The unconditional absoluteness with which Judge Taft acted from the beginning on the assumption that the Filipinos would make a distinction between civil and military rule, and that their objection to us was because we had first sent soldiers to rule them and not civilians, and that these objections would vanish before the benignant sunlight of a government by civilians, is one of the great tragedies of all history, considering the countless lives it eventually cost. As a matter of fact, the Filipino objection had little or no relation to the kind of clothes we wore, whether they were white duck or khaki. Their objection was to us, i.e., to an alien yoke. However, to heal the bleeding wounds of war, the Filipinos were benevolently told to forget it, and a civil government was set up on July 4, 1901, pursuant to the amiable delusion indicated. That it has never yet proved a panacea, and why, will be developed in the next and subsequent chapters, but only in-so-far as such development throws light on the present situation--which it is the whole object of this book to do. And now a few words by way of concluding the present chapter, as preliminary to the inauguration of a civil government, cannot be misconstrued, though they come from one who held office under it. I have certainly made clear that Judge Taft and his colleagues were as honest in their delusion about how popular they were with the Filipinos as many other public men who have been known to have hobbies, and my remarks must be understood as based on the comprehensive bird's-eye view which we have had of the whole situation from the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898 to the end of June, 1901, as a summation of that situation. It is quite true that all contemporary history is as much affected by its environment as the writer of it is by his own limitations. But it certainly seems clear now that, in regard to the Philippine problem presented in 1898 by the decision to keep the islands, the American people were played upon by the politicians for the next few years thereafter, sometimes on the idea that the Filipino people were not a people but only a jumble of semi-civilized tribes incapable of any intelligent notion of what independence meant, and sometimes on the idea that while there was no denying that they were indeed a civilized, homogeneous, Christian people, yet the great majority of them did not want independence, and would prefer to be under a strong alien government. But the key-note to the McKinley policy from the beginning, his answer to the eager question of his own people, was that there was no real absence of the consent of the governed. In Senator Lodge's history of the war with Spain, written in 1899, there is a description of the long struggle for independence in Cuba, whose existence Spain denied year after year until we decided that patience had ceased to be a virtue, which description is so strikingly applicable to the situation in the Philippines during