International law forbids a nation to make a contract in regard to taking the liberties of its colonies.
Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said "the law of righteousness," instead of "international law," his proposition, thus amended, would have been incontrovertible. On September 19, 1911, one of the great newspapers of this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members of the Congress of the United States, and to "The Fourth Estate" also, the newspaper editors, a circular letter proposing that we sell the Philippine Islands to Japan. A member of the United States Senate sent this answer:
I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands means selling the inhabitants. The question of traffic in human beings, whether by wholesale or retail, was forever settled by the Civil War.
About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia had an editorial on the Denver Post's proposition, the most conspicuous feature of which was that Japan was too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate selling the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the matter at length.
No; Lawyer Melliza's proposition has no standing in international law yet. But it has with what Mr. Lincoln's First Inaugural called "the better angels of our nature," if we stop to reflect.
Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to General Miller is the following:
I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could occupy the city would they agree to it. He replied most emphatically that they would.
At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on the treaty was in progress in the United States Senate, there was hardly a province in that archipelago where you would not have encountered the same inflexible adherence to the Aguinaldo government.
At the conclusion of the meeting it was said that as this question involved the integrity of the entire republic, it could not be further discussed here, but must be referred to the Malolos Government.
There is one other statement made by the spokesman of the Filipinos, at their meeting with Dr. Phelan, which arrested and gripped my attention. That it may interest the reader as it did me, it will need but a word or so as preface. In the fall of that same year, 1899, when my regiment, the 29th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, reached the Islands, it was supposed that the insurrection had about played out, i.e., that it had been "beaten to a frazzle," because the Filipinos no longer offered to do battle in force in the open. Yet all that fall, and all through 1900 and after, a most obstinate guerrilla warfare was kept up. Anywhere in the archipelago you were liable to be fired on from ambush. At first we could not understand this. Later we found out it was the result of an order of Aguinaldo's, faithfully carried out, not to assemble in large commands, but to conduct a systematic guerrilla warfare indefinitely. We learned this by capturing a copy of the order, which was quite elaborate. Dr. Phelan's report says: