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THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES
Officer of United States Volunteers in the Philippines, 1899-1901 United States District Judge in the Philippines, 1901-1905
G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1912
To JOHN DOWNEY WORKS OF CALIFORNIA AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN AS EVER GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES WHO BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION IS INDEFINITE DRIFTING HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK AS IT PROGRESSED LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN AND THE CONTAGIOUS SERENITY OF CONFIDENCE THAT RIGHT WILL PREVAIL THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED BY The Author
Pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirit that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object.
To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date.
This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.
The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for the last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously, and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary to the end.