In the first place, when I left Manila in December, 1901, I was very near to a nervous breakdown. This was due to the long strain of a peculiarly exacting official life in a trying climate, and an added weight of uneasiness about my husband’s illness.
Then, too, my mother was very ill. She had suffered a stroke of paralysis the year before from which she had never rallied and I was extremely anxious to be with her in Cincinnati.
When we arrived in San Francisco a terrible midwinter storm was sweeping the country from one end to the other and we were strongly advised to delay our trip across the continent, but we were both eager to go on so we started East at once over the Union Pacific.
When we passed Ogden we found ourselves in the midst of the worst blizzard I ever saw. The snow piled up ahead of us, delaying us hour by hour; the bitter wind fairly shook the heavy train; and to turn mere discomfort into misery the water pipes in the cars froze solid and we were left without heat of any kind. There was nothing to do but to go to bed; but even so, with all the blankets available piled on top of us, we shivered through interminable hours while the train creaked and puffed and struggled over the icy tracks.
When we reached Omaha I received a telegram telling me that my mother had died the day before, and I found it no longer possible to brace myself against the inevitable collapse. We hurried on to Cincinnati and arrived in time for my mother’s funeral, but I was too ill to be present. It was two months before I began to recover.
In the meantime Mr. Taft left us and went on to Washington for consultation with the President and Mr. Root and to appear before the Philippine Committees of the House and Senate which were then conducting minute inquiries into conditions in the Islands preparatory to passing a much needed governmental bill. For a whole month he was subjected to a hostile cross-examination, but he was able to place before the Committees more firsthand and accurate information on the subject of their deliberations than they had theretofore received. This was exactly what he wanted to come to the United States for, and he would greatly have enjoyed it had he been in his usual form, but he was not. During his stay in Washington he was the guest of Secretary and Mrs. Root and only their friendly care and solicitude enabled him to continue so long. In March he was compelled to return to Cincinnati for another operation, the third in five months. Everything considered, it seemed to me the Taft family had fallen upon evil days.
However, the weeks passed, I began to improve, and as soon as my husband had fairly set his feet on earth again we began to make plans for our return to the Philippines. There could be no thought of abandoning the work in the Islands just when it was beginning to assume an ordered and encouraging aspect, nor was it possible just then to shift the responsibility to other shoulders. This would have been too much like “changing horses in the middle of a stream.”
My husband was able while he was in Washington to present to President Roosevelt and Secretary Root a very clear outline of Philippine affairs, together with such details as could never be conveyed by cable, and the inevitable conclusion reached was that no solution of the problem was possible which did not include the settlement of the Friar controversy. The four monastic orders, the Franciscan, the Dominican, the Augustinian and the Recoleto, which held four hundred thousand acres of the best agricultural land in the Islands, had won the lasting enmity of the Filipino people and it was absolutely impossible to establish permanent peace while the Friars remained and persisted in an attempt to return to their parishes. Hundreds of them were living in practical imprisonment in the monasteries of Manila, and that they should not be allowed to return to their churches throughout the Islands, from which they had been driven, was the one stand taken by the Filipinos from which they could not by any form of persuasion be moved.
The solution of the difficulty proposed by Mr. Taft and his colleagues in the Philippine government was that the United States purchase the Friars’ lands and turn them into a public domain on the condition that the orders objected to by the people be withdrawn from the Islands.
As soon as President Roosevelt recognised the importance of accomplishing these things he decided, with characteristic directness, that somebody should go at once to Rome and open negotiations with the Vatican, and after considering various men for this delicate mission he concluded that Mr. Taft was the man best fitted to undertake it.
The prospect of another novel experience was exceedingly gratifying to me and I began at once to look forward with interest to a renewal of my acquaintance with Rome and to the trip back to the East by the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean which, according to Kipling, “sits an’ smiles, so sof’, so bright, so bloomin’ blue.” So my feet no longer lagged in my preparations for a long trip with my three children and another extended residence in the tropics.
To assist Mr. Taft in his negotiations with the Vatican, and to make up a dignified and formidable looking Commission, the President appointed Bishop O’Gorman of the Catholic diocese of South Dakota, and General James F. Smith, at that time a member
