"A. This Congress was made up by Aguinaldo. All the members may be said to have been appointed. There were a very few members who were elected by the people, but the great majority were appointed by Aguinaldo, and naturally the decisions of the Congress had to be as Aguinaldo desired.

"Q. Did Aguinaldo have the power to remove members who did not vote to suit his wishes?

"A. Yes, sir.

"Q. Was the Congress fairly representative of the various provinces in the Philippine Archipelago, or chiefly made up of [the island of] Luzon?

"A. Luzon exclusively.

"Q. In the island of Luzon, were the various provinces represented, or mostly Tagalogs?

"A. All Tagalogs.

"Q. You say you were Vice-President of the Congress; did you ever preside?

"A. I only attended Congress twice, for the position did not suit me. I hardly stopped there. I did not like it, and I did not swear to support the Constitution.

"Q. What importance did the Congress actually have? Were its decrees put into effect, or were they overruled by Aguinaldo and his cabinet when they were not pleasing to them?

"A. Whatever Aguinaldo wished.

"Q. I wish to know whether the Congress was dominated by Aguinaldo and his cabinet or not.

"A. Completely.

"Q. Was it not true that the Congress passed a measure to the effect that the protection of the United States should be requested for the Philippines?

"A. Yes, sir.

"Q. And what was the reason that that resolution was not carried out?

"A. Because Aguinaldo disapproved of it.”

From February 4, 1899, to July 4, 1901, war continued. At the latter date it was "officially" declared at an end, and civil rule began; though there was desul

It should prowoke no surprise that the effort to frame a wise, just, and beneficent policy for our government of the Filipino people called out such differences of opinion and so much bitterness. To frame a policy under which a Republic could govern seven million brown men in the Far East was a most difficult task. It was the most momentous question which our nation had faced since the Civil War had settled the relation which individual States hold to the Union. History bears swift witness to the perils encountered when a free people begin to rule over subject populations. Should the Filipinos be held to be a "subject population?" Should our nation treat them as the Dutch treat the inhabitants of Java, and as the English treat the natives of India or the Federated Malay States? The experience of European colonization-Spanish, English, Dutch and French-was before us. The larger questions growing out of the influence of white races in the tropics. were all brought up by this demand for a consistent and successful policy for our newly-acquired island possessions in Asia. Our statesmen could not be blind to the steady invasion of the tropics by the rule of Northern and Western nations. They could not but see that, within a little more than a century, one-half of all tropical countries had come under the control of European powers. In this vast, silent, irrepressible movement

toward tropical control, what part should the United States play? The Philippines were ours by the fortunes of war. They were ours by payment of a fair purchase price to their former owner, after the arbitrament of a war for humanity had left them in our keeping. Naked imperialism or the cool calculations of commerce had furnished motive for nearly all previous European occupation of the tropics. No serious attempt had ever been made, at least none at all commensurate with the vastness of the interests at stake, to lay down those principles which should control in future relations between powerful Western nations and the primitive savagery or partially-civilized inhabitants of the tropical regions. Constructive statesmanship was needed. Never had it been more urgently needed since the birth-hour of the Republic. If our nation committed itself to a selfish. policy, we would sin against the spirit of our own free institutions, and the sin would come home to curse us. We had done but our duty in enforcing our sovereignty. Now we must show to the Filipinos, and to the nations of the earth, that our humanitarian claims were something more than empty words; for we had entered the Philippines with large claims of disinterested humanitarianism. One of the members of the first Philippine Commission says:

"I take as my starting-point the motives and objects with which we went into the Philippines. They were impressively voiced by President McKinley, and I have already told you how he set them forth to me three years ago. Our purpose was not selfish; it was humanitarian; it was not the vanity of self-aggrandizement; it was not the greed of power and dominion. No, no, not these, but altruism, caring for the happiness of others; philanthropy relieving the Filipinos of oppression and conferring on them the blessings of liberty. This was the supreme con

sideration of President McKinley. It was this that touched the vein of sentiment in the American hearts that so overwhelmingly supported him. It does not matter what judgment you may, in the cooler atmosphere of 1902 pass upon that popular sentiment of the summer of 1898. You may consider it extravagant, irrational, impractical. I thought at the time that it went too far; and I publicly pointed out that while, under the Monroe Doctrine, it might become our duty to relieve American peoples from European oppression, we had no call to go into the business of rectifying the tyrannies of Asia. But the popular heart was stirred too deeply to be stilled, and Admiral Dewey's great victory in Manila Bay had brought the Filipinos within the range of American solicitude and sympathy.

"This is the first fact in the history of our relations with the Philippines. The political emancipation of the Filipinos was the controlling object with the President and people of the United States. I am, of course, aware that other and less worthy aims appealed to individual Americans and to groups of Americans. It would be strange if it were otherwise, considering how diversified human motives are apt to be. The jingo saw in the annexation of the Philippines another avenue for spread-eagleism; to Americans in the Orient it meant an accession of American influence in Asia; to the Protestant Churchman it offered a new field for missionary enterprise; the exploiting capitalist was fascinated by the riches of Philippine forests, lands, and mines, which showed like 'the wealth of Ormus or of Ind;' and the sensational press, stiil delirious from the fever of war and surfeited with the staleness of piping peace, discerned in the Philippines material for new sensations, which promised to be as stirring as the excitant was remote, unknown, and dangerously explosive. All these influences, and others, were undoubtedly at work. Yet it was not these forces singly or in combination that carried the day; it was the humanitarian object of liberating the Filipinos from Spanish tyranny, and bestowing upon them the boon of freedom, that decided the President and the people of the United