RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
years of war, and especially in a country where the natives take naturally to ladronism. The Municipal police as now organised are not able to meet all the requirements in this regard."
"There you are," said General Chaffee, "you give your whole case away."
"I have no case to give away," replied General Wright. "We are trying to put our provincial governments on a basis where they will require nothing but the moral force of the military arm, and actually to preserve law and order through the civil arm. The people desire peace, but they also desire protection and we intend through the civil government to give it to them."
The Commissioner then suggested the names of some Army officers whose peculiar tact in handling Filipinos had marked them as the best available men for organising and training native soldiers, but General Chaffee was not inclined to detail them for the work, so General Wright returned to the Commission quite cast down and communicated to his colleagues the feeling that they were to have a continuance of the same difficulties with which they were required to contend under the former administration.
But a peacemaker came along in the person of General Corbin. He spent some time with General Chaffee and then came to Malacañan to visit us. He made a hurried, but quite extensive trip through the Islands and gave the whole situation pretty thorough inspection. After he left, a change was found to have come over the spirit of affairs, and it was thought that he had managed to make clear to everybody concerned that, while there was a military arm and a civil arm of the government in the Philippines, they represented a single American purpose and that that purpose had been expressed by the administration at Washington when the Commission was sent out to do the work it was then engaged upon.
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