The Japanese Minister of War, General Terauchi, was a soldier—which seems fitting, and which is usual in most countries I believe—and he assumed at once, in common with all the other Army officers whom he encountered, that Mr. Taft was a soldier, too. This has nothing to do with my immediate story, but I remember it as one of the most amusing circumstances of that visit to Japan. Whatever Mr. Taft may be he is not martial, but these Japanese warriors proceeded to credit him with all manner of special knowledge which he had never had an opportunity to acquire and to speak to him in technical terms which, it must be admitted, strained his ability for concealing his ignorance. He finally said that if anybody asked him again about the muzzle velocity of a Krag-Jorgensen, or any like question, he intended to reply: “Sh! It’s a secret!”
General Kodama, who afterward made himself world-famous as Chief of Staff during the Russo-Japanese War, had been Military Governor of Formosa and he was especially interested in Mr. Taft because he conceived that in the Philippines we had a parallel for their Formosan problem. He grew quite confidential, telling Mr. Taft many things about the Japanese administration of Formosan affairs and drawing comparisons between his difficulties and those that we had encountered under similar circumstances. He ended by saying:
“We had to kill a good many thousands of those people before they would be good. But then, of course, you understand—you know—you know!”
This story could not have been told at that time because there were groups of active anti-Imperialists in the United States who would have pounced upon it as something to be made the most of as an argument for their cause, but in the light of history that has been made I think it is safe to tell it now. Mr. Taft had to admit that he was a man of peace, that so far as he personally was concerned he had never killed nor ordered killed a single Filipino in his life, and that his whole endeavour had been to form a friendly alliance with the Philippine people and to dissuade them from indulgence in the personal danger involved in their useless opposition to temporary American control.
We made something of a triumphal progress through Japan during our short stay and were escorted to our ship by numerous dignitaries who were extremely gracious and who cheered us on our way with such “banzais!” and such a waving of flags as made me feel that we were quite important personages. Later on I had my sense of the importance of my position rudely shaken. There is one thing to be said for the American Republic and that is that no public official is permitted to retain for very long a too exalted opinion of himself.
One day shortly after my arrival in Washington, I was at tea at the house of a friend and found myself in conversation with a lady, the wife of an Army officer, whom I had known in Manila. We talked around and about various subjects, after the manner of ladies at a tea, when she finally said to me:
“You know, Mrs. Taft, I have thought about you so often and wondered how you liked it here in Washington after your life in Manila. Why, out there you were really a queen, and you come back here and are just nobody!”
There was another lady who sat next to my husband at a dinner one night. It was a place of honour, next to a Cabinet officer, and she no doubt considered it necessary to “make conversation” while the candle-lights shone. She went along quite successfully for awhile, but eventually blundered into this:
“Do you know, Mr. Secretary, I really think you ought to go out and see the Philippine Islands. They say they are so interesting!”
Poor man, most of his reputation, such as it then was, had been made in the Philippine service, but he replied to her:
“That’s right, I should go. And I’m going, too, just as soon as I can possibly get away.”
He meant that. He had promised the Filipinos that he would return to open their first Assembly, and even then he had a fixed desire to lead a party of American Congressmen to the country whose affairs they were endeavouring to settle by long distance legislation founded upon very mixed and, in some cases, greatly distorted, secondhand information.
Mr. Taft became Secretary of War at the beginning of 1904, but I spent the remainder of the winter after our arrival in the United States in Santa Barbara and did not join him until May, when I met him at St. Louis, where he went to open the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
President Roosevelt was to have done this, but urgent affairs kept him in Washington, so the Secretary of War was asked to represent him and to make the speech which announced to the world the inauguration of this great Fair. I remember the occasion especially because I had been so long out of touch with the kind of buoyant Americanism which made itself felt in St. Louis that I had almost lost my own identity with it, and I began then to think that it was really good to be back in my own country.
I knew fairly well what it would mean to settle down in Washington as the wife of a Cabinet officer because I had lived in Washington before. While I didn’t expect to be and didn’t expect anybody to consider me “just nobody” I knew that it would not be at all like entering upon the duties and privileges of the wife of the Governor of the Philippine Islands. I thought what a curious and
