* * * * *

“I certify to the truth of all the above-mentioned evils, which must be eradicated.  I retain the evidence for presentation when called on, so that if any of the readers hereof should consider themselves referred to and should resent it, I am ready to beg their pardon.”—­P.I.R., 8.2.

[346] Blount, p. 108.

[347] Senate Documents, Vol. 25, pp. 2928-2941.

[348] P.I.R., 838-2.

[349] In this connection note Blount’s statement:—­

“But we are considering how much of a government the Filipinos had in 1898, because the answer is pertinent to what sort of a government they could run if permitted now or at any time in the future.”—­Blount, p. 73.

[350] Blount refers to

“The death-warrant of the Philippine republic signed by Mr. McKinley on September 16th.”—­Blount, p. 99.

Speaking of Mr. Roosevelt’s opinion of the practicability of granting independence to the Filipinos, he says—­

“Yet it represented then one of the many current misapprehensions about the Filipinos which moved this great nation to destroy a young republic set up in a spirit of intelligent and generous emulation of our own.”—­Blount, p. 230.

[351] “Here was a man claiming to be President of a newly established republic based on the principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence, which republic had just issued a like Declaration, and he was invited to come and hear our declaration read, and declined because we would not recognize his right to assert the same truths.”—­Blount, p. 59.

[352] “The war satisfied us all that Aguinaldo would have been a small edition of Porfirio Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have-been would have been, very decidedly, ‘a going concern,’ although Aguinaldo probably would have been able to say with a degree of accuracy, as Diaz might have said in Mexico for so many years, ‘The Republic?  I am the Republic.’”—­Blount, p. 292.

[353] “The war demonstrated to the army, to a Q. E. D., that the Filipinos are ‘capable of self-government,’ unless the kind which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea for all the ills of government among men without regard to their temperament or historical antecedents.  The educated patriotic Filipinos can control the masses of the people in their several districts as completely as a captain ever controlled a company.”—­Blount, p. 292.

[354] “Even to-day the presidente of a pueblo is as absolute boss of his town as Charles F. Murphy is in Tammany Hall.  And a town or pueblo in the Philippines is more than an area covered by more or less contiguous buildings and grounds.  It is more like a township in Massachusetts, so that when you account governmentally for the pueblos of a given province, you account for every square foot of that province and for every man in it.”