LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE PHILIPPINES It run thus : "In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the out-lying bar rios l are rendered wholly insecure by con tinued predator}' raids, and such outlying barrios thus furnish to the ladrones or out laws their sources of food supply, and it is not possible with the available police forces con stantly to provide protection to such barrios, it shall be within the power of the Civil Governor, upon resolution of the Philippine Commission, to authorize the provincial governor to order that the residents of such outlying barrios be temporarily brought within stated proximity to the poblacion 2 or larger barrios of the municipality, there to remain until necessity for such order ceases to exist, etc., etc." Acts United States Philippine, Number 781, Section 6, enacted June i, 1903. Section 5 of the Act of Congress approved July i, 1902, known as the Philippine Gov ernment Act, provides: "That no law shall be enacted which shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law," and further on it also pro vides for suspension of the writ of habeas cor pus "when in cases of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion, the public safety may require it." The effect of the reconcentration law above set forth, and the practice under it, has been to deprive people, by reconcentra tion, of their liberty or property, or both, without due process of law. What reader of this magazine, if he were a nisi priits judge in the Philippines, and one of these reconcentrados brought in his court a petition for habeas corpus, would hesitate in the least to 1 A barrio is a fractional part, or subdivision of a township. 1 The poblacion is the center of population of the township — the town proper.
27
grant the writ, and incidentally declare this reconcentration law null and void as being in conflict with the Act of Congress? This matter of not suspending the writ of habeas corpus and declaring martial law, while herding or reconcentrating innocent people together in great masses, is no mere technicality. It means that you have got to feed them through inexperienced agents, with supplies purchased and transported in a more or less crude and defective manner. The whole situation is handled by civilians, not by officers of the United States Army trained to quartermaster and commissary work, like those who so superbly handled the situation just after the San Francisco earth quake of 1906. Even in the absence of affirmative evidence, one may safely assume that if you crowd together in a limited area some thousands of ignorant peasants, with their women —-still more ignorant, and more helpless —• and their little children born, and to be born, and their old people tottering at the verge of the latter end, some of them are going to die of starvation during the period of reconcentration if their rations are to be conveyed to them by crude and imperfect means of transporta tion and distributed by inexperienced hands. If we ever have reconcentration again in the Philippines in the future — as we have had in the past — a decent respect for the opin ions of mankind requires that our style of reconcentration shall bear no resemblance to that practised by Weyler in Cuba, for which we drove the Spaniards from the Western Hemisphere. When we find it necessary, let us look matters squarely in the face, and turn the situation over to the army — applying the knife to all abscesses form ing in the body politic, so long as we con tinue to be the doctor in charge of the case. MACON, GA., December, 1907.
