Copyright, 1912
By
James H. Blount

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To
JOHN DOWNEY WORKS
OF CALIFORNIA
AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN
AS EVER
GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
WHO
BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT
INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION
IS
INDEFINITE DRIFTING
HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK
AS IT PROGRESSED
LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF
AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN
AND
THE CONTAGIOUS SERENITY OF
CONFIDENCE THAT RIGHT WILL PREVAIL
THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED BY
The Author

To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date.

This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.

The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for the last