1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own and Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do. In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way region as "the affair of March 23d" (1903). In his annual report for 1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary's guns, while they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town, and departed. But Mr. Taft's report disposes of the whole incident in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country, hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements arrived. Governor Taft's failure adequately to present the gravity of the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote provinces which he was anxious to keep on his "pacified list," to say nothing of politically negligible native life therein. [415] Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair, Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one