Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid, sent a joint signed statement. They urged taking over the whole archipelago, saying that, as their instructions provided for the retention at least of Luzon, "we do not consider the question of remaining in the Philippine Islands as at all now properly before us." They also urged that as Spain governed and defended the islands from Manila, we became, with the destruction of her fleet and the surrender of her army, "as complete masters of the whole group as she had been, with nothing needed to complete the conquest save to proceed with the ample forces we had at hand to take unopposed possession." The vice of this proposition, from the strategic as well as the ethical point of view, is of course clear enough now.
Spain's government was already tottering in the Philippines when the Spanish-American war broke out. To be "as complete masters as she had been" was like becoming the recipient of a quit-claim deed. Also, ours was not a case of taking "unopposed possession." An adverse claimant, relying on immemorial prescription, was in full possession; all the tenants on the land had attorned to him, and he and they were ready to defend their claim against all comers with their lives. They reminded one of the recurrent small farmer whom some great timber or other corporation seeks to oust, patrolling his land lines rifle in hand, on the lookout for the corporation's agent and the sheriff with the dispossessory warrant.
Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid go on to say:
Military and naval witnesses agree that it would be practically as easy to hold and defend the whole as a part.
Hardly any one can fail to read with interest the following accurate and vivid picture which they give of the physical strategic unity of the Philippine Islands:
There is hardly a single island in the group from which you cannot shoot across to one or more of the others--scarcely another archipelago in the world in which the islands are crowded so closely together and so interdependent.
This explains also why the Filipino people are a people. Whenever the American people understand that, they will give them their independence, unless they get an idea that government of their people by their people for their people would be distasteful to them.