It was a frightful nervous strain and it took several months of tranquillity to restore confidence. If it had been a regular engagement in which the Americans had sustained a reverse it could have been accepted with some philosophy, but it was a plain massacre of a company of defenceless men by many times their number who had gotten into the town with the consent of the American authorities, and in conspiracy with the local headman and the native parish priest, on the pretext of bringing in for surrender a band of

insurrectos .

The man, Lucban, who was in command of the Samar ladrones who committed this atrocity, is now a prominent politico in Manila, and it is interesting to know that only last year, in a campaign speech, he referred with dramatic intensity to “our glorious victory of Balangiga.” He was appealing to an ignorant electorate, many of whom, as he knew, wore the scar of the awful Katipunan “blood pact,” but it is just to record that the average Filipino is not proud of the Balangiga “victory.”