On February 10, 1900, General P. García wrote to General Isidoro Torres advising him to inform the inhabitants of Bulacan, among whom it was understood that the Americans were about to establish municipal governments, "of what occurred in the Island of Negros where two hundred men have been shot and forty more have been cast into the water for having accepted the American sovereignty, and because they were suspected of not being adherents of the cause of the independence of our country." [146] In reviewing the sentence of the Taytay murderers, General Adna R. Chaffee, who, as the ranking military officer in the Philippines, was closely in touch with the situation, made the following statement:-- "The number of peaceful men who have been murdered in these islands at the instigation of the chiefs, while impracticable of exact determination, is yet known to be so great that to recount them would constitute one of the most horrible chapters in human history. With respect to these chiefs, the commanding general has, therefore, no other recourse than to invoke the unrelenting execution of the law upon them and to appeal to the intelligent and educated among the Filipino people to aid him by renewed efforts to end a reign of terror of which their own people are the helpless victims." [147] Taylor has made the following summary of the facts:-- "The justice of the United States was slow in its course; witnesses had to be examined, and before a notorious criminal could be punished it had to be proved that he had committed some particular crime. Unless the crime was proved to the satisfaction of a military commission by witnesses, the greater part of whose testimony had to be translated into English from some native language by an interpreter, who was almost never an American, the man whom a whole village knew to be an assassin would escape punishment and would return to avenge himself upon those who had denounced him. The justice of Aguinaldo was a different matter. The Americans might hang for murder, but he would bury alive for serving them. The Americans might send a man to prison for burning a town, only to release him when an error was found in the proceedings. There were no errors in the proceedings of the guerillas. There was usually no summoning of witnesses, no slow taking of testimony and no careful search for laches which would invalidate the finding of the court and inure to the benefit of the accused. It was sufficient for some native to be denounced as in the employment of the Americans, or as an agent, or as a civil officer under the United States, for a summons to be issued for his appearance before a court of summary procedure, which was a court in name only; or for a mandate to be sent ordering that 'the serviceable method of dukut was to be employed in his