If to the three provinces above named you add the province of Samar, later of dark and bloody fame, you have a fourth province as to which not only had there been no "civil" government organized on paper, but no claim yet made by any one that we had ever conquered it. We had been so busy in Luzon and elsewhere that we had not yet had time to bother very much with Samar. The area of Samar is 5276 square miles, and its population 266,237. (See the census tables already cited.) In their report dated October 15, 1901, [377] you find the Commission admitting that "the insurrection still continues in Batangas, Samar, Cebu" and "parts of" Laguna and Tayabas provinces. Now the euphemistic limitation implied in the words "parts of" is quite negligible, for any serious purpose, since our troops kept the insurgents rather constantly on the move, and the population in all the "parts of" any province that was still holding out backed up the combatants morally and materially, with information as to our movements, supplies, etc., whenever the insurgent detachments, in the course of their peregrinations, happened to pass through those "parts." So, to make a recapitulation presenting the political situation admitted by the Commission to exist a little over three months after the inauguration of civil government, we have the insurrection still in progress as follows:
Batangas 1,201 257,715 Cebu 1,939 653,727 Bohol 1,511 269,223 Laguna 629 148,606 Tayabas 5,993 153,065 Samar 5,276 266,237 ------ --------- Total 16,549 1,748,573
According to his own official statements, it thus appears that on October 15th, after Governor Taft set up his "civil" government on the Fourth of July, throughout one-fifth of the territory and among one-fourth of the population insurrection was rampant. The total area of the archipelago, if Mohammedan Mindanao be excepted (for the reason that the Moros never had anything to do with the Filipinos and their insurrection against us), is about 80,000 square miles, having a total population of 7,000,000. So that, to restate the case, one-fifth of the house was still on fire, and one-fourth of the inmates were trying their best to keep the fire from being put out.