It was not until July 4, 1902, that President Roosevelt officially declared, by his amnesty proclamation of that date that the insurrection in the Philippines was at last ended. It was by no means beaten to a frazzle, as we shall later see. But of course, knowing the impatience of a large portion of the American people with a situation about which there was a wide-spread notion that much remained undisclosed, Mr. Roosevelt would have issued such a proclamation earlier, had the facts seemed to him to so authorize. General MacArthur's relentless "never ceasing patrols, explorations," etc., continued straight on through the presidential campaign of 1900 side by side in point of time with the roseate Taft cablegrams of the same period, and long thereafter--how long will be later indicated. Says General MacArthur, in his report for 1901:
It had been suggested that some of the Filipino leaders were willing to submit the issue to the judgment of the American people, which was soon to be expressed at the polls, and to abide by the result of the presidential election of November, 1900. [335] But subsequent events demonstrated that the hope of ending the war without further effusion of blood was not well founded, and that as a matter of fact the Filipinos were organizing for further desperate resistance by means of a general banding of the people in support of the guerrillas in the field. [336]
General MacArthur then goes on to tell how, as part of this programme, the insurgent authorities,
announced a primal and inflexible principle, to the effect that every native, without any exception, residing within the limits of the archipelago, owed active allegiance to the insurgent cause. This jurisdiction was enjoined under severe penalties, which were systematically enforced.
This is what Judge Taft afterwards described as "a conspiracy of murder, a Mafia on a very large scale", [337] the characterization being made in support of his theory that "the great majority of the people" with whom we were then at war would welcome our rule if allowed to follow their real preferences, and that they were being cruelly coerced to fight for the independence of their country. General MacArthur's view, however, did not support this theory. His report deals with this branch of the subject thus: