The most important words of the above telegram are "and here at home." The "serious effect here at home" so earnestly deprecated was that the real issue between General Chaffee and Governor Taft might be ventilated by some Congressional Committee, and thus bring out the prematurity with which, to meet political exigencies, the civil government had been set up. The issue was that General Chaffee was recognizing the hostility of the people, and deprecating the withdrawal of the police protection of the army from districts in which there were many people who, though tired of keeping up the struggle, and willing to quit, were being harried by the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent. This would mean, ultimately, an examination, such as has already been made in this volume, of the evidence on which Governor Taft based his half-baked opinion of 1900 that "the great majority" were "entirely willing" to American sovereignty. It would also show up Mr. Root's nonsense about "the patient and unconsenting millions," so shamelessly flouted in the presidential campaign of 1900, and his pious Philippics against delivering said millions "into the hands of the assassin, Aguinaldo," [381] and would reveal the truth confessed by Secretary Root in a speech made to the cadets at West Point in July, 1902, after the trouble had blown over, in which, apropos of the valor and services of the army, he referred proudly to its having then just completed the suppression of "an insurrection of 7,000,000 people." On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt's above cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular waters, a company of General Chaffee's command, Company C, of the 9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place called Balangiga, in the island of Samar. [382] This had made General Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody drama of which General "Jake" Smith was the central figure, whereby Samar was made "a howling wilderness." But Governor Taft was filled with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty Chaffee with remarks like this: "The people are friendly to the civil government," and suavely speaking of "the evidence which accumulates on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and protection by the civil government." [383] The same Taft report goes on to deprecate "rigor in the treatment" of the situation and the "consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread and development of the civil government."