Chapter XIV: The Taft Commission (3)

And we were to go on pretending that the war was not there,
and that we had answered the unsettled question, when we really
had simply turned our heads aside and refused to look. And then
when the troublesome matter had been so nicely laid to sleep,
the result followed which is usual when Congressmen and Presidents
and nations are trying to make shams pass for realities." [362]

By the same high token the Philippine question will always remain "the unsettled question" until it is settled right. In other words, the American occupation of the Philippines, having been originally predicated on the idea that the Filipino people did not really want independence, a fiction which political expediency incident to government by parties inexorably compelled it to try to live up to thereafter, took the form, in 1901, of a civil government founded upon a benevolent lie, which expressed a hope, not a fact, a hopeless hope that can never be a fact. And that is what has been the matter with it ever since.

The papers 'id it 'andsome,
But you bet the army knows.