RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
sent to President Roosevelt and Secretary Root a very clear outline of Philippine affairs, together with such details as could never be conveyed by cable, and the inevitable conclusion reached was that no solution of the problem was possible which did not include the settlement of the Friar controversy. The four monastic orders, the Franciscan, the Dominican, the Augustinian and the Recoleto, which held four hundred thousand acres of the best agricultural land in the Islands, had won the lasting enmity of the Filipino people and it was absolutely impossible to establish permanent peace while the Friars remained and persisted in an attempt to return to their parishes. Hundreds of them were living in practical imprisonment in the monasteries of Manila, and that they should not be allowed to return to their churches throughout the Islands, from which they had been driven, was the one stand taken by the Filipinos from which they could not by any form of persuasion be moved.
The solution of the difficulty proposed by Mr. Taft and his colleagues in the Philippine government was that the United States purchase the Friars' lands and turn them into a public domain on the condition that the orders objected to by the people be withdrawn from the Islands.
As soon as President Roosevelt recognised the importance of accomplishing these things he decided, with characteristic directness, that somebody should go at once to Rome and open negotiations with the Vatican, and after considering various men for this delicate mission he concluded that Mr. Taft was the man best fitted to undertake it.
The prospect of another novel experience was exceedingly gratifying to me and I began at once to look forward with interest to a renewal of my acquaintance with Rome and to the trip back to the East by the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean which, according to Kipling, "sits an' smiles, so sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue." So my feet no longer lagged in my preparations for a long trip with my
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