The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912Blount, James H. (James Henderson)
History
The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912
Blount, James H. (James Henderson)
Philippines -- History -- 1898-1946; Philippines -- Politics and government -- 1898-1935
When Judge Taft, General Wright, and their colleagues of the Taft
Commission, came out to the Philippines in 1900, they came full of the
McKinley convictions about a people whom neither they or Mr. McKinley
had ever seen, bound hand and foot by political necessity to square the
freeing of Cuba with the subjugation of the Philippines. A perfectly
natural evolution of this attitude resulted in the position they
at once took on arriving in the Islands, viz., that to do for the
Filipinos what we have done for the Cubans would mean a bloody welter
of anarchy and chaos. And the presidential contest of 1900 was fought
and won largely on that issue. After 1900, for all the gentlemen above
referred to, the proposition was always res adjudicata. All protests
by Filipinos to the contrary caused only resentment, and welded the
authorities more and more hermetically to the correctness of the
original proposition. Loyalty to the original ill-considered decision
became impregnated, in their case, with a fervor not entirely unlike
religious fanaticism, and belief in it became a matter of principle,
justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might thereafter
do. So that when General Wright "came to the throne" in our colonial
empire, as Governor, and legatee of the McKinley-Taft Benevolent
Assimilation policies, his attitude in all he did was thoroughly
honest, and also thoroughly British. He honestly believed in the
"bloody welter of anarchy and chaos" proposition, and was prepared,
in any emergency that might arise, to follow his convictions in that
regard whithersoever they might lead, without variableness or shadow
of turning. Take him all in all, Governor Wright was about the best
man occupying exalted station I ever knew personally, President Taft
himself not excepted; although I still adhere to Colonel Roosevelt's
opinion of 1901 concerning Mr. Taft, quoted in the chapter preceding
this, from the Outlook of September 21, 1901, notwithstanding that in
the contest for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1912,
the Colonel "recalled" that opinion. Seriously, a man may "combine the
qualities which would make a first class President of the United States
with the qualities which would make a first class Chief Justice of the
United States" and still cut a sorry figure trying to fit a square peg
into a round hole, or a scheme of government, the breath of whose life
is public opinion, into the running of a remote colonial government,
the breath of whose life is exemption from being interfered with by
public opinion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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