the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the United States, is whether
Manila shall become an American city, with all the broad and sweeping
significance attaching thereto. Manila was not dressed for company
when I saw her, for she had just emerged from a siege in which
the people had suffered much inconvenience and privation. The water
supply was cut off, and the streets were not cleaned. The hotels were
disorganized and the restaurants in confusion. The trees that once cast
a grateful shade along the boulevards, that extended into the country,
rudely denuded of their boughs, had the appearance of the skeletons
of strange monsters. The insurgent army was still in the neighborhood
in a state of uneasiness, feeling wronged, deprived, as they were,
of an opportunity to get even with the Spaniards, by picking out
and slaying some of the more virulent offenders. There was an immense
monastery, where hundreds of priests were said to be sheltered, and the
insurgents desired to take them into their own hands and make examples
of them. The Spaniards about the streets were becoming complacent. They
had heard of peace, on the basis of Spain giving up every thing,
but the Philippines, and there were expectations that the troops
withdrawn from Cuba might be sent from Havana to Manila, and then,
as soon as the Americans were gone, the islanders could be brought to
submission by vastly superior forces. There were more rations issued to
Spanish than to American soldiers, until the division of the Philippine
Expedition with Major-General Otis arrived, but the Americans were
exclusively responsible for the preservation of the peace between the
implacable belligerents, and the sanitary work required could not at
once be accomplished, but presently it was visible that something was
done every day in the right direction. There was much gambling with
dice, whose rattling could be heard far and near on the sidewalks,
but this flagrant form of vice was summarily suppressed, we may say
with strict truth, at the point of the bayonet. The most representative
concentration of the ingredients of chaos was at the Hotel Oriental,
that overlooked a small park with a dry fountain and a branch of the
river flowing under a stone bridge, with a pretty stiff current,
presently to become a crowded canal. It is of three lofty stories
and an attic, a great deal of the space occupied with halls, high,
wide and long. The front entrance is broad, and a tiled floor