When the last national convention met, over 70,000 soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still vigorous enemy in check. [306]
The foregoing is all a record made and unalterable. It is a fair sample of the initial stages of one more of the experiments in colonization by a republic which are scattered through history and teach but one lesson. All the gentlemen concerned were personally men of high type. But look at the net result of their work. The impression it produced in the United States, at a tremendously critical period in the country's history, when the men at the helm of state were bending every energy to railroad the republic into a career of overseas conquest, and using the army for that purpose, can be called by a short and ugly word. The splendor of Mr. Root's intellect is positively alluring, but he is a dangerous man to republican institutions. Mr. Taft's part in that conspiracy for the suppression of the facts of the Philippine situation in 1900 was really due to kindliness of heart, regret at the war, and earnest hope that it would soon end. Mr. Denby's part was that of the out-and-out imperialist who has frank doubts in his own mind as to whether it is axiomatic, after all, that the form of government bequeathed us by our fathers is the best form of government yet devised. But the conspiracy was really a sin against the progress of the world, because it deceived the American people as to the genuineness and unanimity of the desire of the Filipino people to imitate the example set by us in 1776, which has since served as a beacon-light of hope to so many people in so many lands in their several struggles to be free.
By the spring of 1900, when General MacArthur relieved General Otis, the volunteers of 1899 had gotten thoroughly warmed up to the work of showing the Filipinos who was in fact "the boss of the show," and by June, 1900, when Judge Taft arrived, they had gotten still warmer [307]; and in General Otis's successor they had a commander who understood his men thoroughly, and was determined to carry out honestly, with firmness, and without playing, as his predecessor had done, the rôle of political henchman, the purpose for which the army he commanded had been sent to the Islands to accomplish. In this state of the case, the Taft Commission came out.