The torments practised on them had two principal objects:  to compel them to give up money, and to discredit them with the common people.  They failed to accomplish this latter result.  There is abundant evidence that the natives of the Cagayan valley clothed and fed them when they could, and wept over the painful humiliations and the dreadful sufferings which they were powerless to prevent or relieve.

The tormentors were men from distant provinces, with no possible personal grievances against the priests whom they martyrized.  Their action was the result, not of an “ebullition of revenge for three centuries of tyranny” as stated by Blount, but of insensate greed of gold and damnable viciousness.  I believe the American people will hold that such cruelities brand those who practise them as unfit to govern their fellows, or themselves.

Lest I be accused of basing my conclusions on ex parte statements I will now return to the Insurgent record of events in the Cagayan valley.

At the outset the Spanish officers of the Tabacalera Company [290] fared comparatively well.  In a letter dated September 27, 1898, and addressed to the secretary of war of the revolutionary government, Leyba says of the taking of Tuguegarao that the only terms of the surrender were to respect life.  He therefore felt at liberty to seize all the money that the friars had hidden, “which was accomplished by applying the stick.”  He adds that they did nothing to the agents of the great Tabacalera Company, then the most powerful commercial organization in the Islands, for the significant reason that they had found that its stock was largely held by Frenchmen and feared trouble. [291]

On December 4, 1898, Leyba, concerning whose ideas as to public order we are already informed, wrote a most illuminating letter setting forth the conditions which had existed there.  He does not claim that there had been Octavian peace!

It should be borne in mind that this letter covers the very time during which Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent passed through the Cagayan valley.  It paints a vivid picture of conditions, and as the painter was the ranking Insurgent officer in the valley during this entire period, he cannot be accused of hostile prejudice.  I therefore give the letter in full’—­

“Aparri, December 4, 1898.

“Don Baldomero Aguinaldo,

“The Secretary of War: 

“Dear Sir and of My Greatest Esteem:  I take the liberty of addressing this to you in order to state that owing to the lack of discipline in the soldiers whom we have brought, since they are all volunteers and whom I am not able to reduce to rigorous subordination, for the revolution would find itself without soldiers with whom to win triumph, they committed many abuses and misdeed which, for the lack of evidence, I was not able to punish, although I knew of these abuses but had no proof, and as a lover of my country and