So far as the writer is advised and believes, nobody who knows John F. Bass ever suspected him of being a quitter. He must have been reading the London Standard, which said about that time: "It is a little startling to find the liberators of Cuba engaged in suppressing a youthful republic which claims the sacred right of self-government." Bass had written his newspaper in August previous, after observing how pluckily the Filipinos had fought and licked the Spaniards: "Give them their independence and guarantee it to them." The overwhelming sentiment of the Eighth Army Corps when we took the Philippines was against taking them; and those who had kept informed knew that the Senate had ratified the treaty by a majority only one more than enough to squeeze it through, the vote having been 57 to 27, at least 56 being thus indispensable to make the necessary constitutional two-thirds of the 84 votes cast; and that Wall Street and the White Man's Burden or land-grabbing contingent--"Philanthropy and Five per cent," as Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage put it at the time--were responsible for these shambles Mr. Bass describes. At this juncture some soft-headed gentleman asks: "What is this man who writes this book driving at? Is he trying to show that the American soldiers in the Philippines in February, 1899, all wanted to quit as soon as the war broke out?" Not at all. In the first place it hardly lay in American soldier nature to want to quit when Aguinaldo was telling us "if you don't take your flag down and out of these islands at once and promptly get out yourselves along with it, I will proceed to kick you out and throw it out." And in the next place, in the war with the Filipinos, as in all other wars, fuel was added to the flame as soon as the war broke out. Among the Americans, charges soon came into general circulation and acceptance that the Filipinos had planned (but been frustrated in) a plot looking to a general massacre of all foreigners in Manila. This alleged plot was supposed to have been scheduled to be carried out on a certain night shortly after February 15, 1899. Among the Filipinos, on the other hand, counter-charges soon followed, and met with general credence, that the Americans made a practise of killing prisoners taken in battle, including the wounded. Neither charge was ever proven, but both served the purpose, at the psychologic moment, of possessing each side with the desire to kill, which is the business of war. Let us glance briefly at these recriminations.