At the outset Archbishop Nozaleda made a great impression upon him.  The Archbishop was a thoroughgoing Spaniard of the old school, and entertained somewhat radical opinions as to what should be done to end the distressing situation which existed.  After talking with him Mr. Schurman seemed to be convinced that we ought to adopt a stern and bloody policy, a conclusion to which Colonel Denby and I decidedly objected.

A little later he made a trip up the Pasig River with Admiral Dewey and others and had a chance to see something of the aftermath of war.  It was not at all pretty.  It never is.  I was waiting for him with a carriage at the river landing on his return and had hard work to keep him away from the cable office.  His feelings had undergone a complete revulsion.  He insisted that if the American people knew what we were doing they would demand that the war be terminated immediately at any cost and by whatsoever means, and he wanted to tell them all about it at once.  By the next morning, however, things fortunately looked rather differently to him.

Mr. Schurman acquired a working knowledge of the Spanish language with extraordinary promptness.  Shortly thereafter Colonel Denby and I discovered that when Filipinos came to see the commission in order to impart information or to seek it, he was conferring with them privately and sending them away without our seeing them at all.

Soon after we had made our formal statement of the situation to the President, Mr. Schurman had an interview with an Englishman who had been living in Insurgent territory north of Manila, from which he had just been ejected, in accordance with Luna’s order.  This man told him all about the mistakes of the Americans and evidently greatly impressed him, for shortly thereafter he read to us at a commission meeting a draft of a proposed cablegram which he said he hoped we would approve.  It would have stultified us, had we signed it, as it involved in effect the abandonment of the position we had so recently taken and a radical change in the policy we had recommended.  Mr. Schurman told us that if we did not care to sign it, he would send it as an expression of his personal opinion.  Colonel Denby asked him if his personal opinion differed from his official opinion, and received an affirmative reply.  We declined to approve the proposed cablegram, whereupon he informed us that if his policy were adopted, he and General Aguinaldo would settle things without assistance from us, and that otherwise he would resign.  He inquired whether we, too, would send a cable, and we told him certainly not, unless further information from us was requested.  He sent his proposed message, in somewhat modified form, and received a prompt reply instructing him to submit it to the full commission and cable their views.

He did submit it to Colonel Denby and myself at a regularly called commission meeting, argued that in doing this he had obeyed the President’s instructions, and vowed that he would not show it to General Otis.  I showed it to the General myself, allowing him to believe that I did so with Mr. Schurman’s approval, and thus avoided serious trouble, as he had been personally advised from Washington of the instructions to Mr. Schurman.  The General then joined with Colonel Denby and myself in a cablegram setting forth our views, and so this incident ended.