After the tremendous eight weeks' tension had relaxed, and before the final reduction to writing of all the details, we see this dear little telegram, from Secretary of State Hay, himself a writer of note, come bravely paddling into port, where it was cordially received by both sides, taken in out of the wet, and put under the shelter of the treaty: Mr. Hay to Mr. Day: In renewing conventional arrangements do not lose sight of copyright agreement. And here is the last act of the drama: Mr. Day to Mr. Hay, Paris, December 10, 1898: Treaty signed at 8.50 this evening. CHAPTER VIII THE BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION PROCLAMATION Prometheus stole the heavenly fire from the altar of Jupiter to benefit mankind, and Jupiter thereupon punished both Prometheus and the rest of mankind by creating and giving to them the woman Pandora, a supposed blessing but a real curse. Pandora brought along a box of blessings, and when she opened it, everything flew out and away but Hope. Tales from AEschylus. The ever-memorable Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, the Pandora box of Philippine woes, was signed December 21, 1898, and its contents were let loose in the Philippines on January 1, 1899. Let us consider for a moment the total misapprehension of conditions in the islands under which Mr. McKinley drafted and signed that famous document--a misapprehension due to General Otis's curious blindness to the great vital fact of the situation, viz., that the Filipinos were bent on independence from the first, and preparing to fight for it to the last. Take the following Otis utterance, for example, concerning a date when practically everybody in the Eighth Army Corps, and every newspaper correspondent in the Philippines, recognized that war would be certain in the event the Paris Peace negotiations should result, as common rumor then said they would result, in our taking over the islands: My own confidence at this time in a satisfactory solution of the difficulties which confronted us may be gathered from a despatch sent to Washington on December 7th, wherein I stated that conditions were improving, and that there were signs of revolutionary disintegration. [149]