Recollections of Full Years

back across the Pacific and the United States, all by himself, to his Uncle Horace’s school in Connecticut, and I had opposed the idea with all my might without being able to offer a satisfactory substitute plan. But now a school for American children was opened and they were as well taught as they would have been at home. Moreover, Bob and Helen found a large number of congenial companions, and I don’t think I ever saw a happier set of boys and girls. They lived out of doors and did everything that children usually do, but their most conspicuous performance was on the Luneta in the evenings, where they would race around the drive on their little ponies, six abreast, or play games all over the grass plots which were then, and always have been, maintained chiefly for the benefit of children, both brown and white.

My husband’s change in title and station made very little difference in the character of his duties, but it gave him increased authority in the performance of them. The onerous necessity for submitting legislation to an executive whose point of view was different from that of the Commission came to an end, and he was able to see that such laws as the Commission passed were put in operation without delay. Under General Chaffee the feeling on the part of the Army against the encroachments of civil government gave way, slowly but surely, to an attitude of, at least, friendly toleration. It was as if they said: “Well, let them alone; we know they are wrong; but they must learn by experience, and, after all, they mean well.”

General Chaffee and General MacArthur were two quite different types of men. General Chaffee was less precise, less analytical. General MacArthur had always been given to regarding everything in its “psychological” aspect and, indeed, “psychological” was a word so frequently on his lips that it became widely popular. General Chaffee was impetuous; he was much less formal than his predecessor both in thought and manner, and Mr. Taft found cooperation with him much less difficult. He made no secret of his conviction, which was shared by most of the Army, that civil government was being established prematurely, but he was not unreasonable about it.

He refused at first to listen to the proposition for the establishment of a native Constabulary. This had been the Commission’s pet project ever since they had been in the Islands, and it was a great disappointment to them to find that the opposition which they had encountered in the former administration was to be continued.

What they wanted was a force of several thousand Filipinos, trained and commanded by American Army officers, either from the regular Army or from the volunteers. The same thing had been done with success by the British in India and the Straits Settlements, by the Dutch in Java and by our own General Davis in Puerto Rico, and as the insurrectionary force had dwindled to a few bands and to scattered groups of murderers and ladrones, so acknowledged by everybody, there was no reason why a native constabulary should not be employed to clear these out.

This plan was among the first things submitted to General Chaffee, but he was evidently not impressed. “Pin them down with a bayonet for at least ten years” was a favourite expression of Army sentiment which sometimes made the Commissioners’ explanations to the natives rather difficult.

General Wright, on behalf of the Commission, called on General Chaffee and was much surprised to learn that he had not even read the Constabulary bill which had been passed some time before and held up pending the hoped for opportunity to carry it into effect. When General Wright explained the purport of the measure General Chaffee said:

“I am opposed to the whole business. It seems to me that you are trying to introduce something to take the place of my Army.”

“Why, so we are,” said General Wright. “We are trying to create a civil police force to do the police work which we understood the Army was anxious to be relieved of. You have announced your purpose to concentrate the Army in the interest of economy, and to let our civil governments stand alone to see what is in them and we consider it necessary to have a constabulary, or some such force, to take care of the lawless characters that are sure to be in the country after four years of war, and especially in a country where the natives take naturally to ladronism. The Municipal police as now organised are not able to meet all the requirements in this regard.”

“There you are,” said General Chaffee, “you give your whole case away.”

“I have no case to give away,” replied General Wright. “We are trying to put our provincial governments on a basis where they will require nothing but the moral force of the military arm, and actually to preserve law and order through the civil arm. The people desire peace, but they also desire protection and we intend through the civil government to give it to them.”

The Commissioner then suggested the names of some Army officers whose peculiar tact in handling Filipinos had marked them as the best available men for organising and training native soldiers, but General Chaffee was not inclined to detail them for the work, so General Wright returned to the Commission quite cast down and communicated to his colleagues the feeling that they were to have a continuance of the same difficulties with which they were required to contend under the former administration.

But a peacemaker came along in the person of General Corbin. He spent some time with General Chaffee and then came to Malacañan to visit us. He made a hurried, but quite extensive trip through the Islands and gave the whole situation pretty thorough inspection. After he left, a change was found to have come over the spirit of affairs, and it was thought that he had managed to