--giving the reply proclamation in full. No man can read the Otis report itself without feeling that if he, the reader, had been playing Aguinaldo's hand he would have played it exactly as Aguinaldo did. To General Otis the government at Malolos--"their Malolos arrangement," he used to call it--seemed quite an impudent little opera-bouffe affair, "a tin-horn government," as Senator Spooner suggested in the same debate on the treaty, in which he called his rugged and fiery friend from South Carolina, Senator Tillman, "the Senator from Aguinaldo," and immediately thereafter, with that engaging frankness that always so endeared him to his colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, removed the sting from the jest by admitting that neither he (Spooner), nor Tillman, nor anybody else in the United States, knew anything about Aguinaldo or his government. But in the calmer retrospect of many years after, we have seen, through the official documents which have become available in the interval, that said government was in complete and effective control of practically the whole archipelago, and had the moral support of the whole population at a time when our troops controlled absolutely nothing but the two towns of Manila and Cavite. Therefore, when we read in the Aguinaldo proclamation such phrases as, "In view of this, I summoned a council of my generals and asked the advice of my cabinet, and in conformity with the opinion of both bodies I" did so and so; "My government cannot remain indifferent to" this or that act of the Americans assuming sovereignty over the islands; "Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities if" etc.; they do not sound to us so irritatingly bombastic as they did to General Otis, distributed under his nose as the proclamation containing them at once was, by thousands, throughout a city of which he was nominally in possession, but nine-tenths of whose 300,000 inhabitants he was obliged to believe in sympathy with the insurgents. "My government," says the Aguinaldo proclamation, "rules the whole of Luzon, the Visayan Islands, and a part of Mindanao." Except as to Mindanao, which cut absolutely no figure in the insurrection until well toward the end of the guerrilla part of it, we have already examined this claim and found by careful analysis that it was absolutely true by the end of December, 1898. After a rapid review of how he had been aided and encouraged in starting the revolution against the Spaniards by Admiral Dewey, and then given the cold shoulder by the army when it came, Aguinaldo's manifesto says: