The next day—“just when the sun got the hottest,” wrote Mr. Taft—all the launches in the harbour gathered around the Hancock, many whistles blew, many flags and pennants fluttered, and the Commission was escorted to the shore. They entered the city with great pomp and circumstance, through files of artillerymen reaching all the way from the landing at the mouth of the Pásig River, up a long driveway, across a wide moat, through an old gateway in the city wall and up to the Palace of the Ayuntamiento where General MacArthur, the Military Governor, had his offices. But it was not a joyous welcome for all that. All the show was merely perfunctory; a sort of system that had to be observed. Their reception was so cool that Mr. Taft said he almost stopped perspiring. There were few Filipinos to be seen, and as General MacArthur’s reception to the Commission was anything but cordial or enthusiastic they began to feel a discomforting sense of being decidedly not wanted.
If they had any doubts on this point General MacArthur soon cleared them up. He frankly assured them that he regarded nothing that had ever happened in his whole career as casting so much reflection on his position and his ability as their appointment under the direction of the President. They suggested that he could still rejoice in considerable honour and prestige as a man at the head of a division of more troops than any general had commanded since the Civil War and that he was, moreover, still enjoying the great power of Chief Executive of the Islands.
“Yes,” said he, “that would be all right if I hadn’t been exercising so much more power than that before you came.”
Whereupon Mr. Taft gently reminded him that he had been exercising that power for about three weeks only and said he hoped he had not become, in that time, so habituated to the situation as to prevent his appreciating the rather exalted position in which he would still be left. They afterward exchanged some correspondence as to what powers each did have, but they seemed to have disagreed from the first.
General MacArthur succeeded General Otis in command of the United States Army in the Philippines and he had fallen heir to a policy with which he was entirely out of sympathy. General Otis had scattered the troops in small divisions and detachments all over the Islands, and General MacArthur found himself in command of about seventy thousand men, but with only a few regiments where he could lay his hands on them for action in his own immediate vicinity. He believed that the only way to get rid of the predatory bands and bring order out of a chaotic state, was to concentrate the army on the island of Luzon where most of the active insurrectos operated. And he thought it would be many years before the Filipinos would be ready for anything but the strictest military government. But the trouble was that thousands of Filipinos all over the Islands had already sworn fealty to the United States, or had gone quietly back to work, and it was known that the lives of many of these would not be worth a moment’s purchase if the protection of the American troops was withdrawn from them. That was the situation.
The last engagement between real insurgents and American troops had taken place in February before the Commission arrived. There had been men of some ability and real patriotism in Aguinaldo’s cabinet and among his followers at Malolos, but by this time the best of them had come in and taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, others were in prison slowly making up their minds as to whether they would or would not follow this course, while still others had gone over to Hong Kong to join in the activities of the “junta.” Aguinaldo was still roaming around the mountain fastnesses of Luzon, posing as a dictator and issuing regular instructions to his lieutenants for the annihilation of American regiments; but the insurrection had degenerated.
The companies of men who still kept the field did so, for the most part, because they found that the easiest way to make a living. Money was getting scarce and the people were steadily refusing to contribute to the cause. A letter from one of Aguinaldo’s lieutenants was intercepted in which he said that he had found a certain town obdurate and that he thought it would be necessary to take four or five lives before the people could be induced to give money. Murder and rapine, torture and robbery; these were the methods employed, and very little of the money realised ever found its way into the general revolutionary coffers. Most of the remaining “patriots” had become ladrones and were harrying their own people much more than they were opposing the American forces.
These conditions led the Commission to think the time had come to organise a native constabulary, under American officers, with which thoroughly to police the Islands. But General MacArthur did not agree with them; thought it would be folly to trust any Filipino with arms and cited instances of where those who had been armed as scouts had proved entirely untrustworthy. But the suggestion was received by many of his own officers with the utmost approval and one man, in the Ilocos country in
