never odd or even

Yet, with “his coils drawn tightly about it,” from mid-June to mid-July, Aguinaldo refrained from the final squeeze that might have given him the nation’s capital city, before the Americans could land a single soldier on Philippine soil. His position would then have been impregnable; he would have been talking to Commodore Dewey and to Generals Anderson, Merritt, and Greene from the eminence of a fait accompli. The Manifest Destiny would have been his, not theirs. Victory for the Revolution was his for the daring—but he hesitated. And lost.

Why, why, why did he delay?

That suspense from mid-June to mid-July 1898 was the crucial moment in our history. It could have united us all behind Aguinaldo; yes, even those of us who were already talking of American annexation would have been stunned to silence by the prodigy of an Aguinaldo speaking from the Ayuntamiento de Manila, an Aguinaldo enthroned in Malacañang. A single act of Aguinaldo could have startled us into a nation, as that action of Dewey on Manila Bay had electrified his country into a world power. For that moment of our history, Aguinaldo was our history.

Is this our tragedy then: that at the climactic moment of our national life our destiny was in the hands of a small man with little imagination?