HE events of the month that stand THE CHARACTER OF AGUINALDO Tout with striking interest were the AFTER a long controversy, well-balanced brilliant feat of General Funston in capturing Aguinaldo, and Aguinaldo's good sense, after he had found out the real situation, in promptly taking the oath of allegiance to the United States. The military problem in the Philippine Islands is now practically solved. In fact better conditions prevail in all the old Spanish islands than have before prevailed for an indefinite time. There is less violence in the Philippines than at any period within the memory of living men; there is no violence in Cuba, and on the first of April this year, for the first time within a century perhaps, there was not a case of yellow fever in Havana. In Porto Rico, in Cuba and in the Philippines, the fruits of orderliness and a stable government are already apparent, in the whole civil, educational and industrial machinery for building up the people and developing the land. The policy of the Administration (which was indeed rather a necessary plan of action than a deliberate policy), has been vindicated; and our more or less awkward attack on these problems, which were new to us, have been quite as successful as we could have dared to hope. Much remains to be done, but so far events have justified our action. opinion in the United States has come back to the first judgment made of Aguinaldo by our officers in the Philippines-that he is an ambitious and rather ignorant man with good qualities of leadership among an untrained people. His aim was a dictatorship, and he had no well-developed conception of a government other than a rude government by force. He is a high product of Tagalog civilization, tempered by Spanish influence. A wise leader in his position would not have attacked the United States Army; but his ambition was greater than his knowledge or his wisdom. The high qualities of a man who would liberate his country for the love of freedom were hardly his. His ambition was of a far more personal and primitive kind— to rule it himself for the gratification of his own power. There is no essentially base quality in this estimate of him; for independence and free government, in the sense in which we know them, were inconceivable not only to a Tagalog leader, but to the Spaniards from whom he learned his lessons in government. It was indeed an admirable quality to prefer to be dictator over his own people rather than to surrender his supposed power to a government that he did not understand, and that he 124224 |