RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
dently was impressed. We made it a rule from the beginning that neither politics nor race should influence our hospitality in any way, and we came thus to have a very wide and diverse acquaintance. The editorial in El Progreso gives such a curious picture of attitude and conditions in general, as well as of my husband, my family and my home, that I think I must quote it,—at least in part. It is headed simply:
Señor Taft
The most uncompromising jingoes; the rabid partisans of militarism, as well as the men of democratic sentiments who consider the occupation of the Philippines as an odious Cæsarism, respect and venerate the President of the Civil Commission, whose surname serves as the caption of these lines. Uprightness and bon-hommie always demand recognition.
Before the Hancock, bearing this statesman, had anchored in Manila Bay, the echo of his reputation and the radiations of the brilliant aureole which his success in the judiciary of his country had imposed upon him—and we underline the word imposed because the characteristic trait of Mr. Taft is his modesty—had reached the Philippines. The Filipinos awaited him with the same pleasing curiosity with which a child opens a toy with a concealed surprise, and the foreigners as the incarnation of those American patriarchal, democratic ideas with which Castelar portrayed to his followers the country of Lincoln.
Behind that spacious brow of the thinker, between his liberal tendencies and the incomparable exactions of the enormous burdens which his country undertook in Paris, fierce struggles are waging. The President of the American Civil Commission has broad shoulders, but the weight of a people whom patriotism endows with the strength of a colossus is very great.
We must concede to all the leading authorities whom America has sent to the Philippines the trait of being industrious. We know that General Otis worked more than twelve hours a day; MacArthur, that Daban of the American Army through the rapidity of his advancement, follows the same course as his predecessor, and Mr. Taft leaves his house every morning at eight and, as unostentatiously as a clerk, proceeds to become a part of his chair in the Ayuntamiento. There his first occupation is glancing over114
