of the first cases he handled was the boundary dispute between Antipolo and the neighboring town of Cainta. He won the case for his hometown. He and Rafael Palma also successfully defended the newspaper El Renacimiento in a libel suit filed by some American Constabulary officials, which was also the first case that the American government lost. The paper exposed the abuses committed by the military officers against the citizens of Cavite in the concentration camp in Bacoor. In June 1902, these two young lawyers secured from Governor William Howard Taft the pardon of Isabelo de los Reyes who was accused of "conspiracy" in organizing a labor union that staged the first organized strike in the Philippines. He was made Judge of the Court of First Instance in 1906 and of the Court of Land Registration in 1908. He was also a member of the Philippine Commission from 1909 to 1913. He was also offered a position inside the Supreme Court by the U.S. President William H. Taft, which he declined. In 1904, while he was in the United States as a member of the Honorary Commission to the St. Louis Exposition he published in an American journal the independence aspiration of the Filipinos, realizing the inadvisability of the statehood plan. Sumulong was Vice-President of the Partido Nacional Progresista that was organized on January 2, 1907. The new political party aimed to achieve Philippine independence by progressive stages. He ran as its candidate for a seat in the first Philippine Assembly in the July 30 elections but lost to the Nacionalist Party candidate. He ran for and lost the position of senator for the Fourth Senatorial District in the 1916 general elections. Because of the overwhelming Nacionalista victories in the 1916 elections, the minority groups, Sumulong's Progresistas and the Partido Democrata Nacional of Teodoro Sandiko, merged in August 1917 to form the Democrata Party. In 1919, Sumulong became president of this party. Sumulong was "an effective public speaker with a high reputation for intellectual capacity and integrity" according to Claro M. Recto, Jr., but he lost his senatorial bid in 1922 because of an alleged defect in the party platform. In 1925, he was elected finally to a six-year term as senator for the Fourth Senatorial District, composed of Manila, Rizal, Laguna and Bataan. As a senator, he had his famous debate with Senate President Manuel L. Quezon on the