The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 12

In regard to the Treaty of Paris, the spokesman, Lawyer Melliza, said:

International law forbids a nation to make a contract in regard to taking the liberties of its colonies.

Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said "the law of righteousness,"

instead of "international law," his proposition, thus amended, would have been incontrovertible. On September 19, 1911, one of the great newspapers of this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members of the Congress of the United States, and to "The Fourth Estate" also, the newspaper editors, a circular letter proposing that we sell the Philippine Islands to j.a.pan. A member of the United States Senate sent this answer:

I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands means selling the inhabitants. The question of traffic in human beings, whether by wholesale or retail, was forever settled by the Civil War.

About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia had an editorial on the Denver Post's proposition, the most conspicuous feature of which was that j.a.pan was too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate selling the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the matter at length.

No; Lawyer Melliza's proposition has no standing in international law yet. But it has with what Mr. Lincoln's First Inaugural called "the better angels of our nature," if we stop to reflect.

Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to General Miller is the following:

I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could occupy the city would they agree to it. He replied most emphatically that they would.

At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on the treaty was in progress in the United States Senate, there was hardly a province in that archipelago where you would not have encountered the same inflexible adherence to the Aguinaldo government.

Dr. Phelan's report closes thus:

At the conclusion of the meeting it was said that as this question involved the integrity of the entire republic, it could not be further discussed here, but must be referred to the Malolos Government.

There is one other statement made by the spokesman of the Filipinos, at their meeting with Dr. Phelan, which arrested and gripped my attention. That it may interest the reader as it did me, it will need but a word or so as preface. In the fall of that same year, 1899, when my regiment, the 29th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, reached the Islands, it was supposed that the insurrection had about played out, i.e., that it had been "beaten to a frazzle," because the Filipinos no longer offered to do battle in force in the open. Yet all that fall, and all through 1900 and after, a most obstinate guerrilla warfare was kept up. Anywhere in the archipelago you were liable to be fired on from ambush. At first we could not understand this. Later we found out it was the result of an order of Aguinaldo's, faithfully carried out, not to a.s.semble in large commands, but to conduct a systematic guerrilla warfare indefinitely. We learned this by capturing a copy of the order, which was quite elaborate. Dr. Phelan's report says:

I told him [Melliza] that the city was in our power, and that we could destroy it at any time * * *. Lawyer Melliza replied that he cared nothing about the city; that we could destroy it if we wished * * *. "We will withdraw to the mountains and repeat the North American Indian warfare. You must not forget that."

Later, they did.

On January 15th, General Otis wrote General Miller [172] again cautioning him against any clash at Iloilo, and saying of conditions at Manila and Malolos: "The revolutionary government is very anxious for peaceful relations."

Three days later Senator Bacon saw the situation with clearer vision from the other side of the world than General Otis could see it under his nose, and said on the floor of the Senate on January 18th concerning the conditions at Manila and Malolos:

While there is no declaration of war, while there is no avowal of hostile intent, with two such armies fronting each other with such divers intents and resolves, it will take but a spark to ignite the magazines which is to explode. [173]

The spark was ignited on February 4, 1899, by a sentinel of the Nebraska regiment firing on some Filipino soldiers who disregarded his challenge to halt, and killing one of them. War once on, General Miller was directed on February 10th, after he had lain in Iloilo harbor for forty-four days, to take the city. So at last he gave written notice to the insurgents in Iloilo demanding the surrender of the city and garrison "before sunset Sat.u.r.day, the 11th instant"

and requesting them to give warning to all non-combatants. [174]

Thereupon the insurgents set fire to the city and departed.

CHAPTER X

OTIS AND AGUINALDO (Continued)

A word spoken in due season, how good is it!

Proverbs xv., 23.

In the last chapter we saw the debut of the Benevolent a.s.similation programme at Iloilo. We are now to observe it at Manila. General Otis says in his report for 1899 [175]:

After fully considering the President's proclamation and the temper of the Tagalos with whom I was daily discussing political problems and the friendly intentions of the United States Government toward them, I concluded that there were certain words and expressions therein, such as "sovereignty," "right of cession," and those which directed immediate occupation, etc., * * * which might be advantageously used by the Tagalo war party to incite widespread hostilities among the natives. * * * It was my opinion, therefore, that I would be justified in so amending the paper that the beneficent object of the United States Government would be clearly brought within the comprehension of the people.

Accordingly, he published a proclamation as indicated, on January 4th, at Manila. In a less formal communication concerning this proclamation, viz., a letter to General Miller at Iloilo, General Otis comes to the point more quickly thus:

After some deliberation we put out one of our own which it was believed would suit the temper of the people. [176]

The only thing in the Otis proclamation specifically directed toward soothing "the temper of the people" was a hint that the United States would, under the government it was going to impose, "appoint the representative men now forming the controlling element of the Filipinos to civil positions of responsibility and trust" (p. 69). And this, far from soothing Filipino temper, was interpreted as an offer of a bribe if they would desert the cause of their country. The bona fides of the offer they did not doubt for a moment. In fact it caught a number of the more timid prominent men, especially the elderly ones of the ultraconservative element preferring submission to strife. But the younger and bolder spirits were faithful, many of them unto death, and all of them unto many battles and much "hiking." [177]

General Otis's report goes on to tell how, about the middle of January, after he had published his sugar-coated edition of the presidential proclamation at Manila, it then at last occurred to him that General Miller might have published the original text of it in full at Iloilo, and, "fearing that," says he, "I again despatched Lieut. Col. Potter to Iloilo"--evidently post-haste. But it appears that when the breathless Potter arrived, the lid was already off. The horse had left the stable and the door was open, as we saw in the preceding chapter. However, as the Otis report indicates in this connection (p. 67), copies of the original McKinley proclamation, as published in full at Iloilo by General Miller, were of course promptly forwarded by the insurgents at Iloilo to the insurgent government at Malolos. So all that General Otis got for his pains was detection in the attempt to conceal the crucial words a.s.serting American sovereignty in plain English. He tells us himself that as soon as the Malolos people discovered the trick, "it [the proclamation] became"--in the light of the Otis doctoring--"the object of venomous attack." His report was of course written long after all these matters occurred, but its language shows a total failure on the part of its author, even then, to understand the cause of the bitterness he denominates "venom." This bitterness grew naturally out of what seemed to the Filipinos an evident purpose of the United States to take and keep the Islands and an accompanying unwillingness to acknowledge that purpose, as shown by the conspicuous discrepancies between the original text of the proclamation as published at Iloilo by General Miller, on January 1st, and the modified version of it given out by General Otis at Manila on January 4th. "The ablest of the insurgent newspapers," says he (p. 69), "which was now issued at Malolos and edited by the uncompromising Luna * * * attacked the policy * * * as declared in the proclamation, and its a.s.sumption of sovereignty * * * with all the vigor of which he was capable." The nature of Editor Luna's philippics is not described by General Otis in detail, the only specific notion we get of them being from General Otis's echo of their tone, which, he tells us, was to the effect that "everything tended simply to a change of masters." But in another part of the Otis Report (p. 163) we find an epistle written about that time by one partisan of the revolution to another, whose key-note, given in the following extracts, was doubtless in harmony with the Luna editorials:

We shall not have them (Filipinos enough to conduct a decent government) in 10, 20, or a 100 years, because the Yankees will never acknowledge the apt.i.tude of an "inferior" race to govern the country. Do not dream that when American sovereignty is implanted in the country the American office-holders will give up. Never! If * * * it depends upon them to say whether the Filipinos have sufficient men for the government of the country * * * they will never say it."

Is not the American who pretends that he would have done anything but just what the Filipinos did, had he been in their place, i.e., fought to the last ditch for the independence of his country, the rankest sort of a hypocrite? General Otis was a soldier, and his views may have been honestly colored by his environment. But how at this late date can any fair-minded man read the above extracts ill.u.s.trative of the temper in which the Filipinos went to war with us without acknowledging the righteousness of the motives which impelled them?

Aguinaldo promptly met General Otis's proclamation of January 4th by a counter-proclamation put out the very next day, in which he indignantly protested against the United States a.s.suming sovereignty over the Islands. "Even the women," says General Otis (p. 70), "in a doc.u.ment numerously signed by them, gave me to understand that after the men were all killed off they were prepared to shed their patriotic blood for the liberty and independence of their country." General Otis actually intended this last as a sly touch of humor. But when we recollect Mr. Millet's description (Chapter IV. ante) of the women coming to the trenches and cooking rice for the men while the Filipinos were slowly drawing their cordon ever closer about the doomed Spanish garrison of Manila in July and August previous, fighting their way over the ground between them and the besieged main body of their ancient enemies inch by inch, while Admiral Dewey blockaded them by sea, General Otis's sly touch of humor loses some of its slyness. "The insurgent army also," he says (p. 70), "was especially affected * * *

and only awaited an opportunity to demonstrate its invincibility in war with the United States troops * * * whom it had commenced to insult and charge with cowardice."

The benighted condition of the insurgents in this regard was directly traceable to the Iloilo fiasco. It was that, princ.i.p.ally, which made the insurgents so foolishly over-confident and the subsequent slaughter of them so tremendous. Further on in his report General Otis says, with perceptible petulance, in summing up his case against the Filipinos:

The pretext that the United States was about to subst.i.tute itself for Spain * * * was resorted to and had its effect on the ignorant ma.s.ses.

Speaking of his own modified version of the Benevolent a.s.similation Proclamation, General Otis says (p. 76):

No sooner was it published than it brought out a virtual declaration of war from, in this instance at least, the wretchedly advised President Aguinaldo, who, on January 5th, issued the following