On the eighth day after General Miller had asked permission of the Iloilo village Hampdens to enforce the orders of the President of the United States, the "Federal Government of the Visayas," through its President, Senor Lopez, finally deigned to notice Mr. McKinley's proclamation. It said under date of January 9th: General: We have the high honor of having received your message, dated January 1st, of this year, enclosing letter of President McKinley. You say in one clause of your message: "As indicated in the President's cablegram, under these conditions the inhabitants of the island of Panay ought to obey the political authority of the United States, and they will incur a grave responsibility if, after deliberating, they decide to resist said authority." So the council of state of this region of Visayas are, at this present moment, between the authority of the United States, that you try to impose on us, and the authority of the central government of Malolos. Then follows this remarkable statement of the case for the Filipinos: The supposed authority of the United States began with the Treaty of Paris, on the 10th of December, 1898. The authority of the Central Government of Malolos is founded in the sacred and natural bonds of blood, language, uses, customs, ideas, (and) sacrifices. [169] General Otis was fond of throwing cold water on any particularly eloquent Filipino insurrecto document he had occasion to put in his reports by saying that Mabini was "the brains of" the Malolos Government--meaning the only brains it had [170]--and that he probably wrote such document, whatever it might be. But here is a piece of real eloquence, originating away down in the Visayan Islands, as far away from Malolos as Colonel Stark and his "Green Mountain Boys" were from Washington and Hamilton in 1776 and after. What then is the explanation of composition so forceful in its impassioned simplicity, and in the light of subsequent events, so pathetic? There is but one explanation. It came from the heart. It was the cry of the Soul of Humanity seeking its natural affiliations. It was the language of what Aguinaldo's early state papers always used to call the "legitimate aspirations of" his people--legitimate aspirations which we later strangled. The reason of the writer's earnestness is that a few months later he helped do some of the strangling. Thirteen years afterwards, a thorough acquaintance with the Filipino side of the matter, derived from an examination of the information which has been gradually accumulated and published by our government during that time, causes him to say, "Father forgive me, for I knew not what I did." The 35,000 volunteers of 1899 knew nothing about the Filipinos or their side of the case. We were like the deputy sheriff who goes out with a warrant duly issued to arrest a man charged with unlawful breach of the peace.