The Blow from Behind; Or, Some Features of the Anti-Imperialist Movement Attending the War with Spain, Together with a Consideration of Our Philippine Policy from Its Inception to the Present Time and the International and Domestic Law Affecting the Same (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DEWEY AND AGUINALDO DANGER FROM AGUINALDO, AND CHARACTER OF HIS FORCES Soon an additional trouble broke around Dewey's head. This one must have given him more worry than all the rest combined; for there was no way to control it. He was dependent upon luck to escape misfortune from it. Nothing that he could do would direct it or govern it in an appreciable degree; and yet it could snatch away in an instant everything he had gained, and give the hostile powers the very opening for which they were, for all the world like so many cats at a rat-hole, so eagerly watching. All they wanted was an excuse to jump in and seize the rat for themselves. The insurgents, Aguinaldo and his army, were closing in on Manila. They gradually drove in the Spaniards and were likely to take the city. They were treacherous, bloodthirsty andignorant of the laws of war. Dewey was like a man in a powder magazine with 30,000 savages surrounding him, juggling lighted matches in their hands. Any instant they might commit some outrage that would have given the foreign war-vessels in the harbor a decent excuse to intervene. That was what they were there for; to use force if they could find any justification for it. Their hostile attitude shows that plainly enough. They had a perfect right to turn their guns on to the city any moment their consuls or their other citizens were endangered. -Must as we had done at Greytown in 1853, so France or Germany or China or Japan could have done to Manila,?bombarded it the moment it became evident that the insurgents would capture the city, if such a time were to come, as it was evidently recognized by all the nations whose ships were there that massacre and sack would follow a capture of Manila by Aguinaldo; that was what those ships of war of all natio...