These newspaper men, not under military orders, were daily risking their lives voluntarily, just to keep the American public informed, and the American public were kept in darkness and only vouchsafed bulletins giving them the progressive lists of their dead and wounded, and this last only on demand made upon Secretary Alger by the people of Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc., through their senators. The War Department did not want the people to know, did not want to admit itself, how plucky, vigorous, and patriotic the resistance was. The period of the fighting done by the State Volunteers from February until fall, when public opinion finally forced the Administration to send General Otis an adequate force, is slurred by Secretary of War Root in his report for 1899. I do not mean that it was slurred intentionally. But the Philippines were a long way off, and Mr. Root and Mr. McKinley naturally relied for their information on their commanding general on the spot. There were gallant deeds done in the Philippines by those Western fellows of the State regiments which volunteered for the war with Spain, that would have made the little fighting around Santiago look like--well, to borrow from "Chimmie" Fadden's fertile vocabulary, "like 30 cents." But General Otis was not in a position to get the thrill of such things from his office window, so very few of them were given much prominence by him in his despatches to the Adjutant-General of the army. This was wise enough from a political standpoint, seeing that a presidential campaign was to ensue in 1900 predicated on the proposition that American sovereignty was "in accord with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipinos," to use the words of the President's message to Congress of December, 1899.