miles. [376]
The eminent gentlemen charged with the government of the Islands,
once they committed themselves to their "civil" government, persisted
always in treating the insurrection, as General Hancock's campaign
speeches used to treat the tariff--as "a local issue." The true
analogy, that of a house on fire, with the fire partly but not wholly
under control, and momentarily subject to gusts of wind, never seems
to have occurred to them. Here were provinces aggregating nearly
twelve hundred thousand people, officially admitted to be still in
insurrection within less than two weeks after the announcement of
the inauguration of a civil government, which included them, with
its implied assertion of a state of peace as to them.

If to the three provinces above named you add the province of Samar,
later of dark and bloody fame, you have a fourth province as to which
not only had there been no "civil" government organized on paper, but
no claim yet made by any one that we had ever conquered it. We had been
so busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not yet had time to bother
very much with Samar. The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its
population 266,237. (See the census tables already cited.) In their
report dated October 15, 1901, [377] you find the Commission admitting
that "the insurrection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu" and
"parts of" Laguna and Tayabas provinces. Now the euphemistic limitation
implied in the words "parts of" is quite negligible, for any serious
purpose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather constantly on the
move, and the population in all the "parts of" any province that was
still holding out backed up the combatants morally and materially,
with information as to our movements, supplies, etc., whenever
the insurgent detachments, in the course of their peregrinations,
happened to pass through those "parts." So, to make a recapitulation
presenting the political situation admitted by the Commission to exist
a little over three months after the inauguration of civil government,
we have the insurrection still in progress as follows:

    Province             Area (sq. m.)          Population

    Batangas              1,201                   257,715
    Cebu                  1,939                   653,727
    Bohol                 1,511                   269,223
    Laguna                  629                   148,606
    Tayabas               5,993                   153,065
    Samar                 5,276                   266,237
                         ------                 ---------
        Total            16,549                 1,748,573

According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on
October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his "civil" government on
the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among
one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total
area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the
reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos
and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles,
having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the
case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of
the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.

Just here I owe it to President Taft, under whose administration
as governor I served as a judge, as well as to myself, to explain
why I have so frequently put the word "civil" in quotations in
referring to the civil government of the Philippines. Broadly
speaking, if "civil" does not imply consent of the governed, it
at least distinctly negatives the idea of a bleeding, prostrate,
and deeply hostile people. And, in that the civil government of the
Philippines founded in 1901 did so negative the actual conditions it
was a kindly humbug. When you go around the country sending people
to the penitentiary by scores for political crimes, and then get
criticised afterwards for "subserviency" to the government you are
thus serving, you get a trifle sensitive about such criticism. Now
the core of the charges made in this country against the Philippine
judiciary in the early days was that they were parties to a humbug,
pliable servants of a government which was trying to produce at home
an incorrect impression of substantial absence of unwillingness on
the part of the governed. I am very sure that the five ex-officers of
the volunteer army above named, who went from the army to the bench,
never did, by act or word, lend themselves to the idea that there was
any "consent" on the part of the governed. Those of us who had been
in Cuba with General Wood had but a little while previously observed
there a civil régime under a military name. We were now, in the
Philippines, serving a military régime under a civil name. We had all
of us doubtless--if there was an exception it is immaterial--served
on military commissions. We therefore felt, without immodesty,
that we could deal out to insurrectos and their political cousins,
the brigands, more even-handed justice, as a military commission
of one, than a board of several officers, booted, spurred, and
travel-stained from some recent man-hunt. Turning, however, from
the more inconspicuous objects of Professor Willis's attacks, [378]
the American trial judges in the Philippines in the pioneer days, to
the now wide-looming historic personage who was his real objective,
I was asked at a public meeting in Boston, rather significantly,
by one of the most eminent lawyers in this country, Mr. Moorfield
Storey, formerly president of the American Bar Association, whether
or not there had been attempts in the Philippines, while I was there,
to make the judiciary subservient to the executive. My answer was, "No,
the lawyers who have been in charge of the Philippine Government have
never been guilty of any unprofessional conduct." But the distinguished
Boston barrister above referred to has a nephew who is now and has been
since 1909, Governor of the Philippines--and who, before he went out
there was a representative of Big Business in Boston--Governor Forbes,
and I have no idea that any judge who during that time has rendered
any decision of importance he did not like has been promoted to the
Supreme Bench of the Islands, though I know that under Governor Taft,
Judge Carson unhesitatingly declared a certain act of the Commission
null and void as being in conflict with an Act of Congress, and
before the time-servers had gotten through wondering at his rashness,
Mr. Taft had him put on the Supreme Bench of the Philippines [379]
because he liked that kind of a judge.

Having sown the wind by setting up his civil government too soon,
let us now observe the whirlwind Governor Taft reaped within six
months thereafter. Of course the civil and military folk were at
daggers' points. That goes without saying. But their differences
were decorously suppressed so that the Filipinos did not get hold
of them. To that end, the situation was also diligently concealed
in the United States. In his proclamation of July 4, 1902, you find
President Roosevelt publicly smoothing the ruffled feathers of that
rugged hero of many battles in two hemispheres, General Chaffee, and
also commending Governor Taft, and telling them how harmoniously they
had gotten along together to the credit of their common country. But
in 1901, shortly after General Chaffee had relieved General MacArthur,
you find the following cablegram:

                                          Executive Mansion, Washington,
                                                        October 8, 1901.

    Chaffee, Manila: I am deeply chagrined, to use the mildest possible
    term, over the trouble between yourself and Taft. I wish you
    to see him personally, and spare no effort to secure prompt and
    friendly agreement in regard to the differences between you. Have
    cabled him also. It is most unfortunate to have any action which
    produces friction and which may have a serious effect both in
    the Philippines and here at home. I trust implicitly that you
    and Taft will come to agreement.

        Theodore Roosevelt. [380]

The most important words of the above telegram are "and here at
home." The "serious effect here at home" so earnestly deprecated was
that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might
be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out
the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil
government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was
recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal
of the police protection of the army from districts in which there
were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and
willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch
contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has
already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor
Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that "the great majority"
were "entirely willing" to American sovereignty. It would also show
up Mr. Root's nonsense about "the patient and unconsenting millions,"
so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his
pious Philippics against delivering said millions "into the hands of
the assassin, Aguinaldo," [381] and would reveal the truth confessed
by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July,
1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor
and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just
completed the suppression of "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people."

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt's above
cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular
waters, a company of General Chaffee's command, Company C, of the
9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place
called Balangiga, in the island of Samar. [382] This had made General
Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody
drama of which General "Jake" Smith was the central figure, whereby
Samar was made "a howling wilderness." But Governor Taft was filled
with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government
than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos
of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty
Chaffee with remarks like this: "The people are friendly to the civil
government," and suavely speaking of "the evidence which accumulates
on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and
protection by the civil government." [383] The same Taft report goes
on to deprecate "rigor in the treatment" of the situation and the
"consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the
Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread
and development of the civil government."

General "Jake" Smith was sent to Samar shortly after the Balangiga
massacre, and did indeed make the place a howling wilderness, with his
famous "kill-and-burn" orders, instructions to "kill everything over
ten years old" and so forth, and the army was in sympathy generally
with most of what he did,--except, of course, the unspeakable "10 year
old" part--piously exclaiming, as fallible human nature often will in
such circumstances, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Now the civil
government could have put a stop to all this if it had wanted to. It
had the backing of President Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the
benefit of such "fear of God"--to use the army's rather sacrilegious
expression about that Samar campaign--as the military arm put into
the heart of the Filipino, and went on the even tenor of its way,
still maintaining that the Filipinos must like us because the civil
government was so benevolent,--as if the Filipinos drew any nice
distinctions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or supposed
the two did not represent one and the same government, the government
of the United States. There was much investigation about that awful
Samar campaign afterward. General Smith was court-martialed and partly
whitewashed, at least not dismissed. At General Smith's court-martial,
there was some dispute about the alleged orders to "kill and burn,"
to "kill everything over ten years old," etc. But the nature of the
campaign may be inferred from General Smith's famous circular No. 6,
which, issued on Christmas eve, 1901, advised his command, in effect,
that he did not take much stock in the civil commission's confidence
that the people really wanted peace; that he was "thoroughly convinced"
that the wealthy people in the towns of his district were aiding the
insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that he proposed to

    adopt a policy that will create in all the minds of all the
    people a burning desire for the war to cease; a desire or longing
    so intense, so personal, and so real that it will impel them to
    devote themselves in real earnest to bringing about a real state
    of peace. [384]

During all his trial troubles, General Smith "took what was coming
to him" without a murmur, and General Chaffee stuck to him as far as
he could without assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful
orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went to Samar, his
superior officer, General Chaffee, was in just the direly vengeful
frame of mind he, General Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted
him to do, substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no
means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put the blame on his
chief. But a fearful lesson was given the Filipinos, and the civil
government profited by it. General Chaffee was never really pressed
on whether he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he did;
Governor Taft was never even criticised for not protesting; but with
a flourish of presidential trumpets, General Smith was finally made
"the goat," by being summarily placed on the retired list, and that
closed the bloody Samar episode of 1901-02. I wonder General Smith
has not gone and wept on General Miles's shoulder and like him become
a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston. Some of the best
fighting men in the army say that as a soldier in battle General
Smith is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation in the
following passage of the Scriptures which fits and describes his case:

    But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be
    presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him,
    and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. [385]

In his Report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the four principal
provinces, including Batangas, which gave trouble shortly after the
civil government was set up in that year, and had to be returned
to military control, were organized under civil rule "on the
recommendation" of the then commanding general (MacArthur) [386]: It
certainly seems unlikely that the haste to change from military rule
to civil rule came on the motion of the military. If the Commission
ever got, in writing, from General MacArthur, a "recommendation" that
any provinces be placed under civil rule while still in insurrection,
the text of the writing will show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the
will of Mr. McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contemporaneous
evidence will show that General MacArthur told them, substantially,
that they were "riding for a fall." In fact, whenever an insurrection
would break out in a province after Governor Taft's inauguration as
governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philippines, from
the commanding general down, was "I told you so." They did not say
this where Governor Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge
that they were much addicted to damning "politics" as the cause of
all the trouble.

Governor Taft's statement in his report for 1901, that the four
principal provinces, above named, Batangas and the rest, were organized
under civil rule "on the recommendation of General MacArthur,"
is fully explained in his testimony before the Senate Committee of
1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted from President
McKinley's state papers concerning the Philippines, especially
his messages to Congress, the political pressure Mr. McKinley was
under from the beginning to make a show of "civil" government, thus
emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial opposition
to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity for the use of force,
so as to palliate American repugnance to forcing a government upon an
unwilling people, has been made clear. There were to be no "dark days
of reconstruction." The Civil War in the United States from 1861 to
1865 was a love feast compared with our war in the Philippines. Yet the
work of reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated on the
theory of consent, so persistently urged by President McKinley before
the American people from the beginning, viz., that the insurrection
represented only a small faction of the people. We have seen how
General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, entertained this
notion, and how by the time he took Malolos in March, 1899, he had
gotten over this notion, and had--regretfully--recognized that "the
whole people are loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents." And
now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of continuous
fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on behalf of Mr. McKinley,
that he, MacArthur, did not know what he was talking about, and that
"the great majority" were for American rule. The representative
men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return of the State to
military control in 1870. Most of them had been officers of the
Confederate army. The Federal commander simply told them that if
they could not restrain the lawless element of their own people, he
would. By premature setting up of the Philippine civil government,
the lawless element was allowed full swing. General MacArthur had
been in the Civil War. He knew something about reconstruction. But
here were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. McKinley to
the effect that civil government, government "essentially popular in
form," was to be set up as fast as territory was conquered. It didn't
make any difference about the government being "essentially popular"
just so it was "essentially popular in form." To the Senate Committee
of 1902, Governor Taft said:

    General MacArthur and the Commission did differ as to where the
    power lay with respect to the organization of civil governments,
    as to who should say what civil governments should be organized,
    the Commission contending that, under the instructions, it was
    left to them, and General MacArthur thinking that everything was
    subject to military control ultimately, in view of the fact that
    the islands were in a state of war. [387]

Governor Taft then added that he and General MacArthur reached a
modus vivendi. When a good soldier once finds out just what his
commander-in-chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good
faith, to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how
unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General MacArthur saw what
President McKinley wanted done, he proceeded to co-operate loyally
with Governor Taft to carry out the plan. He well knew the country
was not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley was bent on
crowding civil government forward as fast as territory was conquered,
he would make his recommendations on that basis. In the matter of
the utter folly of the prematurity with which the civil government
was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the terrible consequences
to the hapless Filipinos, hereinafter described, which followed,
by reason of the premature withdrawal of the police protection of
the army and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated,
from a country just recovering from some six years of war, General
MacArthur's exemption from responsibility is shown by his reports
for 1900 and 1901. [388] The former has already been fully examined,
and the original sharp differences between him and Governor Taft
made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the date of
the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, if I mistake not, the
day of General MacArthur's final departure for the United States,
the latter washes his hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense,
born of political expediency, about there having never been any real
fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncertain terms thus:

    Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede the
    activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments [our
    military forces,] will not only be a menace to the present, but
    put in jeopardy the entire future of American possibilities in
    the archipelago. [389]

No, President Taft can never make General MacArthur "the goat" for
what General Bell had to do in Batangas Province in 1901-02 to make
our "willing" subjects behave. Nor can the ultimate responsibility
before the bar of history for the awful fact that, according to the
United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Atlas of the Philippines of
1899, the population of Batangas Province was 312,192, and according
to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903 it was 257,715,
[390] rest entirely on military shoulders. An attempt to place the
responsibility for the prematurity of the civil government on General
MacArthur was made by Honorable Henry C. Ide, who was of the Taft
Commission of 1900, and later Governor General of the Islands, and
is now Minister to Spain, in the North American Review for December,
1907. But Mr. Taft, a man of nobler mould, has at least maintained a
decorous silence on the subject except when interrogated by Congress,
and when so interrogated, his testimony, above quoted, if analyzed,
places the responsibility where it honestly belongs. In 1900 the Taft
Commission were not taking much military advice.

Batangas province was first taken under the wing of the
peace-at-any-price policy by the Act of the Taft Commission of May 2,
1901, entitled "An Act Extending the Provisions of 'the Provincial
Government Act' [391] to the Province of Batangas." By the Act of
the Commission of July 17, 1901, the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, and
Bohol, were restored to military control. When the civil authorities
turned those provinces back to military control, they well knew the
frame of mind the military were in, and there is no escape from the
proposition that they, in effect, said to the military: "Take them
and chasten them; go as far as you like. After you are done with them,
it will be time enough to pet them again. But for the present we mean
business." General Bell was scathingly criticised on the floor of the
United States Senate for what he did in Batangas in 1901-02, but by
the time he took hold there it had become a case of "spare the rod
and spoil the child." The substitution by the Commission of kindness,
and a disposition to forget what the Filipinos could not forget, for
firmness and the policy of making them submit unreservedly to the
inevitable,--viz., abandonment of their dream of independence--had
created among them a well-nigh ineradicable impression that, for some
reason or other, whether due to disapproval in the United States
of the so-called "imperial" policy or what not, we were afraid of
them. General Bell's task in Batangas, therefore, was to eradicate
this impression all over the archipelago by making an example of the
Batangas people.

In General Chaffee's report for 1902, [392] he prefaces his account
of General Bell's operations in Batangas as follows:

    The long-continued resistance in the province of Batangas and
    in certain parts of the bordering provinces of Tayabas, Laguna,
    and Cavite, had made it apparent to me and to others that the
    insurrectionary force keeping up the struggle there could exist
    and maintain itself only through the connivance and knowledge
    of practically all the inhabitants; that it received the active
    support of many who professed friendship for United States
    authority, etc.

This last was a thrust at Governor Taft's new-found Filipino friends
and advisers, in whose lack of sympathy with the cause of their
country the Governor so profoundly believed, but in whose continuing
co-operation in the killing of his soldiers General Chaffee believed
still more profoundly.

General Bell's famous operations on a large scale in Batangas began
January 1, 1902. The great mistake of the Civil Commission, to which
they adhered so long, was in supposing that when the respectable
military element of the insurgents was pursued to capture or surrender,
these last could and would thereafter control the situation. As a
matter of fact, whether they could or not, they did not.

In his celebrated circular order dated Batangas, December 9, 1901,
General Bell announced:

    To all Station Commanders:

    A general conviction, which the brigade commander shares,
    appears to exist, that the insurrection in this brigade continues
    because the greater part of the people, especially the wealthy
    ones, pretend to desire, but do not in reality want peace; that
    when all really want peace, we can have it promptly. Under such
    circumstances, it is clearly indicated that a policy should be
    adopted that will, as soon as possible, make the people want
    peace and want it badly.

    The only acceptable and convincing evidence of the real sentiments
    of either individuals or town councils should be such acts
    publicly performed as must inevitably commit them irrevocably to
    the side of Americans by arousing the animosity of the insurgent
    element. * * * No person should be given credit for loyalty simply
    because he takes the oath of allegiance, or secretly conveys to
    Americans worthless information and idle rumors which result in
    nothing. Those who publicly guide our troops to the camps of the
    enemy, who publicly identify insurgents, who accompany troops in
    operations against the enemy, who denounce and assist in arresting
    the secret enemies of the Government, who publicly obtain and
    bring reliable and valuable information to commanding officers,
    those in fact who publicly array themselves against the insurgents,
    and for Americans, should be trusted and given credit for loyalty,
    but no others. No person should be given credit for loyalty solely
    on account of having done nothing for or against us so far as
    known. Neutrality should not be tolerated. Every inhabitant of
    this brigade should be either active friend or be classed as enemy.

In his Circular Order No. 5, dated Batangas, December 13, 1901, [393]
General Bell announced that General Orders No. 100, Adjutant General's
Office, 1863, approved and published by order of President Lincoln,
for the government of the armies of the United States in the field,
would thereafter be regarded as the guide of his subordinates in the
conduct of the war. This order is familiar to all who have ever made
any study of military law. Ordinarily, of course, a captured enemy
is entitled to "the honors of war," i. e., he must be held, housed,
and fed, unless exchanged, until the close of the war. But where an
enemy places himself by his conduct without the pale of the laws of
war, i. e., where he does not "play the game according to the rules,"
he may be killed on sight, like other outlaws.

Under General Orders No. 100, 1863, men and squads of men who,
without commission, without being part or portion of the regularly
organized hostile army, fight occasionally only, and with intermittent
returns to their homes and avocations, and frequent assumption of the
semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character
and appearance of soldiers; armed prowlers seeking to cut telegraph
wires, destroy bridges and the like, etc., are not entitled to the
protection of the laws of war and may be shot on sight. In other
words, the game being one of life and death, you must take even
chances with your opponent. General Bell's defenders on the floor of
the Senate simply relied on General Orders No. 100. However, there is
nothing about reconcentration in that order. We learned that from the
Spaniards. In fact we never did succeed in bringing to terms the far
Eastern colonies we bought from Spain, until we adopted her methods
with regard to them. Another of the expedients adopted by General Bell
in Batangas seems harsh, but it was used by Wellington in the latter
end of the Napoleonic wars, and by the Germans in the latter end of
the Franco-Prussian War. It was to promise the inhabitants of a given
territory that whenever a telegraph wire or pole was cut the country
within a stated radius thereof, including all human habitations,
would be devastated. It is in General Bell's Circular Order No. 7
of December 15, 1901, [394] that we find the genesis of the idea of
basing tactics used by Weyler in Cuba on Mr. Lincoln's General Order
100. He there says:

    Though Section 17, General Orders 100, authorizes the starving
    of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided
    it leads to a speedier subjection of the enemy, it is considered
    neither justifiable nor desirable to permit any person to starve
    who has come into towns under our control seeking protection.

This order goes on to direct that all food supplies encountered
be brought to the towns. Of course this does not mean supplies
captured from the enemy's forces, which may lawfully be destroyed
at once. To those not familiar with reconcentration tactics it
should be explained that reconcentration means this: You notify,
by proclamation and otherwise, all persons within a given area, that
on and after a certain day they must all leave their homes and come
within a certain prescribed zone or radius of which a named town is
usually the centre, there to remain until further orders, and that
all persons found outside that zone after the date named will be
treated as public enemies. General Bell's order of December 20th,
provided that rice found in the possession of families outside the
protected zone should, if practicable, be moved with them to the town
which was the centre of the zone, that that found apparently cached
for enemy's use should be confiscated, and also destroyed if necessary.

    Whenever it is found absolutely impossible to transport it [any
    food supply] to a point within the protected zone, it will be
    burned or otherwise destroyed. These rules will apply to all
    food products.

No person within the reconcentration zones was permitted to go
outside thereof--cross the dead line--without a written pass. The
Circular Order of December 23d, apparently solicitous lest subordinate
commanders might become infected with the Taft belief in Filipino
affection, directs that after January 1, 1902, all the municipal
officials, members of the police force, etc., "who have not fully
complied with their duty by actively aiding the Americans and rendering
them valuable service," shall be summarily thrown into prison. [395]
Circular Order No. 19, issued on Christmas Eve, 1901, provided that,

    in order to make the existing state o£ war and martial law
    so inconvenient and unprofitable to the people that they will
    earnestly desire and work for the re-establishment of peace and
    civil government,

subordinate commanders might, under certain prescribed restrictions,
put everybody they chose to work on the roads. [396] This was an
ingenious blow at the wealthy and soft-handed, intended to superinduce
submission by humbling their pride. Note also the seeds of affection
thus sown for the civil government under the reconstruction period
which was to follow. In one of Dickens novels there occurs a law
firm by the name of Spenlow and Jorkins. Mr. Spenlow was quite
fond of considering himself, and of being considered by others, as
tender-hearted. Mr. Jorkins did not mind. When the widow and the orphan
would plead with Mr. Spenlow to stay the foreclosure of a mortgage,
that benevolent soul would tell them, with a pained expression of
infinite sympathy, that he would do all he could for them, but that
they would have to see Mr. Jorkins, "who is a very exacting man,"
he would say. In the dual American politico-military régime in the
Philippines of 1901-02, Governor Taft was the Mr. Spenlow, General
Chaffee the Mr. Jorkins. But the former always seemed to harbor the
amiable delusion that the Filipinos did not at all consider the firm as
the movants in each proceeding against them, and that on the contrary
they were sure to make a favorable contrast in their hearts between
the kindness of Mr. Spenlow and the harshness of Mr. Jorkins. He
seemed blind to the fact that the Filipinos, in considering what was
done by any of us, spelled us--U. S.

General Bell's Circular Order No. 22, also a Christmas Eve product,
re-iterates the usual purpose to make the people yearn for civil
government, and the usual warning that none of them really and truly
want the blessings of American domination and Benevolent Assimilation
as they truly should, and adds:

    To combat such a population, it is necessary to make the state of
    war as insupportable as possible; and there is no more efficacious
    way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people
    in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such
    conditions will soon become unbearable. Little should be said. The
    less said the better. Let acts, not words, convey intentions. [397]

Under date of December 26, 1901, General Bell reports:

    I am now assembling in the neighborhood of 2500 men, who will be
    used in columns of fifty each. I expect to accompany the command.
    * * * I take so large a command for the purpose of thoroughly
    searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents
    and for food, expecting to destroy everything I find outside of
    town. All able-bodied men will be killed or captured.

Such was the central idea animating the Bell Brigade that overran
Batangas in 1902. The American soldier in officially sanctioned
wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling
to describe him. I have seen him in that mood, but to describe it is
beyond me. Side by side with innumerable ambuscades incident to the
nature of the field service as it then was, in which little affairs
the soldier above mentioned had lost many a "bunkie," there had gone
on for some time, under the McKinley-Taft peace-at-any-price policy,
whose keynote was that no American should have a job a Filipino could
fill, much appointing to municipal and other offices of Filipinos,
many of whom had at once set to work to make their new offices useful
to the cause of their country by systematic aid to the ambuscade
business. With this and the Balangiga massacre ever in mind, the
men of General Bell's brigade began their work in Batangas in a mood
which quite made for fidelity in performance of orders to "make living
unbearable" for the Filipino "by acts, not words." Also, the American
soldier can sing, sometimes very badly, but often rather irrepressibly,
until stopped by his officer. Also, whether justly or unjustly is
beside the question, he considers a politician who pets the enemy
in the midst of a war a hypocrite. So General Bell's 2500 men began
that Batangas campaign on New Year's Day, 1902, giving preference,
out of their repertoire, to a campaign song whose ominous chorus ran:

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

and between songs they would say purringly to one another, "Remember
Balangiga." And their commanding officer was the very incarnation of
this feeling. So listen to the stride of his seven-league boots and
the ring of his iron heel:

    I expect to first clean out the wide Looboo Peninsula. I shall then
    move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country
    westward to the ocean and south of Cavite, returning through
    Lipa. I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging
    northward, the country in the vicinity of [here follows a long
    list of towns] will be scoured, ending at [a named mountain],
    which will then be thoroughly searched and devastated. Swinging
    back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the
    country of which [two named mountains] are the main peaks.

And so on ad libitum. General Bell's course in Batangas was commended
in the annual report of his immediate superior, a very humane, as
well as gallant, soldier, General Wheaton, as "a model in suppressing
insurrections under like circumstances." [398] The Batangas programme
was approved by General Chaffee, the commanding general. In 1902 the
United States Senate rang with indiscriminate denunciation of the
Batangas severities and the Samar "kill and burn" orders. I tried
in 1903, without success, to satisfy my distinguished and beloved
fellow-townsman, Senator Bacon, that at the time it was adopted it
had become a military necessity, which it had. The fact was that the
McKinley-Taft policy of conciliation, intended to gild the rivets of
alien domination and cure the desire for independence by coddling,
had loaned aid and comfort to the enemy, by creating, among a people
used theretofore solely to force as a governmental agency for making
sovereignty respected, the pathetic notion that we were afraid of them,
and might be weakening in respect to our declared programme of denying
them independence. The Bell opinion of the Commission's confidence in
Filipino gladness at its advent among them is sufficiently apparent in
his orders to his troops. On May 23, 1902, Senator Bacon read in the
Senate a letter from an officer of the army, a West Point graduate and
a personal friend of the Senator's, whose name he withheld, but for
whose veracity he vouched, which letter alluded to "a reconcentrado,
pen with a dead line outside, beyond which everything living is
shot"; spoke of "this corpse-carcass stench wafted in" (to where the
letter-writer sat writing) as making it "slightly unpleasant here,"
and made your flesh crawl thus:

    At nightfall clouds of vampire bats softly swirl out on their
    orgies over the dead.

This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like
Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered
in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell, [399]
and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled
matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in
those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the
dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations,
which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is
not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give
it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were
daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General
Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar
surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged
of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of
insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents
surrendered. [400]

The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse than his
"bite." The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901-02
lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not
as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite
naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was
made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was
312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the
outset to make General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we
are considering his "bite"--how many lives his Batangas lesson to
the Filipino people cost--another bit of testimony is tremendously
relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas
Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due
to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to a little over 200,000
the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province
had." [401] Considering that General Bell's 1901-'02 campaign in that
ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,--how many of the 209
wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered--the
Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from
the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of
"suppressing insurrection under like circumstances." But it was never
again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon's
"corpse-carcass stench" from supposed reconcentrado pens and his
"clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the
dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain
out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the
noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor
Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most
sobbingly in love with "a benign civil government" and had forgotten
all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a
campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home
a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at
the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair
made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again
in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least;
whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon's army friend's "clouds of
vampire bats softly swirling" over the corpses of reconcentrados, were
doing said swirling not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man
familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces can see from
the letter that it was written from Samar. Moreover, Colonel Wagner
afterwards testified before the Senate Committee of 1902 [402] that
if there had been any great mortality in the reconcentration camps
in Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected practically
all those Batangas camps. Nobody who was in the islands at the time
doubts but what such conditions may have obtained in some places
under General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that any such
conditions would have been tolerated under General Bell. General Bell
has that aversion to either causing or witnessing needless suffering,
which you almost invariably find in men who are both constitutionally
brave and temperamentally generous and considerate of others. But the
moral sought to be pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration
in Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in Samar were
hellish, but that, in all matters concerning the Philippines, the army,
as in the case of Senator Bacon's friend, is gagged by operation of
law, and its enforced silence is peculiarly an asset in the hands of
the party in power seeking to continue in power, in a distant colonial
enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his friend's name, because for an
army officer to tell the truth about the Philippines would be likely
to get him into trouble with the President of the United States. The
President, be it remembered, is also the leader of the political party
to which he belongs. That is why the country has never been able to
get any light from those who know the most about the Philippines and
the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. In 1898 this
republic was beguiled into abandonment of the faiths of the founders
and started after a gold brick, thinking it was a Klondyke. Then and
ever since, the most important and material witnesses concerning the
wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the army,--which best
of all knows the rank folly of it--have been gagged by operation
of law. All republics that have heretofore become monarchies, have
become so through manipulation of the army by men in power seeking
to continue in power. We should either resign our expensive kingship
over the Philippines or get a king for the whole business, and be
done with it. We have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R. [403]

"On June 23, 1902," says General Chaffee, in his report for that year,
[404] "by Act No. 421 of the Philippine Commission, so much of Act
No. 173, of July 17, 1901, as transferred the province of Batangas
to military control was revoked. Civil government was re-established
in the province at 12 o'clock noon, July 4, 1902." The rest of the
1,748,573 people herein above mentioned as constituting the population
of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in
turn made to "want peace and want it badly," and on July 4, 1902,
President Roosevelt issued his proclamation declaring that a state of
general and complete peace existed. This is the famous proclamation
in which he congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men of
his command on "a total of more than 2000 combats, great and small,"
most of them subsequent to the Taft roseate cablegrams of 1900,
and the still more roseate reports of 1901 from the same source. The
proclamation appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66,
Adjutant General's Office, Washington, dated July 4, 1902. [405]
It directed, in the body of it, that it be "read aloud at parade in
every military post." It thanked the officers and enlisted men of the
army in the Philippines, in the name of the President of the United
States, for the courage and fortitude, the indomitable spirit and loyal
devotion with which they had been fighting up to that time, alluded
to the impliedly lamb-like or turn-the-other-cheek way in which they
had been behaving (no special reference is made either to Batangas,
Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully Rooseveltian
war-whoop about the "more than 2000 combats, great and small," above
mentioned. It also referred to how, "with admirable good temper and
loyalty to American ideals its (the army's) commanding generals have
joined with the civilian agents of the government" in the work of
superinducing allegiance to American sovereignty. This document is
one of the most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable of
men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of ability to mould
powerful discordant elements to his will. It put everybody in a good
humor. And yet, read at every military post, it served notice on the
military that if they knew which side their bread was buttered on,
they had better forget everything they knew tending to show the
prematurity of the setting-up of the civil government, sheath all
tomahawks and scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting
for Governor Taft's exit from office, abstain from chatty letters to
United States Senators telling tales out of school, such as the one
Senator Bacon had read on the floor of the Senate (already noticed),
and dutifully perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as
officially announced in the proclamation itself.

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, declares that the
insurrection "as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of
the United States" is over (p. 3). They then proceed, with evident
sincerity, to describe the popularity of themselves and their
policies with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in
your Congressional district, in the type of man who thinks he could
be elected to Congress "in a walk" if he should only announce his
candidacy, when as a matter of fact, the great majority of the people
of his district are, for some notorious reason connected with his
past history among them,--say his war record--very much prejudiced
against him. They repeat one of their favorite sentiments about the
whole country--always except "as hereinafter excepted"--being now
engaged in enjoying civil government. But they casually admit also that
"much remains to be done" in suppressing lawlessness and disturbances,
so as to perfect and accentuate said "enjoyment."

Let us see just what the state of the country was in this regard
according to their own showing. They say:

    The six years of war to which these islands have been subjected
    have naturally created a class of restless men utterly lacking
    in habits of industry, taught to live and prey upon the country
    for their support by the confiscation of food supplies as a
    war measure, and regarding the duties of a laborer as dull and
    impossible for one who has tasted the excitement of a guerrilla
    life. Even to the man anxious to return to agricultural pursuits,
    the conditions existing present no temptation. By the war
    and by the rinderpest, chiefly the latter, the carabaos, or
    water-buffaloes, have been reduced to ten per cent. of their
    former number.

Think of the condition of a country, any country, but especially one
whose wealth is almost wholly agricultural, which has just had nine
tenths of its plow animals absolutely swept off the face of the earth
by war and its immediate consequences. The report proceeds:

    The chief food of the common people of these islands is rice,
    and the carabao is the indispensable instrument of the people in
    the cultivation of rice,

adding also that the carabao is the chief means of transportation
of the tobacco, hemp, and other crops to market, and that the few
remaining carabaos, the ordinary price of which in normal Spanish
times had been $10 was now $100. Then, after completing a faithful
picture of supremely thorough desolation such as the Islands had never
seen since they first rose out of the sea, certainly not during the
sleepy, easy-going Spanish rule, they say: "The Filipino people of
the better class have received the passage of the Philippine Act with
great satisfaction"--meaning the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, the
Philippine Government Act. Gott im Himmel! What did the people care
about paper constitutions concerning benevolent assimilation? What they
were interested in was food and safety, not politics; food, raiment,
shelter, and efficient police protection from the brigandage which
immediately follows in the wake of all war, not details as to what we
were going to do with the bleeding and prostrate body politic. But
the Commission had started out to govern the Filipino people on a
definite theory,--apparently on the idea that if Americans wore white
duck and no brass buttons, in lieu of khaki and brass buttons, the
Filipinos would at once forget the war and be happy with an exceeding
great happiness. Now the real situation was this. The Islands had not
yet been thoroughly beaten into submission. Northern Luzon had been
conquered. The lake region of Southern Luzon had been conquered. The
most important of the Visayan Islands had been conquered. But the
extreme southern portion of Luzon, the enormously rich hemp peninsula
already described in a former chapter, and the adjoining hemp island of
Samar, were still seething with sedition which later broke out. All
through the winter of 1900-01 General MacArthur had tried to get
Mr. Root to let him close the hemp ports. But some powerful influence
at Washington had prevented the grant of this permission. On January 9,
1901, General MacArthur had wired Mr. Root:

    Hemp in southern Luzon in same relation to present struggle as
    cotton during rebellion. [406]

Nothing doing. General MacArthur must worry along with the
"blockade-runners" as best he could, no matter how much hemp money
might be poured into the insurgent coffers. So that in the latter
part of 1902, although the more respectable of the insurgent leaders
had then surrendered, even in the hemp country, the flames of public
disorder, which had flickered for a spell after the Batangas lesson,
broke out anew in the province of Albay, and in parts of Sorsogon,
the two provinces of the hemp peninsula having the best sea-ports. The
man at the head of this Albay insurrection was a sorry scamp of some
shrewdness by the name of Simeon Ola, with whom I afterwards had an
interesting and in some respects most amusing acquaintance. But that
is another story. I have simply brought the whole archipelago abreast
of the close of 1902, relatively to public order. In this way only
may the insurrections in Albay and elsewhere in 1902-03, described
in the chapter which follows, be understood in their relation to a
comprehensive view of the American occupation from the beginning,
and not be regarded as "a local issue" like General Hancock's tariff,
having no general political significance. In this way only may those
insurrections be understood in their true relation to the history of
public order in the Islands. The Commission always represented all
disturbances after 1902 as matters of mere banditti, such as have
been chronic for generations in Calabria or the Transcaucasus, wholly
distinct from, instead of being an inevitable political sequel of,
the years of continuous warfare which had preceded. Their benevolent
obsession was that the desire of the Philippine people for independence
was wholly and happily eradicated.

CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903

                            Me miserable! Which way shall I fly?

                                                          Paradise Lost.

Throughout the last year of Governor Taft's administration in the
Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in
the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The
military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901-2 had
precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at
the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public,
already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had
never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of "the days
when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when,
before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
thundered against the oppressor of Africa." [407] He did not want to
order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated
him to his native municipal police and constabulary, experimental
outfits of doubtful loyalty, [408] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as
it afterwards turned out, [409] for the maintenance of public order and
for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security
for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as
well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity
of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, though not so enamored
of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about
resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see
brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that
sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in
the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many
years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded
by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army
were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would
at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous
institution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a
year, in 1902-3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago,
the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon,
and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had
begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked,
because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and
inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of
weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately
vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the
Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an
attitude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration,
but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must
ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American
sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as
senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American
statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year
ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the
political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he
may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft's administration
of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible
effect it might have on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an
elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor
party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, let us examine his
course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines
in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every
government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley's original instructions of April 7, 1900,
to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the
articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:

    This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all
    descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard
    of the faith and honor of the American army;

the President had added:

    As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of
    the United States to give protection for property and life
    * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

    * * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance
    of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of
    their country.

We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the
Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of
citizen in the republic to-day than the man now [410] at the head of
it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article
on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President
Roosevelt, entitled "The First Civil Governor," which began as follows:

    A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public
    life and American public men [411] remarked that the first Governor
    of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make
    a first-class President of the United States with the qualities
    which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States,
    and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was
    Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.

The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing
estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or
not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President
Taft's policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his
chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him
honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in
the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though
as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of
the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem
of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With
this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and
the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has
preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being
animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person
of the sounding-brass-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and
fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion,
viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we
blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house
divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with
the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what
may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will
always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the
controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that
in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect
the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly
enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley's
original instructions to him, lest "the full performance of this
obligation" might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend,
Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged,
then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing
business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes
any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is entitled to
a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it "concerns
the honor and conscience of their country."

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders
in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned,
together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then,
that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled
by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary
incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of
"civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace
the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage
prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the
riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked
on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming
subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which
must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I
know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly
nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God.

The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which
began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying
embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials
by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three
distinct stages:

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental
formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having
terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated,
patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of
provinces, until the summer of 1902.

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious
in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil
government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things
had been given time to settle down in them to normal.

These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above
mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really
understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration
applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens
such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through
which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction
is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from
one of the military reports of 1902:

    The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left
    the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands
    of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and
    nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous
    class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live
    without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the
    guise of patriotism. [412]

Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to
public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the
two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have
called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those
of the latter's colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year
previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded
an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa,
etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion:

    Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the
    Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province
    of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole
    archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware, [413]
    having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he
    has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary,
    officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American
    volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded
    out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there
    are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as
    soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set
    to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over
    the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit
    as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to
    act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any
    Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot
    a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior
    economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing
    rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the
    same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of
    the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to
    handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to
    mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures
    through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may,
    possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be
    made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them
    when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other
    cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can
    see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands,
    or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the
    ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners
    will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all
    until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb
    driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore,
    in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary
    force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain
    that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now
    confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series
    of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The
    majority of the people of the province are really sick of the
    war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there
    is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of
    Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless
    element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together
    nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is
    terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto,
    and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole
    province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands
    that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore,
    this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common
    concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and
    order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for
    the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell
    or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province
    just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it.

At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though
tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with
Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington,
calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial
Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The
man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an
annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt
bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus:

    I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for
    his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar,
    and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can
    be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith
    in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from
    reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats swirling out
    on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend,
    whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never
    did have any application to Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did
    a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice
    of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in
    Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that
    all those people received daily medical treatment.

For the correctness of the picture of conditions presented in the
above hypothetical talk, I of course intend to be understood as
vouching. If such a talk could have been had in 1903 by President
Roosevelt with Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared his
views, the Albay situation might have been handled creditably. But the
Administration was in no position to be frank with the Opposition. No
Administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a
position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the
situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given
time there was always so much that it could not afford to re-open
and explain. Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too
closely as to why, when Secretary of War, he had gone around the
country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. McKinley, and talking
about "the patient and unconsenting millions" so anxious to be rid
of "Aguinaldo and his band of assassins," when at that very time his
(Mr. Root's) generals in the Philippines were engaged in activities,
the magnitude of which may be inferred from a telegram sent from
Washington to General Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly
spare the 10th Infantry, and adding:

    Imperative that we have immediate use of every available company
    that we can lay our hands on for service in the Philippines, [414]

although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets how nobly the army
had labored in putting down "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." No,
the Administration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank
concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not recapitulate
here any more of the long train of reasons why, because they have all
been fully explained in the preceding chapters. Of course President
Roosevelt had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. He
was not in constant daily contact with army officers at the War
Department, familiar with the actual situation in the Philippines,
as Mr. Root was. He was simply "sticking to Taft." Somewhere along
about the time the military folk in the Philippines were scoffing at
the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to the lack of a strong
government, President Roosevelt had written his warm personal friend,
Hon. George Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, who had
been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, was then an official
of the civil government of the Philippines, and later Governor of
New Mexico, by appointment of Mr. Roosevelt: "Stick to Taft, George"
or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt's attitude was simply that
of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft who simply assumed that the
Philippine Government was not going to tolerate impotence in the matter
of protecting life and property. But everybody at both ends of the line
was too deep in the mire of all the long and systematic withholding
of facts from the American public which had been occurring ever since
1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to
illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published
official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical
conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position
to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil
government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked
notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own
and Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency,
respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from
the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized
the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left
to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order
in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just
suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What
then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological
order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would
suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do.

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases
arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way
region as "the affair of March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for
1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor
Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of
Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer
in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while
they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town,
and departed. But Mr. Taft's report disposes of the whole incident
in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that
a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the
provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country,
hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of
them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and
stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements
arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to present the gravity of
the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent
solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote
provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified list," to
say nothing of politically negligible native life therein. [415]
Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the
ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope
with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in
the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy
with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair,
Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and
get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one
hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken
away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people
who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th
Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United
States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as
deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under "civil"
government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark,
and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never
taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying "the peace and
protection of a benign civil government." The writ of habeas corpus
was never suspended for a moment.

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft remarks that if
the prompt steps he did take (he had already described the prompt
sending of the military to the scene) had not been taken, "the trouble
might have spread." But the Surigao affair seemed to teach the civil
government nothing in the matter of subsequent protection of life,
nor did it lessen their persistence in relying on their constabulary
for due extension of such protection in time of need.

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for avoiding calling on the
military. When you are in a foreign country building a new government
on the ruins of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you
can about how the old one met its problems. The Spaniards had had
the same problem in their day about not ordering out the military,
because they did not have any military to order out. They were too poor
to garrison the various provinces. They had long followed the plan,
from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main towns of disturbed
districts all the country population they could get to come in, and
then acting on the assumption that all who did not come in were public
enemies. This meant that when the country people came in, they simply
looked out for themselves, while away from their homes, and farms,
as best they could. Of course nobody at all looked after the farms,
and nobody provided medical attention for the reconcentrados, or
sanitary attention for the reconcentration camps. This general plan
was formally sanctioned by the Commission, in so far as the following
law sanctioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is section
6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all the constabulary
problems, of which this was one. It read:

    In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or
    outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the outlying
    barrios [416] are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory
    raids--

think of permitting a country to get into any such condition when you
have an abundance of American troops on hand available to prevent it--

    and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or outlaws
    their sources of food supply, and it is not possible with the
    available police forces constantly to provide protection to
    such barrios--

there being all the time "available police forces," in the shape
of regular troops, amply able to handle these unsettled conditions,
which were the inevitable aftermath of lawlessness consequent on five
or six years of guerrilla warfare--

    it shall be within the power of the Governor-General, upon
    resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize the
    provincial governor to order that the residents of such outlying
    barrios be temporarily brought--

observe the length of time this may last is not limited--

    within stated proximity to the poblacion, or larger barrios, of
    the municipality, there to remain until the necessity for such
    order ceases to exist.

To house and ration the reconcentrados, the following provision is
made by the statute we are considering:

    During such temporary residence, it shall be the duty of the
    provincial board, out of provincial funds, to furnish such
    sustenance and shelter as may be needed to prevent suffering
    among the residents of the barrios thus withdrawn.

The act also provides that during the course of the reconcentration,
where the province does not happen to have the necessary ready
cash, it may apply to the Commission, in distant Manila, for an
appropriation to meet the emergency. What is to be done with those
who starve during the temporary deficit, it does not say. If you
must have reconcentration, to leave it to such agencies as the above,
with the native police and constabulary as understudies, in lieu of
availing yourself of the superb equipment of the American army, with
all its facilities for handling great masses of people, as they did,
for instance, after the San Francisco fire, is like preferring the
Mulligan Guards to the Cold-stream Guards. Furthermore, there is no
escape from the logic of the fact that reconcentration is essentially
a war measure. The difference between what is lawful in war and what
is lawful in peace is not a technical one. In war the innocent must
often suffer with the guilty. In peace the theory at least is that
only the guilty suffer. Hence it is that our Constitution is so
jealous that in time of peace no man's life, liberty, or property,
shall be taken from him without "due process of law," a provision
which becomes inoperative in war times, being superseded by martial
law. I know that the early question, "Does the Constitution follow
the flag?" was answered by the Supreme Court of the United States in
the negative as to the Philippines. But the Act of Congress of July
1, 1902, under which we were governing the Philippines in 1903,
and still govern them, known as the Philippine Government Act,
extended to the Islands all the provisions of the Bill of Rights of
our Constitution except the right of jury trial and the individual
right to go armed--"bear arms." It specifically said in section 5:

    No law shall be enacted in said Islands which shall deprive any
    person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

It hardly needs argument to show that to bundle the rural population
of a whole district out of house and home, and make them come to town
to live indefinitely on such public charity as may drain through the
itching fingers of impecunious town officials, abandoning meantime
their growing crops, and the household effects they cannot bring with
them, is depriving people of their property, and restraining them
of their liberty, without due process of law. In fact, in 1905, in
the case of Barcelon vs. Baker, vol. v., Philippine Report, page 116,
during an insurrection in Batangas, to control which, the presidential
election of 1904 being then safely over, the writ of habeas corpus
had been suspended and martial law declared, the Supreme Court of the
Philippines held that detention of people as reconcentrados under
such circumstances "for the purpose of protecting them" was not an
illegal restraint of their liberty, because the ordinary law had been
suspended. This decision held it to be both the prerogative and the
duty of the Governor-General to suspend the writ of habeas corpus
when the public safety so required.

I refuse to believe for a moment that President Taft, the former
wise and just judge, in whom is now vested by law the mighty power
of filling vacancies on the highest court in this great country of
ours, will seriously contend that that reconcentration law is not in
direct violation of the above quoted section of the Act of Congress
of July 1, 1902, for the government of the Philippines, and therefore
null and void. The truth is, it was a piece of careless legislation,
dealing with conditions that were essentially war conditions, under
a government which was forever vowing that peace conditions existed,
and determined not to admit the contrary. The civil government was
like Lot's wife. It could not look back.

The Act of Congress of 1902 had made the usual provision permitting
the governor to declare martial law in a given locality in his
discretion. But the reconcentration law passed by the Philippine
Commission was a way of avoiding the exercise of that authority,
so as to keep up the appearance of peace in the provinces to which
it might be applied, regardless of how many lives it might cost. In
its last analysis the reconcentration law was at once an admission
of a duty to order out the military and a declaration of intention
to neglect that duty. I suppose the eminent gentlemen who enacted
it justified it on the idea of teaching the natives how to maintain
order themselves by letting them stew in the dregs of their own
insurrection. Yet no one can read the Commission's own description
of the widespread lawlessness which so long ran riot after the
guerrilla warfare degenerated into brigandage, without seeing,
from their own showing, how obvious was their duty to have waited,
originally, until law and order were restored, by not interfering
with the war itself until it was over, and by keeping the country
properly garrisoned for a decorous and sufficient period after it
was over, until something like real peace conditions should exist,
on which to begin the work of post-bellum reconstruction. After all,
it all gets us back to the original pernicious programme outlined in
President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1899,
wherein was announced the intention to send out the Taft Commission,
which message also announced, in effect, that it was Mr. McKinley's
purpose to begin the work of reconstruction as fast as the patient
and unconsenting millions "loyal to our rule" should be rescued from
the clutch of the hated Tagals.

Recurring again to the reconcentration law itself, the moral quality
of executive action putting it in operation was not unlike that which
would attach should the Governor of Massachusetts, in lieu of ordering
the state troops to the scene of great strike riots in half a dozen
towns around Boston, issue a proclamation something like this:

    The situation has grown so serious that your local police force,
    as you see, is wholly inadequate to cope with the situation. You
    will all, therefore, thrust your tooth-brushes, night-gowns,
    and a change of clothing, into the family grip, and assemble
    on the Boston Common and in the public gardens, there to remain
    until the necessity for this order ceases to exist, and we will
    there take the best care of you we can, as was done in the case
    of the San Francisco fire. As governor I am unwilling to order
    out the military.

If any lawyer on the Commission gave any thought at the time to the
validity of the reconcentration law, in its relation to the "due
process of law" clause of the Philippine Government Act, which none
of them probably did, he must simply have justified the means by the
benevolence of the end, on the idea that he knew so much better than
Congress possibly could, the needs of the local situation. But if you
read this law in the light of a knowledge of its practical operation,
there is more suggestion between its lines of Senator Bacon's friend's
"corpse-carcass stench" and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling
out on their orgies over the dead" than there is of benevolence. It
really was unsportsmanlike for the Commission to have entrusted
reconcentration to the native police and constabulary the native
governors had, and it was wholly indefensible for them to take the
liberty of violating an act of Congress in order to live up to their
pet fiction about the war being "entirely over."

After the term of court at Surigao in the month of May, 1903, I was
sent to Misamis province, where I remained until September, handling an
insurrection down there. This province also was nominally in a state of
peace, i.e., there was no formal recognition of the existence of the
insurrection by suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Curiously
enough, as I wrote Governor Taft afterwards, the Misamis crowd of
disturbers of the peace were genuine insurrectos. Their movement
was not so formidable as the Ola insurrection in Albay I dealt with
later, but they were by no means unmitigated cut-throats. I have often
wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They
did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed
purpose was to subvert the existing government. The use of this word
"insurrection" in connection with these various disturbances recalls
a pertinent incident. In 1904 there was a vacancy on the Supreme Bench
of the Islands. Some of my friends, members of the bar of my district,
got up a petition to the then Governor-General setting forth in most
partial terms my alleged qualifications for the place. Now in the
Philippines, in the candor of informal social intercourse, all of
us always called a spade a spade, i.e., we called an insurrection an
insurrection, instead of referring to the disturbance in the guarded
and euphemistic terms which you find in all the official reports
intended for home consumption. So in their petition, these gentlemen
recited, among my other supposed qualifications, that I had held
court in three different provinces "during insurrections in the same."

The Albay insurrection was the worst one I had to deal with during
Governor Taft's administration as Governor of the Philippines. This
was the insurrection headed by Simeon Ola. The first appearance of
this man Ola in the official reports of the Philippine Government in
connection with the Albay disturbances of 1902-3 is in the report
of the colonel commanding the constabulary for the district which
included Albay, Col. H. H. Bandholtz, dated June 30, 1903. [417] This
report contains a sort of diary of events for the year preceding the
date of it. An entry for October 28, 1902, begins:

    Early this month negotiations were opened with Simeon Ola, chief
    of the ladrones in this province, with a view of inducing him
    to surrender.

Think of this great government negotiating with the leader of a band
of thieves who were openly and flagrantly defying its authority! The
entry proceeds:

    After many promises and conferences extending over a period of
    forty days, during which hostilities were suspended, Ola broke
    off negotiations and withdrew his entire force and a large number
    of additional recruits that he had secured during the armistice.

Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to have had a total
command ranging at various times from a thousand to 1500 men. And I
think Colonel Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him,
first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. Ola also
makes an official reappearance in the report of the Governor of Albay
Province for 1904. [418] It there appears that reconcentration was
begun in Albay as part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in
March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of that year. Says
this report of the Governor of Albay concerning reconcentration:

    Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in a
    limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and
    ordinary living accommodations.

The Governor does not say how large the "unusual volume of persons"
was that was herded into the reconcentration zones, nor does he
furnish any mortality statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was
of the awful mortality and "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling
out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend
correspondent encountered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. The
number of people affected by reconcentration in Albay and an adjacent
province that caught the contagion of unrest and had to be given
similar treatment, was about 300,000. [419]

In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insurrection of 1902-3,
Governor Taft says: "A reign of terror was inaugurated throughout
the province." He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied
the reconcentration tactics. In the same report he describes what
is to my mind the most humiliating incident connected with the
whole history of the American Government in the Philippines, viz.,
Vice-Governor Wright's visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance
of the peace-at-any-price policy that the Manila Government was
bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil government's dealings with
His Excellency, the Honorable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands,
that General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino member of the
Commission, went down to Albay and "talked to the people," the idea
apparently being that those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should
go after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out the military,
and summarily putting a stop to the reign of terror as became the
dignity of this nation. I think these talks had something to do with
the origin of the charge afterwards made that immunity was promised
Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. Of course General
Wright made no such promises. But the idea got out in the province
that the word was, "Get the guns," the inference being that if Ola
and his people would come in and surrender their guns they would be
lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philippine Problem, Professor
Willis, at page 140, gives what purports to be an agreement signed
by Colonel Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Bandholtz
promises Ola immunity, and also promises a number of other things
which are on their face rankly preposterous. Ola was much on the
witness stand before me during that term of court, and, everything
"came out in the wash." He was represented by competent, intelligent,
and fearless Filipino counsel, and they did not suggest the existence
of any such document. No proof of any offer of immunity was adduced
before me. I think Ola simply finally decided to throw himself on
the mercy of the government, on the idea that there would be more joy
over the one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that
are already saved. He was probably as much afraid that Governor Taft
would order out the military as the wretched pacificos were that he
would not. He immediately turned state's evidence against all the men
under him of whose individual actings and doings he had any knowledge,
the prosecuting attorney making, with my full approval, a promise
to ask executive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with the
practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions throughout the
English-speaking world.

The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be somewhat appreciated
from the financial loss it occasioned. Says Governor Taft, in his
report for 1903:

    The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production and sale
    have been interfered with to the extent of some ten to twelve
    millions of dollars Mexican [which is equivalent to five or six
    million dollars American money]. [420]

As the population of the province was about 250,000, [421] a loss
of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for the six months or
so of reconcentration during which the farms were neglected. This
would be equivalent to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length
of time to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which is the
total population figure for the United States according to the Census
of 1910.

It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, that Ola finally
surrendered with some five hundred or six hundred men. I was sent to
Albay about the middle of November, to assist the regular judge of
the district, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of the
Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of the case arising
out of the Ola performances. Conditions at the time were also very
much perturbed in various neighboring and other provinces, and the
courts and constabulary were kept very busy.

An incident recurs to memory just here which illustrates the state of
public order. But before relating it a decent respect to the opinions
of the reader requires me to state my own attitude toward that whole
situation at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind that as
society stands at present, capital punishment is a necessary part of
any sensible scheme for its protection. I have no compunction about
hanging any man for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe
it to the community as a measure of protection to your life and mine
and all others. So far as public order was concerned in the country
now under consideration in 1903, the "civil" government was simply a
well-meaning sham, a military government with a civil name to it. When
the constabulary would get in the various brigands, cut-throats, etc.,
who might be terrorizing a given district, some of them masquerading as
patriots, others not even doing that, the courts would try them. None
of the judges cared anything about any particular brigand in any
given case except to find out how many, if any, murders, rapes,
arsons, etc., he had committed during the particular reign of terror
of which he had been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven,
the punishment would always be "a life for a life." And you have no
idea how absolutely wanton some of the murders were, and how cruelly
some of the young women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated
after they were carried off to the mountains. I would hate to try to
guess how much more of this sort of thing would have had to occur in
Albay in 1903 than did occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive
Albay of "the protection of a benign civil government"--one of the pet
expressions of contemporaneous official literature--and say the word
to the army to take hold of the situation and give the people decent
protection. But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly after I
reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. of the district court,
while my colleague, Judge Carson, held Part I. we had a call from a
third judge, Judge Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some
other perturbed region. I think that by that time, late in November,
1903, Governor Taft must have known he was soon to leave the Islands to
become Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able to make
the best showing possible, in his farewell annual report as Governor,
as to the "tranquillity" conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger
came to see us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at
the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge Carson had had a
gallows erected near the public square of the town, for the execution
of some brigand he had convicted, whether it was for maltreating some
poor farmer's daughter until she died, or burying an American alive,
or what, I do not now recollect. But in going around the town some
one suggested, as we passed this gallows, that we go up on it to
get the view. So we went--the three of us. Then each looked at the
other and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge Carson smiled
and dispelled the momentary sombreness by repeating with grim humor,
an old Latin quotation he happened to remember from his college days
at the University of Virginia: Hæc olim meminisse juvabit ("It will
be pleasant to remember these things hereafter").

The Ola insurrection had continued from October, 1902, to October,
1903, without suspension of civil government. During that period the
jail had been filled far beyond its reasonable capacity most of the
time. It sometimes had contained many hundreds. As to the sanitary
conditions, in passing the jail building one day in company with
one of the provincial officials, he remarked to me, nonchalantly:
"It's equivalent to a death sentence to put a man in that jail." I
afterwards found out that this was no joke. During most of my visit
to the province I was too busy holding court and separating the sheep
from the goats, to think much of anything else. But toward the close of
the term, after Christmas, after Governor Taft had left the Islands
and gone home to be Secretary of War, an incident happened that
produced a profound impression on me, suggested a new view-point,
and started troubled doubts as to whether the whole Benevolent
Assimilation business was not a mistake born of a union of avarice
and piety in which avarice predominated--doubts which certain events
of the following year, hereinafter related, converted in conviction
that any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos would
be better for all concerned than any government we could give them,
hampered as we always will be by the ever-present necessity to argue
that government against the consent of the governed is not altogether
wrong, and that taxation without representation may be a blessing in
disguise. The Yule-tide incident above alluded to was this. Most of
the docket having been disposed of, and there being a lull between
Christmas and New Year's day which afforded time for matters more or
less perfunctory in their nature, the prosecuting attorney brought in
rough drafts of two proposed orders for the court to sign. One was
headed with a list of fifty-seven names, the other with a list of
sixty-three names. Both orders recited that "the foregoing" persons
had died in the jail--all but one between May 20 and Dec. 3. 1903
(roughly six and one-half months) as will appear from an examination
of the dates of death--and concluded by directing that the indictments
be quashed. The writer was only holding an extraordinary term of court
there in Albay, and was about to leave the province to take charge
of another district to which Governor Taft had assigned him before
leaving the Islands. The newly appointed regular judge of the district,
Judge Trent, now of the Philippine Supreme Court, was scheduled soon
to arrive. Therefore the writer did not sign the proposed orders
but kept them as legal curios. A correct translation of one of them
appears below, followed by the list of names which headed the other
(identical) order:

    THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, EIGHTH
    JUDICIAL DISTRICT

    In the Court of First Instance of Albay

    The United States against

    Cornelio Rigorosa              died December    3, 1903
    Fabian Basques                 died September  25, 1903
    Julian Nacion                  died October    14, 1903
    Francisco Rigorosa             died October    18, 1903
    Anacleto Solano                died November   25, 1903
    Valentin Cesillano             died November    6, 1903
    Felix Sasutona                 died September  26, 1903
    Marcelo de los Santos          died June        3, 1903
    Marcelo Patingo                died November   15, 1903
    Julian Raynante                died September   7, 1903
    Dionisio Carifiaga             died October     4, 1903
    Felipe Navor                   died September  17, 1903
    Luis Nicol                     died November   23, 1903
    Balbino Nicol                  died September  23, 1903
    Damiano Nicol                  died November   23, 1903
    Leoncio Salbaburo              died November   20, 1903
    Catalino Sideria               died July       25, 1903
    Marcelo Ariola                 died October    26, 1903
    Francisco Cao                  died November   26, 1903
    Martin Olaguer                 died November   13, 1903
    Juan Neric                     died November   16, 1903
    Eufemio Bere                   died November   21, 1903
    Julian Sotero                  died October    30, 1902
    Juan Payadan                   died September  10, 1903
    Benedicto Milla                died July       30, 1903
    Placido Porlage                died June       13, 1903
    Gaudencio Oguita               died October    11, 1903
    Alberto Cabrera                died September   8, 1903
    Julian Payadan                 died August      4, 1903
    Eusebio Payadan                died August     10, 1903
    Leonardo Rebusi                died November    2, 1903
    Julian Riobaldis               died October     2, 1903
    Victor Riobaldis               died October    23, 1903
    Mauricio Balbin                died September  27, 1903
    Tomas Rigador                  died July       23, 1903
    Miguel de los Santos           died July       28, 1903
    Eustaquio Mapula               died November   18, 1903
    Eugenio Lomibao                died November    1, 1903
    Francisco Luna                 died August      7, 1903
    Gregorio Sierte                died October    31, 1903
    Teodoro Patingo                died November   21, 1903
    Teodorico Tua                  died September  23, 1903
    Ceferino Octia                 died November   10, 1903
    Graciona Pamplona              died September  12, 1903
    Felipe Bonifacio               died November   26, 1903
    Baltazer Bundi                 died October    12, 1903
    Julian Locot                   died October    13, 1903
    Francisco de Punta             died August     20, 1903
    Pedro Madrid                   died August     24, 1903
    Felipe Pusiquit                died July       17, 1903
    Rufo Mansalan                  died July       14, 1903
    Ignacio Titano                 died June       20, 1903
    Alfonso Locot                  died June       29, 1903
    Gil Locot                      died May        23, 1903
    Regino Bitarra                 died September   7, 1903
    Bonifacio Bo                   died August      2, 1903
    Francisco de Belen             died September  29, 1903

    DECREE

    The defendants above named, charged with divers crimes, having
    died in the provincial jail by reason of various ailments, upon
    various dates, according to official report of the jailer, it is

    ORDERED BY THIS COURT, That the cases pending against the said
    deceased persons be, and the same are hereby, quashed, the costs
    to be charged against the government.

    Judge of the Twelfth District acting in the Eighth.

    Albay, December 28, 1903.

The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. As already indicated,
the second order was like the first. It contained the names of
sixty-three other deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit:

    Anacleto Avila                 died September  2, 1903
    Gregorio Saquedo               died July      21, 1903
    Francisco Almonte              died October   11, 1903
    Faustino Sallao                died October    9, 1903
    Leocadio Pena                  died October   16, 1903
    Juan Ranuco                    died October   16, 1903
    Esteban de Lima                died February   4, 1903
    Estanislao Jacoba              died October    7, 1903
    Macario Ordiales               died October   19, 1903
    Laureano Ordiales              died October   27, 1903
    Reimundo Narito                died October    4, 1903
    Antonio Polvorido              died September 12, 1903
    Norverto Melgar                died June      14, 1903
    Bartolome Rico                 died November   8, 1903
    Simon Ordiales                 died September 13, 1903
    Candido Rosari                 died September 29, 1903
    Saturnino Vuelvo               died October   18, 1903
    Vicente Belsaida               died May       26, 1903
    Felix Canaria                  died June      12, 1903
    Pedro Cuya                     died July      26, 1903
    Evaristo Dias                  died July      24, 1903
    Felix Padre                    died July       8, 1903
    Alberto Mantes                 died August     7, 1903
    Joaquin Maamot                 died September  5, 1903
    Santiago Cacero                died May       28, 1903
    Hilario Zalazar                died July      26, 1903
    Tomas Odsinada                 died October    1, 1903
    Julian Oco                     died October    4, 1903
    Julian Lontac                  died August    27, 1903
    Ambrosio Rabosa                died September 19, 1903
    Mariano Garcia                 died September 12, 1903
    Ramon Madrigalejo              died August    19, 1903
    Albino Oyardo                  died October    1, 1903
    Felipe Rotarla                 died September 29, 1903
    Urbano Saralde                 died October    5, 1903
    Gil Mediavillo                 died June      13, 1903
    Egidio Mediavillo              died June      16, 1903
    Mauricio Losano                died October    5, 1903
    Bernabe Carenan                died September 27, 1903
    Pedro Sagaysay                 died September 29, 1903
    Laureano Ibo                   died August     5, 1903
    Vicente Sanosing               died July      17, 1903
    Francisco Morante              died June      10, 1903
    Anatollo Sadullo               died September 16, 1903
    Lucio Rebeza                   died August    27, 1903
    Eugenio Sanbuena               died August    13, 1903
    Nicolas Oberos                 died August    26, 1903
    Eusebio Rambillo               died September 13, 1903
    Tomas Rempillo                 died August    19, 1903
    Daniel Patasin                 died August    19, 1903
    Ignacio Bundi                  died September  7, 1903
    Juan Locot                     died May       23, 1903
    Zacarias David Padilla         died August     7, 1903
    Juan Almazar                   died September 12, 1903
    Rufino Quipi                   died June      13, 1903
    Antonio Brio                   died June      13, 1903
    Timoteo Enciso                 died September 12, 1903
    Hilario Palaad                 died August    28, 1903
    Ventura Prades                 died May       24, 1903
    Alejandro Alevanto             died May       22, 1903
    Rufino Pelicia                 died May       20, 1903
    Alejo Bruqueza                 died July      19, 1903
    Prudencio Estrada              died September 15, 1903

These lists were printed in an article by the author which appeared
in the North American Review for January 18, 1907, which article was
reprinted by Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, in the Congressional
Record for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that President
Taft saw the article, and that if it had contained any inaccuracies
they would long since have been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in
1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta,
on a small scale.

If the military authorities had had charge of the Albay insurrection
and of the prisoners in the Albay jail in 1903, it is safe to say
that the great majority of those who died would have lived. But to
have ordered out the troops would have been to abandon the official
fiction that there was peace.

Of Ola's five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and I, assisted by
the chief prosecuting attorney of the government, Hon. James Ross,
turned several hundred loose. Another large batch were disposed of
under a vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on the
roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, usually six to
twelve months. Most of the remainder, a few score, we tried under the
sedition law, and sent to Bilibid, the central penitentary at Manila,
for terms commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. The
more serious cases were sent up for longer terms under the brigandage
law. We indulged in no more maudlin sentiment about those precious
scamps who had been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally
invoking its name in the course of a long season of preying upon
their respectable fellow-countrymen than Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles
would have indulged. I am quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan
Cailles would have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch than
Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown to have committed
crimes usually punished capitally in this country that we sentenced
to death--a dozen or more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the
state. He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting attorney
to convict the men who had followed him for a year. He was given a
sentence of thirty years (by Judge Carson), as a sort of expression
of opinion of the most Christian attitude possible concerning his
real deserts, but his services as state's evidence entitled him to
immunity, and for that very good and sufficient reason Judge Carson,
Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and myself so recommended to the Governor.

Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he was quite an
ignorant man. But to show what his control must have been over the
rank and file of his men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going
up to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, Ola was
aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as he was a prospective
recipient of executive clemency, though the guards kept an eye on him,
he was allowed the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up,
the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom sometime after
midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, and went back to the storm
steering-gear at the stern of the ship, to spend the rest of the night
more comfortably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassignable
cause, I realized that the crown of another head was tangent to the
crown of my own, and occupying part of my pillow. It was Ola, the
chief of the brigands. I raised up, shook the intruder, and said:
"Hello, Ola, what are you doing here?" He wakened slowly. He had no
idea of any first-class passenger being back there, and had taken
it for granted that I was one of the ship's crew, when he decided to
share my pillow. As soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his
feet with profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck until
morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect of the incident
on my recommendation concerning himself.

After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went back to
sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened by some of the guards
chattering. But I heard Ola, who had apparently been keeping watch
over my august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious tone to
the guards, his keepers, "Hush, the judge is sleeping." They looked
at the brigand chief, and cowed, obeyed.

Ola was pardoned.

CHAPTER XVII

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903 (Continued)

                            The Philippines for the Filipinos.

                                                Speech of Governor Taft.

Just before Governor Taft left the Islands in 1903, he made a speech
which made him immensely popular with the Filipinos and immensely
unpopular with the Americans. The key-note of the speech was "The
Philippines for the Filipinos." The Filipinos interpreted it to
mean for them that ultimate independence was not so far in the dim
distance of what is to happen after all the living are dead as to
be a purely academic matter. And there was absolutely nothing in
the speech to negative that idea, although he must have known how
the great majority of the Filipinos would interpret the speech. On
the other hand, the Americans in the Islands, popularity with whom
was then and there a negligible factor, interpreted the speech,
not inaccurately, to mean for them: "If you white men out here, not
connected with the Government, you Americans, British, Germans and
Spaniards, and the rest of you, do not like the way I am running this
country, why, the boats have not quit running between here and your
respective homes." [422] Then he came back to the United States and
has ever since been urging American capital to go to the Philippines,
all the time opposing any declaration by the law-making power of the
Government which will let the American who goes out there know "where
he is at," i.e., whether we are or are not going to keep the Islands
permanently, and how to formulate his earthly plans accordingly, though
the educated Filipinos are concurrently permitted to clamor against
American "exploitation," American rule, and Americans generally,
and to keep alive among the masses of their people what they call
"the spirit of liberty," and what the insular government calls the
spirit of "irreconcilableness." Clearly, a policy which makes for race
friction and race hatred is essentially soft-headed, not soft-hearted,
and ought not to be permitted to continue. Yet it has been true for
twelve years, as one of President Taft's admiring friends proudly
boasted concerning him some time since:

    One man virtually holds in his keeping the American conscience
    with the regard to the Philippines. [423]

This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should either stop
the clamor, or stop the American capital and energy from going to
the Islands. After an American goes out to the Islands, invests his
money there, and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade,
he sticks to his own people out there. Then the Taft policy steps in
and bullyrags him into what he calls "knuckling to the Filipinos,"
every time he shows any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision
reversing the verdict of all racial history--which has been up to
date, that wheresoever white men dwell in any considerable numbers
in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white man will
rule. Yet the American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into
going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has taken his family to
the Islands, and all his worldly interests are there. Yet he is living
under a despotism, a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the
non-office-holding American does not openly oppose the government's
policies, but one which, however benevolent, is, so far as regards any
brooking of opposition from any one outside the government hierarchy,
as absolute as any of the other despotic governments of Asia. Though
the Governor of the Philippines does not wear as much gilt braid
as some of his fellow potentates on the mainland of Asia, still,
in all executive matters he wields a power quite as immediate and
substantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his royal
colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either to the American
Government official in the Philippines, or to the American citizen
engaged in private business there who is in entire accord with the
policies of the insular government and on terms of friendship with
the officials, that the government under which he is living is any
more of a despotism than the Government of the United States. The
shoe never pinches the American citizen engaged in private business
until he begins, for one reason or another, to be "at outs" with the
insular government, and to have "opinions" which--American-like--he
at once wants to express. If he permits himself to get thoroughly
out of accord with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the
Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious single fact
in the present situation. There is no public opinion to help such a
person, in any case where he differs with any specific act or policy
of the insular government. The American colony is comparatively small,
say between ten and twenty thousand all told, outside the army (which
consists of ten or twelve thousand individuals living wholly apart
from the rest of the community). The doctor who is known to have
the patronage of high government officials is sure of professional
success, and his wife is sure to receive the social recognition her
husband's position in the community naturally commands; and this
permits her to make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at
precedence with her next neighbor called "society," so dear to the
hearts of many otherwise sensible and estimable women--to say nothing
of carpet knights, callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also
if the doctor and his lady have adult children, their opportunities
to marry well are multiplied by the sunlight from the seats of the
mighty. Thus the doctor and his wife are a standing lesson to the man
"with convictions" that yearn for utterance, but who is also blessed
with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the general welfare and
happiness of all the family than in seeing her husband's name in
the paper. What is true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer
known to be persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper
man in favor with the government is sure to get his share of the
government advertising, according to a very liberal construction,
and that insures his being able to command reportorial and editorial
talent such as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is
sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mercantile community,
thus placing success for him on a solid, comfortable basis. Also, a
contrary course will, slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash
competitor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines is deprived
of one of his most precious home pleasures, viz., letting off steam,
in some opposition paper, about the real or imagined shortcomings of
the men in charge of the government. For the reasonable expectancy
of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically brief. The
hapless editor on the prosperous paper, whatever his talents,
who happens to become afflicted with "views" which he airs in his
editorial columns, is soon upbraided by his friends at his club as
"getting cranky," and is told by the orthodox old-timers among them,
"John, you've been out here too long. You better go home." If he does
not change his tone, the receipts of the advertising department of his
paper soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, who
"knows how to get along with people," is not long in agreeing with
the rest of his friends that he has "been out here too long." Again
the successful merchant has too many interests at stake in which he
needs the cordial friendship of the government to be able to afford
to antagonize it. And so on, through every walk of life, the influence
of the government permeates every nook and corner of the situation.

The average public man in the United States would not feel "nat'ral"
unless intermittently bedewed with steam from the exhaust valve of
the soul of some "outraged citizen," through the medium of the public
press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous
position with the government may be very generally detested and
actually not know it. [424] The American in the Philippines, with
all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to
the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or
speech,--even supposing any paper would publish it--which, copied by
the papers back in the United States, would embarrass the National
Administration's Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to
talking too freely for the newspapers when home on a visit.

I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent
impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about
current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there
must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with
shaping the course of the government out there for which they are
responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their
governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not
change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial
situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on
a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of
lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and
future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly
foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka
or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are
fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government
we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of
the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable
governmental asset, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion
which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can
accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of
questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.

To show how absolute was the executive and legislative power over
8,000,000 of people entrusted by the sole authority of President
McKinley to Governor Taft--without consulting Congress, though
afterwards the authority so conferred was ratified by Congress and
descended from Governor Taft to his successor--an incident related
to me in the freedom of social intercourse, and not in the least
in confidence, by my late beloved friend Arthur W. Fergusson,
long Executive Secretary to Governor Taft, will suffice. In 1901
the Commission had passed a law providing for the constitution of
the Philippine judiciary, [425] according to which law an American,
in order to be eligible to appointment as a Judge of First Instance
(the ordinary trial court, or nisi prius court, of Anglo-Saxon
jurisprudence) must be more than thirty years old, and must have
practised law in the United States for a period of five years before
appointed. In 1903 President Roosevelt wanted to make Hon. Beekman
Winthrop (then under thirty years of age) now (1912), Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, a Judge of First Instance. Governor Taft called
Fergusson in and said: "Fergy, make me out a commission for Beekman
Winthrop as a Judge of First Instance." Fergusson said: "You can't do
it, Governor. It's against the law. He's not old enough." Winthrop was
a graduate of the Harvard Law School. Governor Taft said humorously,
"I can't eh? I'll show you. Send me a stenographer." A law was dictated
[426] striking out thirty years and inserting twenty-five, and adding
after the words "must have practised law for a period of five years"
the words "or be a graduate of a reputable law school." Fergusson
was then called in, and told to go down the hall, see the other
commissioners, [427] and get them together, which he did, and
the law was passed in a few minutes. Then Fergusson was sent for,
and the Governor said, handing him the new "law"; "Now make out
that commission." Even if Fergusson colored the incident up a bit,
in the exercise of his inimitable artistic capacity to make anything
interesting, his story was certainly substantially correct relatively
to the absoluteness of the authority of the Governor, as will appear
by reference to the two laws cited.