Aguinaldo had approved the constitution; he had informed the foreign consuls and General Otis that it had been promulgated and become the law of the land.  It was not promulgated.  It had not become the law of the land.  It served one important purpose.  It passed into the hands of the Americans and showed them the ability and the aspirations of certain individuals of the archipelago, but Mabini and his followers did not believe in its form or in its provisions, and Mabini at least was emphatic in his declarations that the time had not yet come for it to be put into effect.  On January 24, 1899, he wrote to Aguinaldo that if it should be promulgated it would be absolutely necessary to give the president the veto power, and replace the elected representatives by others appointed by the government.  If this were not done the president would be at the mercy of congress, and the people, seeing that disagreement between the executive government and the congress was the cause of its misfortunes, would start another revolutionary movement to destroy both of them. [394]

As long as Mabini remained in power the constitution was mere paper.  Its adoption was not indicative of the capacity of the people to maintain self-government.  It expressed only the academic aspirations of the men who drafted it.  There is not the slightest evidence from any previous or subsequent experience of the people that it would have worked in practice.  It was enacted for the misleading of Americans rather than for the benefit of the Filipinos.

While the government of Aguinaldo was called a republic, it was in fact a Tagalog military oligarchy in which the great mass of the people had no share.  Their duty was only to give soldiers for the army and labourers for the fields, and to obey without question the orders they received from the military heads of their provinces.

There is no cause for vain regrets.  We did not destroy a republic in the Philippines.  There never was anything there to destroy which even remotely resembled a republic.

CHAPTER IX

The Conduct of the War

It is not my intention to attempt to write a history of the war which began on February 4, 1899, nor to discuss any one of its several campaigns.  I propose to limit myself to a statement of the conditions under which it was conducted, and a description of the two periods into which it may be divided.

From the outset the Insurgent soldiers were treated with marked severity by their leaders.  On June 17, 1898, Aguinaldo issued an order to the military chiefs of certain towns in Cavite providing that a soldier wasting ammunition should be punished with twelve lashes for a first offence, twenty-four for a second, and court-martialled and “severely punished” for a third. [395]

On November 16, 1900, General Lacuna ordered that any officer allowing his soldiers to load their rifles when not before the enemy should be liable to capital punishment, [396] which in practice was frequently inflicted on soldiers for very minor offences.