RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
After that General Chaffee seems not only to have been amenable to reason, but to have been imbued with a spirit of cordiality and helpfulness which was most gratifying to the long-harassed Commission. To facilitate co-operation, a private telephone was installed between the offices of Mr. Taft and the Commanding General, and it seemed to me that my husband suddenly lost some of the lines of worry which had begun to appear in his face.
The Constabulary, as everybody knows, was eventually established and perhaps no finer body of men, organised for such a purpose, exists. It took a long time to get them enlisted, equipped and properly drilled, but day-to-day they are a force which every man and woman in the Philippines, of whatever nationality, colour, creed or occupation, regards with peculiar satisfaction. They include corps enlisted from nearly every tribe in the Islands, not excepting the Moros and the Igorrotes. The Moro constabulario is distinguishable from the Christian in that he wears a jaunty red fez with his smart khaki uniform instead of the regulation cap, while the Igorrote refuses trousers and contents himself with the cap, the tight jacket, the cartridge belt and a bright "G-string." To the Ifugao Igorrote uniform is added a distinguishing spiral of brass which the natty soldier wears just below the knee. It is difficult to imagine anything more extraordinary than a "crack" company of these magnificent bare-legged Ifugaos going through dress-parade drill under the sharp commands of an American officer. The Constabulary Band of eighty-odd pieces, under the direction of Captain Loving, an American negro from the Boston Conservatory of Music, is well known in America and is generally considered one of the really great bands of the world. All its members are Filipinos.
Press clippings and some correspondence which I have before me remind me that even at this period there began to manifest itself in the Taft family, and otherwheres, a
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