The first Philippine Commission did not complete its work until March, 1900.  By this time conditions had so far improved in the archipelago that President McKinley was prepared to initiate a movement looking toward the establishment of civil government there.  With this end in view he appointed the following commission of five civilians; William H. Taft of Ohio, Dean C. Worcester of Michigan, Luke E. Wright of Tennessee, Henry C. Ide of Vermont and Bernard Moses of California.  Our appointments were dated March 16, 1900.  Our instructions which were full, are given in the appendix. [457] I was the only member of the first commission to be reappointed.  Neither General Otis nor Admiral Dewey cared to serve, and indeed the professional duties of each of them rendered his appointment to the new commission difficult, if not impossible.  Mr. Schurman had at one time expressed himself as vigorously opposed to the idea of a new commission, maintaining that the best results could be obtained by the appointment of a civil governor with wide powers.  It was therefore taken for granted that he would not desire reappointment.  Colonel Denby was keenly interested in the work and would have been glad to continue it, but he was past seventy and with his good wife had then spent some fifteen years in the Far East.  He doubted whether his strength would be adequate to bear the strain of the arduous task which obviously lay before the new commission, and Mrs. Denby desired to remain in the United States where she could be near her children from whom she had been long separated, so her husband felt constrained to say that he did not wish to return to the Philippines.

I separated from him with the keenest regret.  He was an amiable, tactful man of commanding ability and unimpeachable integrity, actuated by the best of motives and loyal to the highest ideals.  He constantly sought to avoid not only evil but the appearance of evil.  I count it one of the great privileges of my life to have been associated with him.  The one thing in the book written by James H. Blount which aroused my ire was his characterization of Colonel Denby as a hypocrite.  No falser, meaner, more utterly contemptible statement was ever made, and when I read it the temptation rose hot within me to make public Blount’s personal Philippine record, but after the first heat of anger had passed I remembered what the good old Colonel would have wished me to do in such a case, and forbore.

The second Philippine commission, hereinafter referred to as “the commission,” received its instructions on April 7, 1900.

They covered a most delicate and complicated subject, namely, the gradual transfer of control from military to civil authority in a country extensive regions of which were still in open rebellion.