James H. Blount

“ Thus has it been that, under the reactionary influence of a colonial policy, this republic has followed its frank abandonment of the idea that all just government must derive its origin in the consent of the governed by a further abandonment of the idea that Church and State should be kept separate. I do not wish to make President Taft ridiculous, and could not if I would. Nor do I seek to belittle him in the eyes of his people,—for we are “his people,” for the time being. No one can belittle him. He is too big a man to be belittled by anybody. ”

“ Any American who has seen a Filipino pueblo transformed, as if by magic, from listless apathy to a state of buzzing and busy enthusiasm suggestive of a bee-hive, by preparations for some church fiesta, or for the coming of some dignitary from Manila, has seen something analogous to what would happen if the Filipino body politic should suddenly be electrified by a promise of independence under some such programme as the above. ”

“ It is much more merciful to kill a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go, with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves, merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign “civil” government. ”

“ Whereat, the young giant America bowed, in puzzled hope, and worldly-wise old Europe smiled, in silent but amused contempt.
If at the time he formulated this scheme for their government Mr. McKinley had known anything about the Philippines, or the Filipinos, he would have known that what he so suavely called “building from the bottom” was like trying to make water run up hill, i.e., like starting out to have ideas percolate upward, so that through “the masses” the more intelligent people might be redeemed. ”

“ It is, as we conceive it, the voice of humanity raised in protest against the proposition that might makes right. It is, as we conceive it, a government which entered the lists of the nations as the champion of the human mind, in the great struggle of Mind for the mastery over Matter, the world-old struggle between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Our government, like everything else, must follow the law of its being, or die. ”

“ We have already seen how busily Aguinaldo occupied himself during the protracted peace negotiations at Paris in getting his government and people ready for the struggle for independence which he early and shrewdly guessed would be ultimately forthcoming. General Otis was in no position to preserve the status quo. The status quo was a worm in hot ashes that would not stay still. The revolution was a snow-ball that would roll. ”

“ Seriously, a man may “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 still cut a sorry figure trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or a scheme of government, the breath of whose life is public opinion, into the running of a remote colonial government, the breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered with by public opinion. ”

“ No Congressman who in silence would permit Big Business to prey upon his constituents as Governor Forbes has, could long remain in office. Taxation without representation may amount to depredation, and yet never be corrected, when the powers that prey have the ear of the court, and the victims cannot get the ear of the American people. So the Hemp Trust continues to rob the Filipinos under the forms of law, and the Mohonk Conference continues to kiss Benevolent Assimilation on both cheeks. ”

“ Any army officer at our War College will inform any member of the House or Senate on inquiry, that Japan can take the Philippines any time she wants to. President Taft and the Mikado may keep on exchanging the most cordial cablegrams imaginable, but the map-making goes on just the same. And, earnest and sincere as both the President and the Emperor undoubtedly are in their desire to preserve the general peace, who is going to restrain Hobson and Hearst, and several of Japan’s public men equally distinguished and equally inflammatory? Heads of nations cannot restrain gusts of popular passion. ”

“ You find her, on the one hand, in the American woman whose attitude has been indicated, and you find her, on the other, in the refined and virtuous native woman, who finds her American husband’s relations to his compatriots altered—queered—since his marriage to her, no matter how faithful a wife and mother she may be. This is the unspeakably cruel situation we have forced upon the Filipino people—whom I really learned to respect, and became much attached to, before I left the Islands—and President Taft knows it as well as I do. Yet he does not take the American people into his confidence. ”

“ You constantly hear President Taft talking quite out loud here at home, in his public utterances, about the great politico-missionary work we are doing in the Philippines by furnishing them with the most approved up-to-date methods for the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of graft in government, the elimination of crimes of violence, in short the ideal way to minimize the ills that human governments are heir to, while every day and every dollar spent out there by Americans induced by him to go there, are time and money tensely arrayed against the ultimate independence he purports to favor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Misunderstanding is the principal cause of hate in this world. When you understand people, hatred disappears in a way strikingly analogous to the disappearance of darkness on the arrival of light. The more you know of the educated patriotic Filipino, the more certain you become that the government we destroyed in 1898 would have worked quite as well as most any of the republics now in operation between the Rio Grande and Patagonia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date. ”

“ Taft went to the Philippines in 1900, he went, not to investigate the correctness of Mr. McKinley’s assumption, which was implied in the purchase, but to champion it; not to give advice concerning the righteousness of having taken over the Philippines, but to bolster up the policy. He assumed the burden of proof before he knew anything about the facts. The burden has been on him ever since. Any subordinate who helps him to bear that burden, finds favor in his eyes. But the burden is greater than he can bear. ”

“ Now the reason the nation blundered into taking the Philippines was that it believed the Filipinos to be, not a people, but a jumble of savage tribes. But the reason the men who controlled the action of the government at the time took the Philippines was because they believed they would pay. Nevertheless, there was a sufficient number of our fellow-citizens—controlled, some by altruistic motives and some by sordid motives—to cause the nation to follow the lead of those then in control. ”

“ No man can serve two masters. Philanthropy for pecuniary profit is a paradox. Duplicity ever follows deviation from principle. In our dealings in 1898 with Aguinaldo you find vacillation on the part of military commanders who personally did not know what fear was, and embarrassed hypocrisy in dealing with him on the part of men wearing the shoulder-straps of the American army, athwart the frankness of whose gaze no such shadow had ever fallen before. ”

“ So that every Filipino of a well-to-do family is brought up speaking two languages, Spanish, and the local dialect of his native place, which is the only language known to the poorer natives of the same neighborhood. Surely even the valor of ignorance can see that we are presumptuously seeking to reverse the order of God and nature in assuming that an alien race can lead a people out of the wilderness better than could a government by the leading men of their own race to whom the less favored look with an ardent pride that would be a guarantee of loyal and inspiring co-operation. ”

“ The bigger Germany’s army and navy grows, the more she will loom up as the one great menace to the peace of the world, and the one avowed enemy of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit de corps, based on the instinct of self-defence. We must win the good will of South America, and we cannot do it so long as we insist, in another part of the world, upon the righteousness of the principle of one Christian people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly to keep them from having revolutions, and really in the hope of ultimate profit. ”

“ I really believe that the southern men in the Philippines have always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any other Americans out there, and for the reasons just suggested. Not only is the universal American willingness to treat the educated Asiatic as a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights going to redeem him from the down-trodden condition into which British and other European contempt for him has kept him, but the American from the South out there is a guarantee that he shall never be treated as if he were an African. ”

“ I do not believe in the doctrine that might makes right, and I cherish the high hope that this human family of ours will survive to see war superseded, as the ultimate arbiter, by something more like heaven and less like hell. But in the Philippines in 1900 it was a situation, not a theory, that confronted us, and, as far as my consciously fallible thinking apparatus lights the way which then lay before us, that way led to a shrine whereon was written “A life for a life.” ”

“ There are so many people in a republic like ours who will always stand by this last proposition as righteous, and as being the chief bulwark of their own liberties, and so many who will always regard denial of that proposition as an insidious practice calculated ultimately to react on their own institutions, that no colonial government of conquered subject provinces eager for independence can ever have the sympathy and backing of all our people. ”

“ So that in entering upon a war for conquest, a republic must “play politics,” using the military arm of the government for the twofold purpose of crushing opposition and proving that there is none.
The maxim which makes all fair in war often covers a multitude of sins. But let us turn for a moment from strategy to principle, and see what two other distinguished American war correspondents were thinking and saying about the same time. ”

“ American imperialism pretends to be ministering to the happiness of the living, and, though it realizes that it is not a success in that line, it resents identification with its British cousin, by sanctimonious reference to the alleged net good it is doing. Yet in its moments of frankness it says, with an air of infinite patience under base ingratitude, “Well, they will be happy in some other generation,” and that therefore the number of people we have had or may have, to kill, or permit to be killed, in the process of Benevolent Assimilation, is wholly negligible. ”