that a very much larger force would be necessary. The Imperialist Administration press changed its festive toot in the twinkling of an eye and began to send out headlines in this key: "More Troops. Need of Additional Men in the Philippines." "Crush Them. Something Must Be Done to the Filipinos. [!] A Provisional Army Will Be Raised if Necessary. Volunteers not to Be Enlisted Except as a Last Resort. Regular Army May Suffice. Thirty Thousand Men Needed to Subdue the Rebels. That Number Will Be Given Gen. Otis if He Wants Them. Forty Thousand Men Available if Deemed Necessary."

What does this mean? We thought the amiable ‘traitors' were 'busted' last March, and now it is June and the work isn't begun. Is Otis a McClellan? Didn't he want, or wasn't he able, to crush the skinny followers of that 'self-seeking' Aguinaldo who was only carrying on the war that he might live in other people's good houses? Hadn't we better send another general to draw Otis's salary-Eagan, Corbin, or even the infinitessimal Alger himself? But perhaps McKinley is the dallying McClellan. How if he only sought to drag the contest painfully along to work the American people up by slow stages to a spirit of revenge against the Filipinos for loving their freedom so well, and being so brave, and standing so intrepidly in front of his beneficently assimilating thuds of extermination, and worrying the sublime Sultan of America in his imperial stagger across the world. It has a very strong flavor of fretting Americans up to the military imperialist pitch by irritation. Whether the war is righteous or nefariously hellish, if it can dawdle and drag on, killing our men and decimating our regiments, the people will at last blurt out Crush them! Crush them!-Crucify them, crucify them!

If this was the game, it has worked. The censored dispatches from McClellan Otis were first allowed to moderate their twaddle as follows:

Dispatches from Manila stating that more troops are needed and that the American army is suffering embarrassment and unnecessary losses on account of the lack of a sufficient force to occupy the territory from which the insurgents are driven, attract much attention here. It is assumed that the facts are as stated, and moreover that Gen. Otis has his reason for wanting them to become known. Dispatches from Manila are censored, and if Gen. Otis had disapproved of this representation of the situation, as respects his forces, it could not have been transmitted. The same is true of dispatches concerning dissatisfaction in military circles at Manila with the course of the civilian members of the peace commission.*

This is solid extract of beef reading, neither canned nor chemicaled, for free republican gastritists, self-rulers supposed to suppose that they know about their own affairs and control them. Censored dispatches, Otis sitting in his other people's fine houses in Manila distilling from his squatty imagination what he thinks (under general mandate from his Sultan) the American bulk had better believe about 'their' campaign of mercy on his beat

The next act of these thrilling private theatricals passes in Washington. Alger, Corbin and Smith (that chicken Emory of mail-suppression immortality, our postmastergeneral) held a cabinet meeting and McKinley was there to transmit the orders of Alger and Corbin to the country. The country was informed by telegraph of this pompy conference:

The situation in the Philippines was reviewed thoroughly, and the subject was discussed from every standpoint. It was agreed that something should be done to crush the rebellion speedily, and, if that could be accomplished in no other way than by raising a provisional army, this expedient would be resorted to.

Then came the crash and din from the Chorus for which all this stage scenery had been prepared, reverberating the edict, Crush them, Crucify them. We select the word of God's particular men, the clergy, because if God said this the Filipinos must surely die. He chose Kain (or Cain) for his messenger this time, by earthly title archbishop, who smote the rock of St. Louis with these thunders, and tears of patriotism and hate for Canaanites and Jebusites and Amalekites who own the land that we want flowed out:

9

*Special in daily paper, from Washington, May 28, 1899.

'The United States should at once proceed to deal with the Philippine question with a firm hand. I was not in favor of the war, but since we have raised our flag over the Philippine Islands, we should make the authority of the United States supreme there, even if it becomes necessary to send 200,000 troops there to do it. All Christian nations look to us to accomplish that end. We cannot go backward. We must not shirk the task we have undertaken. It is impossible that we should abandon the islands now that we have taken hold of them. From the view point of national honor, I say that the administration should take hold of this question now with a firm hand, and not desist until the rebellion is put down. If we were to relinquish the Philippines to their fate, England, Germany, Russia, or some other nation would step in the very next day and assert their right to restore order there, and to protect human life and property.'*

4. Worrying Destiny into the American People.

The administration has again gained its point. The worry of the long drawnout war of which Americans are sick and ashamed has made them passive to further 'destiny,' delivered through Mack; although opposed to the president's spit-in-the-Filipino-face policy in the beginning, they are now frictioned up to imagining that this huge Republic's honor can only be saved by putting the copper heel of might and light on the valiant natives and mashing light out of them; the illogical, ignorant, arrant gabble of archbishop Cain 'goes down.' All Christian nations look to us for a power of killing, now that we realize our Christian mission in the world; we do not deny that part of Cain's heavenly message. Ever since the emperor Constantine used Christianity as a ladder to power Christian nations have been at it in that sense, conquering

*This divine proclamation was delivered on June 6, 1899.

and confiscating weaker nations' lands in the name variously of God, Christianity, law-and order, the sacredness of human life and property!-sacred to the conquering Saracen Christians after they had possessed themselves of the property and slain the possessors. "It was the strength which Christianity had won in Gaul that made Constantine declare himself Christian: no sooner had he done so, than he found himself, like Henry IV of France long after, able to march straight to supreme power. The Gauls flocked to him, eager to fight under the Labarum [a lance with cross-bar, like the cross, with rich purple cloth, gold threads and precious stones on it in emblem of Imperial poverty and humility]; and in A. D. 312 Constantine and Christianity entered Rome in triumph. And ever since, Christianity has been the religion of ‘civilized' war, so that, doubtless, from the Christian viewpoint of national honor we must comfort the Filipinos to ashes. But from the more humble and less Godlike and bloody view-point of common intuition may we not be spared the introduction of ecclesiastical modes of reasoning into mere human things? If we must send 200,000 of our good youths to christianize the Filipinos with Mausers, let us not sear our consciences by pretending there is no other way. If we would stop fighting and inform our 'subjects' that they shall be independent and organize their own government, that we will assist them by keeping other nations out, they would welcome us. But that is not the Christian method, which requires unconditional submission to the nation which happens through the size of its armies to contain God at that time, because, as theology teaches, the will of God is supreme and he alone knows what is good for others.

I would recommend the Christian clergy who think there is no honorable door out of the Philippines but the cellar one of conquest to read an eighteenth century

*Kitchin's History of France, vol. i, p. 51.

treatise on Ecclesiastical Logic called Section the Second of a Tale of a Tub. Therein it is recounted how a father dying left each of his sons (the Churches) a new coat (the Christian religion) and in his will (the Bible) ordered them under great penalties not to altar a thread of these coats. But wearing shoulder-knots and gold lace came into fashion and the brothers wanted to be in the style, so they set to studying the will by the method of 'interpretation' to find in it permission to wear gold lace, although there was not a word in the document about it; and they were soon rewarded by the following discovery of one of them: "For, brothers, [said he] if you remember, we heard a fellow say when we were boys that he heard my father's man say that he would advise his sons to get gold lace on their coats as soon as ever they could procure money to buy it. By G-! that is very true, cries the other; I remember it perfectly well, said the third. And so without more ado they got the largest gold lace in the parish and walked about as fine as lords." It must be a mind filled with interpretation that can say that having made a blunder the way to rectify it is to go on to the end with it; if it was folly to begin the war when the drooling McKinley assured us that a few thousand soldiers would quiet the trouble in a few days, why is it not accumulated folly to go on with it now that we know McKinley maliciously falsified and the task is enormous? A mind with oral traditions may know, but mere plain thinking cannot see through this. Nor can it see what dishonor there is in confessing a mistake and a wrong, and in correcting rather than deepening them. Nor yet can it see why England, Russia or Germany, would rush in if we specified that the national integrity of the Philippines was under our care. Probably some fellow heard the hired man of Constantine or McKinley's ape ancestor, say these things, and told it to our clergymen when they were boys.