At the time the resolutions were presented in the Senate their soldiers were straining at the leash, ready to attack their American opponents upon the most slender excuse.

Aguinaldo himself could not have held them much longer, and it is not impossible that they got away from him as it was.

They would have interpreted the passage of the Bacon resolutions as a further evidence of weakness, and hastened their attack.

As we have seen, "war, war, war" was what they wanted.
Blount has endeavoured to shift the responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities to the United States by claiming that certain words italicized by him in what he calls the "Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation" were necessarily, to the Insurgents, "fighting words." The expressions referred to have to do with the establishment of United States sovereignty and the exercise of governmental control in the Philippine Islands.
These words were not "fighting words," the Insurgent policy being, as I have shown by the records, to consider the acceptance of a protectorate or of annexation in the event that it did not prove possible to negotiate absolute independence, or probable that the American troops could be driven from the islands.
The growing confidence of the Insurgents in their ability to whip the cowardly Americans, rather than any fixed determination on their part to push a struggle for independence to the bitter end, led to their attack..