Paua was later made a general in consideration of his valuable services!

Pampanga

Our travellers next visited Pampanga.  Here they apparently overlooked the fact that Aguinaldo did not have “his whole people a unit at his back.”  The citizens of Macabebe seem not to have approved of the Aguinaldo regime, for the Insurgent records show that:—­

“Representatives of the towns of Pampanga assembled in San Fernando on June 26, 1898, and under the presidency of General Maximino Hizon agreed to yield him complete ’obedience as military governor of the province and representative of the illustrious dictator of these Philippine Islands.’  The town of Macabebe refused to send any delegates to this gathering.” [248]

It may be incidentally mentioned that Blount has passed somewhat lightly over the fact that he himself during his army days commanded an aggregation of sturdy citizens from this town, known as Macabebe scouts, who diligently shot the Insurgents full of holes whenever they got a chance.  He incorrectly refers to them as a “tribe or clan.” [249] It is absurd to call them a tribe.  They are merely the inhabitants of a town which has long been at odds with the neighbouring towns of the province.

Things had come to a bad pass in Pampanga when its head wrote that the punishment of beating people in the plaza and tying them up so that they would be exposed to the full rays of the sun should be stopped.  He argued that such methods would not lead the people of other nations to believe that the reign of liberty, equality and fraternity had begun in the Philippines. [250]

When it is remembered that persons tied up and exposed to the full rays of the sun in the Philippine lowlands soon die, in a most uncomfortable manner, we shall agree with the head of this province that this custom has its objectionable features!

Tarlac

While the failure of Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent to learn of the relations between the Tagalogs of Macabebe and their neighbours, or of the fact that people were being publicly tortured in Pampanga, is perhaps not to be wondered at under the circumstances, it is hard to see how they could have failed to hear something of the seriously disturbed conditions in Tarlac if they so much as got off the train there.

On August 24 the commissioner in charge of elections in that province asked for troops to protect him, in holding them in the town of Urdaneta, against a party of two thousand men of the place, who were going to prevent them.

On September 22 the secretary of the interior ordered that the requirements of the decree of June 18, establishing municipal governments, should be strictly complied with, as in many of the towns “the inhabitants continue to follow the ancient methods by which the friars exploited us at their pleasure and which showed their great contempt for the law.” [251]

The following letter to Aguinaldo, from Juan Nepomuceno, Representative from Tarlac, speaks for itself as to conditions in that province on December 27, 1898, shortly after the American travellers passed through it on their return:—­