cans should be charged with deaths due to malaria
or dysentery, since no systematic effort to rid Batangas of these ills
had ever previously been made, and the very thing which then prevented
the adoption of the measures subsequently so successfully put forth
to this end was the disorderly conduct of the people themselves. As a
simple matter of fact, however, there was no such dreadful mortality
from these diseases at this time. Malaria has never been especially bad
in this province, and even cholera, which swept it during the period
in question and is far more readily communicated than is dysentery,
caused only twenty-three hundred and ninety-nine known deaths.

In the end peace was established and prosperity followed in its wake.

This result was brought about in part by the efficient activity of
the armed forces of the United States and in part by the efforts of
the first and second Philippine Commissions. [432]

CHAPTER X

Mr. Bryan and Independence

In order to bring home to some of my Democratic and Anti-Imperialist
friends the unreliable character of the testimony of even the very
high officers of the so-called Philippine Republic, I here quote
certain extracts from the Insurgent records, showing the important
part played, doubtless unwittingly, by Mr. William Jennings Bryan in
Philippine politics during the war. The first of these might properly
have been considered in the chapter entitled "Was Independence
Promised?" Others are instructive in that they show the use made
of false news in bolstering up the Insurgent cause, and might with
propriety have been included in the chapter on "The Conduct of the
War." I have thought it best to keep them by themselves. Further
comment on them would seem to be superfluous.

"On May 1, 1900 (P.I.R., 516.6), I. de los Santos wrote a long
letter in Tagalog and cipher to Aguinaldo, in which he reported upon
the progress of what he would have probably called the diplomatic
campaign. If this letter is to be believed, the agents in the United
States of the junta had been able to form relations which might be
of great value to them. Santos said in part:--

"'Commissioners... Senores Kant (G. Apacible) and Raff (Sixto Lopez)
duly carried out your last instructions given at Tarlac. Senor Del Pan,
sailing by way of Japan, about the middle of October, and Senor Caney
(G. Apacible), sailing by way of Europe about the 1st of November,
met in Toronto about the middle of Februa