He said: "If the bitterest enemy of the United States had sought to bring upon it in that quarter the greatest trouble in the shortest time, he could have devised for that end no policy more successful than the one we have already pursued." It must be added that Mr. Whitelaw Reid, perhaps to prevent being accused of having sympathy with the enemy, denounced Aguinaldo and the Tagals as rebels, savages and treacherous barbarians, unfit for citizenship or self-government, and declared that the Philippines belong to America by right of conquest. I suppose Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or perhaps any citizen of the United States, has a right to denounce his own President, and certainly the management of the Philippine annexation has been bad from the beginning. But I think Mr. McKinley was badly served by the Peace Commission. They seem to me to have made many and egregious mistakes. 1. They took General Merritt's opinion that the Tagals would submit, and accepted Mr. Foreman's assurance of Tagal plasticity and accommodating nature. 2. They disregarded the intimation of D. Felipe Agoncillo, the accredited agent of the Tagals, that these would accept no settlement to which they were not parties. 3. They treated several millions of civilised Christian people like a herd of cattle to be purchased with the ranch. 4. Under Article VIII., they guaranteed the religious orders the possession of estates already taken from them. 5. Under Article IX., they gave the expelled friars the right to return and exercise their profession. To illustrate their careless procedure, I may add that they did not even accurately determine the boundaries of the Archipelago to be ceded, and now, in August 1900, $100,000 is to be paid to Spain for Sibutu and Cagayan Sulu Islands, left out by mistake. If any man has a right to say, "Save me from my friends," that man is William McKinley. As regards Aguinaldo and the Tagals, I think that Mr. Whitelaw Reid's irritation at their protracted resistance has led him on too far. I prefer the opinion of Senator Hoar, who, speaking in the Senate of three proclamations of Aguinaldo, said: "Mr. President, these are three of the greatest state papers in all history. If they were found in our own history of our own revolutionary time we should be proud to have them stand by the side of those great state papers which Chatham declared were equal to the masterpieces of antiquity." In the same speech he says, and I commend his words to the reader's attention: "Mr. President, there is one mode by which the people of the Philippine Islands could establish the truth of the charges as to their degradation and incapacity for self-government which have been made by the advocates of Imperialism in this debate, and that mode is by submitting tamely and without resistance to the dominion of the United States."