The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 13

--giving the reply proclamation in full. No man can read the Otis report itself without feeling that if he, the reader, had been playing Aguinaldo's hand he would have played it exactly as Aguinaldo did. To General Otis the government at Malolos--"their Malolos arrangement," he used to call it--seemed quite an impudent little opera-bouffe affair, "a tin-horn government," as Senator Spooner suggested in the same debate on the treaty, in which he called his rugged and fiery friend from South Carolina, Senator Tillman, "the Senator from Aguinaldo,"

and immediately thereafter, with that engaging frankness that always so endeared him to his colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, removed the sting from the jest by admitting that neither he (Spooner), nor Tillman, nor anybody else in the United States, knew anything about Aguinaldo or his government. But in the calmer retrospect of many years after, we have seen, through the official doc.u.ments which have become available in the interval, that said government was in complete and effective control of practically the whole archipelago, and had the moral support of the whole population at a time when our troops controlled absolutely nothing but the two towns of Manila and Cavite. Therefore, when we read in the Aguinaldo proclamation such phrases as, "In view of this, I summoned a council of my generals and asked the advice of my cabinet, and in conformity with the opinion of both bodies I" did so and so; "My government cannot remain indifferent to" this or that act of the Americans a.s.suming sovereignty over the islands; "Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities if" etc.; they do not sound to us so irritatingly bombastic as they did to General Otis, distributed under his nose as the proclamation containing them at once was, by thousands, throughout a city of which he was nominally in possession, but nine-tenths of whose 300,000 inhabitants he was obliged to believe in sympathy with the insurgents.

"My government," says the Aguinaldo proclamation, "rules the whole of Luzon, the Visayan Islands, and a part of Mindanao." Except as to Mindanao, which cut absolutely no figure in the insurrection until well toward the end of the guerrilla part of it, we have already examined this claim and found by careful a.n.a.lysis that it was absolutely true by the end of December, 1898.

After a rapid review of how he had been aided and encouraged in starting the revolution against the Spaniards by Admiral Dewey, and then given the cold shoulder by the army when it came, Aguinaldo's manifesto says:

It was also taken for granted that the American forces would necessarily sympathize with the revolution which they had managed to encourage, and which had saved them much blood and great hards.h.i.+ps; and, above all, we entertained absolute confidence in the history and traditions of a people which fought for its independence and for the abolition of slavery, and which posed as the champion and liberator of oppressed peoples. We felt ourselves under the safeguard of a free people.

That this statement also was authorized by the facts is evident from the minutes of the Hong Kong meeting of May 4th, already noticed, presided over by Aguinaldo, and called to formulate the programme for the insurrection he was about to sail for the Philippines to inaugurate, in which, after much discussion among the revolutionary leaders it was agreed that while they must be prepared for all possible contingencies, yet,

if Was.h.i.+ngton proposes to carry out the fundamental principles of its const.i.tution, it is most improbable that an attempt will be made to colonize the Filipinos or annex them. [178]

In short, the Aguinaldo proclamation of January 5th suggests with a briefness which Filipino familiarity with the great ma.s.s of facts already laid before the reader in the preceding chapters made appropriate, all the causes for which the Malolos Government was ready, if need be, to declare war, and winds up by boldly serving General Otis with notice that if the Americans try to take Iloilo and the Visayan Islands "my government is disposed to open hostilities."

On January 9th President McKinley cabled out to General Otis asking if it would help matters to send a commission out to explain to the Filipinos our benevolent intentions. This idea thus suggested materialized, a few weeks later, in the Schurman Commission, of which more anon. The next day, January 10th, General Otis answered endorsing the sending of "commissioners of tact and discretion," and adding: [178]

Great difficulty is that leaders cannot control ignorant cla.s.ses. [179]

As a matter of fact the leaders were leading. They were not arguing with the tide. They were merely riding the crest of it. Actually, General Otis would have stopped "The Six Hundred Ma.r.s.eillaise Who Knew How to Die"--the ones whose march to Paris, according to Thomas Carlyle, inspired the composition of the French national air, "The Ma.r.s.eillaise"--and tried to parley with the head of the column on the idea of getting them to abandon their enterprise and disperse to their several homes. He also says, in the cablegram under consideration:

If peace kept for several days more immediate danger will have pa.s.sed.

In other words, he was holding off the calf as best he could pending the ratification of the treaty. From the text itself, however, of General Otis's report, it is clear enough, that even he was getting anxious to give the Filipinos a drubbing as soon as the treaty should be safely pa.s.sed. Referring to a message from the President enjoining avoidance of a clash with the Filipinos he says (p. 80):

The injunction of his Excellency the President of the United States to exert ourselves to preserve the peace had an excellent effect upon the command. Officers and men * * * were restless under the restraints * * * imposed, and * * * eager to avenge the insults received. Now they submit very quietly to the taunts and aggressive demonstrations of the insurgent army who continue to throng the streets of the business portion of the city.

See the lamb kick the lion viciously in the face, and observe the lion as he first lifts his eyes heavenward and says meekly: "Thy will be done. This is Benevolent a.s.similation"; and then turns them Senate-ward and murmurs: "I cannot stand this much longer, kind sirs. Say when!" The way war correspondent John F. Ba.s.s puts the situation about this time in a letter to his paper, Harper's Weekly, was this:

Jimmie Green [180] bites his lip, hangs on to himself, and finds comfort in the idea that his time will come.

After Aguinaldo's ultimatum of January 5th about fighting if we took Iloilo, General Otis refrained from taking Iloilo, and continued to communicate with the insurgent chieftain, appointing commissioners to meet commissioners appointed by him. These held divers and sundry sessions, whose only result was to kill time, or at least to mark time, while the Administration was getting the treaty through the Senate. The object of these meetings is thus set forth in the military order of January 9, 1899, appointing the Otis portion of the Joint High Parleying Board:

To meet a commission of like number appointed by General Aguinaldo, and to confer with regard to the situation of affairs and to arrive at a mutual understanding of the intent, purposes, aim, and desires of the Filipino people and the people of the United States, that peace and harmonious relations between these respective peoples may be continued. [181]

The minutes of the first meeting of this board, prepared by the Spanish-speaking clerk or recorder, recite the above declared purpose verbatim, in all its verbosity, and then go on to say that our side asked

That the commissioners appointed by General Aguinaldo give their opinion as to what were the purposes, aspirations, aims, and desires of the people of the archipelago.

The next paragraph is almost Pickwickian in its unconscious terseness:

To this request the commissioners appointed by General Aguinaldo made response that in their opinion the aspirations, purposes, and desires of the Philippine people might be summed up in two words "Absolute Independence."

Of course even General Otis does not reproduce this laconic answer as part of his petulant summing up of how little the Filipinos knew, before the outbreak of February 4th, as to what they really wanted. He merely alludes to it as being of record elsewhere. It is one o the various pieces of jetsam and flotsam that have floated from the sea of those great events to the sh.o.r.es of government publications since. The minutes of these meetings may be found among the hearings before the Senate Committee of 1902. [182]

General Otis's report complains that Aguinaldo's commissioners did not know what they wanted, "could not give any satisfactory explanation"

of the "measure of protection" they wanted, they having declared that they would greatly prefer the United States to establish a protectorate over them to keep them from being annexed by some other power. But he fails to state, which is a fact shown by the minutes of the meeting of January 14 (p. 2721), that the Filipino commissioners did say that this was a question which would only be reached between their government and ours when the latter should agree to officially recognize the former. To quote their exact language, which is rather clumsily translated, they said: "The aspiration of the Filipino people is the independence with the restrictions resulting from the conditions which its government may agree with the American, when the latter agree to officially recognize the former."

It is perfectly clear from the voluminous minutes of the proceedings that the Filipinos were only seeking some declaration of the purpose of our government which would satisfy their people that the programme was something more than a mere change of masters. "They begged,"

says General Otis (p. 82), "for some tangible concession from the United States Government--one which they could present to the people and which might serve to allay excitement." General Otis of course had no authority to bind the government and so could make no promise. But the day this Otis-Aguinaldo parleying board had its second meeting, January 11th, and probably with no more knowledge of its existence than the reader has of what is going on in the Fiji Islands at the moment he reads these lines, Senator Bacon introduced in the United States Senate some resolutions which were precisely the medicine the case required and precisely the thing the Filipinos were pleading for. These resolutions concluded thus:

That the United States hereby disclaim any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said islands except for the pacification thereof, and a.s.sert their determination when an independent government shall have been duly erected therein ent.i.tled to recognition as such, to transfer to said government, upon terms which shall be reasonable and just, all rights secured under the cession by Spain, and to thereupon leave the government and control of the islands to their people.

They were a twin brother to the Teller Cuban resolution which was incorporated into the resolution declaring war against Spain, being verbatim the same, except with the necessary changes of name, of "islands" for "island," etc.

On January 18th, while the futile parleying board aforesaid was still futilely parleying at Manila, Senator Bacon made an argument in the Senate in support of his resolution, whose far-sighted statesmans.h.i.+p, considered in relation to the a.n.a.logies of its historic setting, most strikingly reminds us of Burke's great speech on conciliation with America delivered under similar circ.u.mstances nearly a century and a quarter earlier. After alluding to the naturalness of the apprehension of the Filipinos "that it is the purpose of the United States Government to maintain permanent dominion over them," [183]

Senator Bacon urged:

The fundamental requirement in these resolutions is that the Government of the United States will not undertake to exercise permanent dominion over the Philippine Islands. The resolutions are intentionally made broad, so that those who agree on that fundamental proposition may stand upon them even though they may differ materially as to a great many other things relative to the future course of the government in connection with the Philippine Islands.

Senator Bacon then quoted the following from some remarks Senator Foraker had previously made in the course of the great debate on the treaty:

I do not understand anybody to be proposing to take the Philippine Islands with the idea and view of permanently holding them.

* * * The President of the United States does not, I know, and no Senator in this chamber has made any such statement;

and added:

If the views expressed by the learned Senator from Ohio in his speech * * * are those upon which we are to act, there is very little difference between us; and there will be no future contention between us * * * if we can have an authoritative expression from The Law-Making Power of the United States in a joint resolution that such is the purpose of the future. [184]

Says the Holy Scripture: "A word spoken in season, how good is it!"

Had the Bacon resolutions pa.s.sed the United States Senate in January, 1899, we never would have had any war with the Filipinos. [185]

They would have presented at the psychologic moment the very thing the best and bravest of the Filipino leaders were then pleading with General Otis for, something "tangible," something "which they could present to their people and which would allay excitement,"