Accordingly, he published a proclamation as indicated, on January 4th, at Manila. In a less formal communication concerning this proclamation, viz., a letter to General Miller at Iloilo, General Otis comes to the point more quickly thus:
After some deliberation we put out one of our own which it was believed would suit the temper of the people. [176]
The only thing in the Otis proclamation specifically directed toward soothing "the temper of the people" was a hint that the United States would, under the government it was going to impose, "appoint the representative men now forming the controlling element of the Filipinos to civil positions of responsibility and trust" (p. 69). And this, far from soothing Filipino temper, was interpreted as an offer of a bribe if they would desert the cause of their country. The bona fides of the offer they did not doubt for a moment. In fact it caught a number of the more timid prominent men, especially the elderly ones of the ultraconservative element preferring submission to strife. But the younger and bolder spirits were faithful, many of them unto death, and all of them unto many battles and much "hiking." [177]
General Otis's report goes on to tell how, about the middle of January, after he had published his sugar-coated edition of the presidential proclamation at Manila, it then at last occurred to him that General Miller might have published the original text of it in full at Iloilo, and, "fearing that," says he, "I again despatched Lieut. Col. Potter to Iloilo"--evidently post-haste. But it appears that when the breathless Potter arrived, the lid was already off. The horse had left the stable and the door was open, as we saw in the preceding chapter. However, as the Otis report indicates in this connection (p. 67), copies of the original McKinley proclamation, as published in full at Iloilo by General Miller, were of course promptly forwarded by the insurgents at Iloilo to the insurgent government at Malolos. So all that General Otis got for his pains was detection in the attempt to conceal the crucial words asserting American sovereignty in plain English. He tells us himself that as soon as the Malolos people discovered the trick, "it [the proclamation] became"--in the light of the Otis doctoring--"the object of venomous attack." His report was of course written long after all these matters occurred, but its language shows a total failure on the part of its author, even then, to understand the cause of the bitterness he denominates "venom." This bitterness grew naturally out of what seemed to the Filipinos an evident purpose of the United States to take and keep the Islands and an accompanying unwillingness to acknowledge that purpose, as shown by the conspicuous discrepancies between the original text of the proclamation as published at Iloilo by General Miller, on January 1st, and the modified version of it given out by General Otis at Manila on January 4th. "The ablest of the insurgent newspapers," says he (p. 69), "which was now issued at Malolos and edited by the uncompromising Luna * * * attacked the policy * * * as declared in the proclamation, and its assumption of sovereignty * * * with all the vigor of which he was capable." The nature of Editor Luna's philippics is not described by General Otis in detail, the only specific notion we get of them being from General Otis's echo of their tone, which, he tells us, was to the effect that "everything tended simply to a change of masters." But in another part of the Otis Report (p. 163) we find an epistle written about that time by one partisan of the revolution to another, whose key-note, given in the following extracts, was doubtless in harmony with the Luna editorials: