in aid of a presidential candidate in the United States. That it was highly inaccurate was well known to some 70,000 American soldiers then in the field, who were daily getting insurrecto lead pumped into them, and also well known to their gallant commander, General MacArthur, who told Judge Taft just that thing. That it was an ungracious belittling of the work of the army is certainly obvious enough, and it was so considered by the army, and its commanding general aforesaid, who practically told Judge Taft just that thing. But Mr. Root, then Secretary of War, was as much interested in Mr. McKinley's re-election as Judge Taft was. So he spread the Taft cablegrams broadcast throughout the United States during the presidential campaign, and pigeonholed the MacArthur messages and reports on the situation in the dusty and innocuous desuetude of the War Department archives. Four years later at the Republican National Convention of 1904, Mr. Root told the naked truth, thus: When the last national convention met, over 70,000 soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still vigorous enemy in check. [306] The foregoing is all a record made and unalterable. It is a fair sample of the initial stages of one more of the experiments in colonization by a republic which are scattered through history and teach but one lesson. All the gentlemen concerned were personally men of high type. But look at the net result of their work. The impression it produced in the United States, at a tremendously critical period in the country's history, when the men at the helm of state were bending every energy to railroad the republic into a career of overseas conquest, and using the army for that purpose, can be called by a short and ugly word. The splendor of Mr. Root's intellect is positively alluring, but he is a dangerous man to republican institutions. Mr. Taft's part in that conspiracy for the suppression of the facts of the Philippine situation in 1900 was really due to kindliness of heart, regret at the war, and earnest hope that it would soon end. Mr. Denby's part was that of the out-and-out imperialist who has frank doubts in his own mind as to whether it is axiomatic, after all, that the form of government bequeathed us by our fathers is the best form of government yet devised. But the conspiracy was really a sin against the progress of the world, because it deceived the American people as to the genuineness and unanimity of the desire of the Filipino people to imitate the example set by us in 1776, which has since served as a beacon-light of hope to so many people in so many lands in their several struggles to be free.