Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned, together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then, that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of "civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of God. The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three distinct stages: (1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899. (2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated, patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of provinces, until the summer of 1902. (3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things had been given time to settle down in them to normal. These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common illustration applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from one of the military reports of 1902: The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous class of people, whose principal ambition seems to be to live without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the guise of patriotism. [412]