This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell, [399] and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations, which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents surrendered. [400] The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse than his "bite." The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901-02 lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was 312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the outset to make General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we are considering his "bite"--how many lives his Batangas lesson to the Filipino people cost--another bit of testimony is tremendously relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province had." [401] Considering that General Bell's 1901-'02 campaign in that ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,--how many of the 209 wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered--the Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of "suppressing insurrection under like circumstances." But it was never again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon's "corpse-carcass stench" from supposed reconcentrado pens and his "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most sobbingly in love with "a benign civil government" and had forgotten all about independence. It was obvious that a repetition of such a