Cavite 619 134,779 Batangas 1,201 257,715 Laguna 629 148,606 Tayabas 5,993 153,065 ----- ------- 8,442 694,165 For convenience of subsequent allusion, this group of provinces may be treated as representing roughly 8500 square miles of territory and 700,000 people. These four provinces group themselves together naturally from a military standpoint. As physical force is the final basis of all government, these four provinces constitute a logical administrative governmental unit, as shown by the action of our military authorities in their extension of the American occupation. It would seem therefore that if there should ever be a Philippine republic, they would probably constitute one of its states--the State, let us say, of Cavite. The rest of southern Luzon below that part above described consists of a peninsula which, owing to its odd formation, is easy to remember. The mainland of Luzon, that is to-say, that part of the island which our narrative has already covered, remotely suggests, in shape, the State of Illinois. At least it resembles Illinois more than it does any other State of our Union, in that its length runs north and south, and its average length and width are nearer that of Illinois than any other. At the southeast corner of this mainland, the observer of the map will see, jutting off to the southeast from the mainland, the peninsula in question. It is about a hundred and fifty miles long, with an average width of possibly thirty miles--a minimum width of, say, ten miles, and a maximum of fifty,--and is separated from Samar by the narrow, swift, and treacherous San Bernardino Strait, which connects the Pacific Ocean with the China Sea. This peninsula is frequently called "the Hemp Peninsula." The importance of controlling the hemp ports prompted General Otis to send General Bates with an expedition to those ports on February 15, 1900. [292] This expedition did little more than occupy those ports. The great interior continued under insurgent control some time afterward. The report of the Secretary of War, Mr. Root, for 1900, goes on to describe an engagement, or two, sustained by the Bates Expedition shortly after it landed, and concludes, with a complacency almost Otis-like, by stating that shortly thereafter "the normal conditions of industry and trade relations with Manila were resumed by the inhabitants." Of course Mr. Root believed this, and so did Mr. McKinley. More the pity, as we shall later see. General Otis was now getting anxious to go home, and hastened to "occupy" and organize the rest of the archipelago, on paper, at least, the hemp peninsula becoming, on March 20, 1900, the Third District of the Department of Southern Luzon, Brigadier-General James M. Bell commanding.