force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of the province are really sick of the war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it. At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington, calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus: I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar, and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from reconcentration camps, and "clouds of vampire bats swirling out on their orgies over the dead," that Senator Bacon's army friend, whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never did have any application to Bell's methods in Batangas. Bell did a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that all those people received daily medical treatment.