After that General Chaffee seems not only to have been amenable to reason, but to have been imbued with a spirit of cordiality and helpfulness which was most gratifying to the long-harassed Commission. To facilitate cooperation, a private telephone was installed between the offices of Mr. Taft and the Commanding General, and it seemed to me that my husband suddenly lost some of the lines of worry which had begun to appear in his face.
The Constabulary, as everybody knows, was eventually established and perhaps no finer body of men, organised for such a purpose, exists. It took a long time to get them enlisted, equipped and properly drilled, but today they are a force which every man and woman in the Philippines, of whatever nationality, colour, creed or occupation, regards with peculiar satisfaction. They include corps enlisted from nearly every tribe in the Islands, not excepting the Moros and the Igorrotes. The Moro constabulario is distinguishable from the Christian in that he wears a jaunty red fez with his smart khaki uniform instead of the regulation cap, while the Igorrote refuses trousers and contents himself with the cap, the tight jacket, the cartridge belt and a bright “G-string.” To the Ifugao Igorrote uniform is added a distinguishing spiral of brass which the natty soldier wears just below the knee. It is difficult to imagine anything more extraordinary than a “crack” company of these magnificent barelegged Ifugaos going through dress-parade drill under the sharp commands of an American officer. The Constabulary Band of eighty-odd pieces, under the direction of Captain Loving, an American negro from the Boston Conservatory of Music, is well known in America and is generally considered one of the really great bands of the world. All its members are Filipinos.
Press clippings and some correspondence which I have before me remind me that even at this period there began to manifest itself in the Taft family, and otherwheres, a mild interest in the possibility that my husband might become President of the United States. Mr. Taft himself treated all such “farfetched speculation” with the derision which he thought it deserved, but to me it did not seem at all unreasonable. We received first a copy of the Boston Herald containing two marked articles in parallel columns, one of which, headed by a picture of Mr. Taft, stated that in Washington there had been serious suggestion of his name as a Presidential candidate and the other giving a sympathetic account of an anti-imperialistic meeting at Faneuil Hall. We thought the two articles as “news items” hardly warranted juxtaposition, and it seemed to us the editor was indulging a sort of sardonic sense of humour when he placed them so. Not that my husband was an “imperialist,” but that he was generally so considered. Indeed, he was the most active anti-imperialist of them all. He was doing the work of carrying out a thoroughly anti-imperialistic policy, but he recognised the difference between abandoning the Philippines to a certain unhappy fate and guiding them to substantial independence founded on self-dependence. It took a long time to get the shouters from the housetops to accept this interpretation of our national obligation, but there was reassurance in the fact that where our honour is involved Americanism can always be trusted to rise above purely partisan politics.
Mr. Taft’s mother, who took an active and very intelligent interest in her son’s work and who sent him letters by nearly every mail which were filled with entertaining and accurate comment on Philippine affairs, took the suggestion of his being a Presidential possibility quite seriously. And she did not at all approve of it. Having seen a number of press notices about it she sat down and wrote him a long letter in which she discussed with measured arguments the wisdom of his keeping out of politics. At that time the idea appealed to nothing in him except his sense of humour. He wrote to his brother Charles: “To me such a discussion has for its chief feature the element of humour. The idea that a man who has issued injunctions against labour unions, almost by the bushel, who has sent at least ten or a dozen violent labour agitators to jail, and who is known as one of the worst judges for the maintenance of government by injunction, could ever be a successful candidate on a Presidential ticket, strikes me as intensely ludicrous; and had I the slightest ambition in that direction I hope that my good sense would bid me to suppress it. But, more than this, the horrors of a modern Presidential campaign and the political troubles of the successful candidate for President, rob the office of the slightest attraction for me. I have but one ambition, and if that cannot be satisfied I am content to return to the practice of the law with reasonable assurance that if my health holds out I can make a living, and make Nellie and the children more comfortable than I could if I went to Washington.”
This letter is dated August 27, 1901, and was written on a Spanish steamer which the Commission had taken from Aparri, on the north coast of Luzon, after they finished the last of the long trips they had to make for the purpose of organising civil government in the provinces.
It was just after they returned from this trip; just when things were at their brightest; when everything seemed to be developing so rapidly and our hopes were running high, that we were shaken by the appalling news of the attack on President McKinley. We had kept luncheon waiting for Mr. Taft until it seemed useless
