IS THIS CHRISTIAN? by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 4, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 27.

IS THIS CHRISTIAN?

By Editor

Is It Original and True Americanism?

THE theory was that United States was to be the saviour of those whom Spain was oppressing; but it would seem from many reports from various sources that the war that United States is waging against the Filipinos is crueler than any war that Spain ever waged; and that already American soldiers have slain more than Spain has in all her rule in the Philippines.

Letters have been published from soldiers that the order is, "Take no prisoners." The natives were shot down. One company, it is said, started out with sixty native prisoners, and delivered but three, with no reprimand. Another started out with thirty odd, but came into camp with no natives, but a few chickens. Dr. Charles R. Brown, pastor First Congregational Church of this city, in a sermon on Palm Sunday (we quote from the printed copy), gives the following extract from a letter from a California lieutenant to a friend in Oakland:—

"I have seen a real war with all its horrors. I have seen two hundred acres of houses burned. I have put the match myself to houses while old women knelt at my feet sobbing and begging me to spare their shack of palm leaves. I have ordered the destruction of acres of vegetables and fruit trees, which meant months of labor and the only means of living to the poor fellow who was on his knees to me."

Dr. Brown says:—

"We read, also, that this people, who, in their desperation have fought for liberty for a hundred years against Spanish domination, are still struggling for the privileges of self-government in a way that touches our American hearts. The very women among the Filipinos have been enlisting; and when their troops were driven back from the trenches, among the bodies of the dead our men found the bodies of women clothed in men's garments and with hair cropped close. They, too, had shouldered their muskets that they might stand beside their husbands and brothers in their pathetic contest for the privilege of governing the soil where they lived. It may be that these ignorant people are misguided and that their estimate of our final purpose is not correct, but the desperation of their struggle against the idea of taxation without representation must touch the hearts of all those who have not forgotten our own war of revolution. Do we want to compel this unwilling people to accept our rule? Do we want to kill, burn, and devastate in order to defeat them in their desperate attempt to gain their freedom from any foreign domination?"

"We are told that Spain oppressed these people; but even cruel, ignorant, incompetent Spain has never burned a mile square of their homes in a single day. The death of thirty thousand of our men, on the principle that one American soldier is equal to five savage Filipinos, would mean the death of one hundred and fifty thousand of these uncivilized natives. If we should write that bloody record within the next two years it would eclipse the annals of any cruelty that can be charged for a similar period against Spain!"

Further on, this brave preacher says:—

"It is no excuse for our slaughter of the Filipinos for us to plead their alleged incompetency to manage their own affairs. In 1861 a certain great nation had a deadly dispute with itself. The North and the South were arguing out with the awful weapons of war that political principle which we call 'States' rights.' The lives of almost a million men were sacrificed and thirty-seven hundred millions of dollars were expended in determining which view of that principle should obtain. We would not have thanked any nation on earth to have said to us in those days: 'These American people are not capable of self-government. They are killing each other; their country is torn by rebellion; therefore, we must come in by our superior force, set up our government, and manage their affairs for them.' Let the Filipinos learn to govern themselves precisely as we learned to govern ourselves, and let us not soil our hands by killing them because they claim in desperation this solemn privilege. I remember it is urged that their leader, Aguinaldo, has once been bribed. Perhaps he was, and, if so, it was a grievous fault and grievously has Aguinaldo answered it. But here, at home, we do not kill men nor burn their towns because they have been bribed. If such were our settled policy, what awful conflagrations and what dreadful slaughter might have marked some of our State capitals."

"We announced at the beginning that this was a war for humanity and not for conquest; it was to deliver men from oppression but not to shoot them down or to compel them against their wills to submit to our rule. To me there is something more splendid than any conquest that we might win, and that is for a nation to keep its word."

When we read these letters of the cruelties practised by Americans upon the Filipinos, fighting for their independence, we recall the earnest, thrilling, glorious words of that true American, James Russell Lowell, words as applicable now as when written:—

Look on who will in apathy, and stifle they who can The sympathies, the hopes, the words, that make man truly man; Let those whose hearts are dungeoned up with interest or with ease Consent to hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds like these! Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stone To those who won our liberty, the heroes dead and gone, While we look coldly on, and see law-shielded ruffians slay The men who fain would win their own, the heroes of to-day! Are we pledged to craven silence? O, fling it to the wind, The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind— That makes us cringe and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest, While Pity's burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast! Tho we break our fathers' promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God! We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, man— To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core;— Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men. He's true to God who's true to man; wherever wrong is done To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the all-beholding sun That wrong is also done to us; and they are slaves most base Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.