The recruiting by Aguinaldo of an army of 40,000 men with guns within one hundred days after his little "Return from Elba"--"15,000 fighting men, 11,000 of them armed with guns," in fifty days, [99] which number had swelled to nearly 40,000 men with guns in another fifty days (by August 29th) [100]--is no more remarkable than his progress in organizing his government and making its grip on the whole island of Luzon effective in a short space of time. As all Americans who know the Filipinos know how fond they are of what government offices call "paper work," and how their escribientes [101] can work like bees in drafting documents, it might be easy to ignore Aguinaldo's various proclamations, already hereinbefore noticed in Chapter II., as representing merely "a government on paper," were there no other proof. But among the insurgent captured papers we found long afterward, there is a document containing the minutes of a convention of the insurrecto presidentes from all the pueblos of fifteen different provinces, on August 6, 1898, which throws a flood of light on the subject now under consideration. [102] This convention was held at Bacoor, then Aguinaldo's headquarters, a little town on the bay shore between Manila and Cavite. The minutes of the convention recite that its members had been previously chosen as presidentes of their respective pueblos in the manner prescribed by previous decrees issued by Aguinaldo (already noticed), and that thereafter they had taken the oath of office before Aguinaldo as President of the government, etc. They then declare that the Filipino people whom they speak for are "not ambitious for power, nor honors, nor riches, aside from the rational aspirations for a free and independent life," and "proclaim solemnly, in the face of the whole world, the Independence of the Philippines." They also re-affirm allegiance to Aguinaldo as President of the government and request him to seek recognition of it at the hands of the Powers, "because," says the paper, "to no one is it permitted to * * * stifle the legitimate aspirations of a people"--as if Europe cared a rap what we did to them except in the way of regret that it did not have a finger in the pie. However, they were not only apprehensive, on the one hand, lest we might be tempted to take their country away from Spain for ourselves, but also, on the other hand, lest we might in the wind-up decide to leave them to Spain at the end of the war. That this last was not an idle fear is shown by the fact that during the deliberations of the Paris Peace Commission, Judge Gray urged, in behalf of his contention against taking the islands at all, that if Dewey had sunk the Spanish fleet off Cadiz, instead of in Manila Bay, and the Carlists had incidentally helped us about that time, we would have been under no resulting obligation "to stay by them at the conclusion of the war." [103] When the presidentes in