THE PROPAGANDA OF EVARISTO PANGANIBAN depredations had been perpetrated by the Igorrotes to move a reasonably prudent wayfarer, starting over the southwest trail for Nueva Viscaya to accept a strong and well armed escort if offered. This province of Nueva Viscaya is really one of the most remote things I know of. It is as far thither from Manila by mail as Manila is from San Francisco. Strategically, it had no connection with the Americans in the province adjoining it on the south. For the pass at the southwestern end of the oval valley was a tortuous and precipitous gorge or canyon, hardly possible to get through in the wet season, and almost inaccessible for supply trains. Hence, for help in the event of trouble, the governor of Nueva Viscaya looked always to the northeastern pass, which led over the CorkScrew Mountain into the great rich and well garrisoned valley of the Rio Grande de Cagayan. The military centre for that part of the Cagayan valley was the town of Ilagan, capital of the province in which Aguinaldo's capture occurred, and to this Ilagan it was a far cry over the hills from the capital of the mountain-locked province. In fact it was ninety long and weary miles, along which the Igorrotes — the socalled " unfaithfuls " — continually lay in wait for the so-called faithful, attacking them if weak, or unwary. Besides, the only garrison in Nueva Viscaya consisted of native troops, lately organized, armed and equipped as an infantry company of rural police. These troops, the constabulary, being natives of the province, except the officers, had of course been recruited from people who had but recently served in th^ insur gent army. So that when, during the last days of April, of the year 1902, telegrams from Bayombong began coming into Ilagan, indicating that the constabulary officer over there was having very considerable friction with the civilized people of the lowlands, that bad blood was beginning to be stirred, and that a general uprising was
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a culmination momentarily likely, of course it was not an inviting prospect to leave the cheerful and eminently respectable light that glistens from the bayonets of a batta lion of regular infantry, charged with the preservation of law and order, and go over a series of mountains, ninety miles, into the outer darkness of the hatchet and the bolo, where judicial decrees might have no more weight than a child's pop-gun, and where the Court itself might at any moment have to cast aside benevolent assimilation and shoulder a gun. After the dimensions of an apparent tempest have dwindled to the capacity of a tea-pot, the storm-centre is contemplated in retrospect much more imperturbably than it was contemplated in prospect. Hence these dramatic touches, by way of anticipation, to a denouement that was not only bloodless, but full of genuine humor. The cause of all the trouble was what has since been known and will long be remembered in that locality, as "The propaganda of Evaristo Panganiban." Evaristo was an agitator. For ways that were dark, and for ways out of them that were ingenious, he could discount a labor agitator from the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. He had written a letter to the Mayor of the town, full of that withering sarcasm customarily employed even in the land of the free by a man who wants an office against his rival who has it. Among others things, he had told the Mayor some thing to this effect; "I wish I were Mayor of this town. If I were Mayor, I too would have a barn built for my live-stock by the poor and humble people of the neighborhood without money and without price, I too would send casadorcs to the mountains to kill deer for my table, and pesacdorcs to the rivers to catch fish for my family's use, and otherwise get my subsisttence without expense to myself. I too would use the carabaos of my humbler neighbors to plough my rice-paddies and tobacco fields. I too would &c &c."
