Part 28 (2/2)
CHAPTER XVII
GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903 (Continued)
The Philippines for the Filipinos.
Speech of Governor Taft.
Just before Governor Taft left the Islands in 1903, he made a speech which made him immensely popular with the Filipinos and immensely unpopular with the Americans. The key-note of the speech was ”The Philippines for the Filipinos.” The Filipinos interpreted it to mean for them that ultimate independence was not so far in the dim distance of what is to happen after all the living are dead as to be a purely academic matter. And there was absolutely nothing in the speech to negative that idea, although he must have known how the great majority of the Filipinos would interpret the speech. On the other hand, the Americans in the Islands, popularity with whom was then and there a negligible factor, interpreted the speech, not inaccurately, to mean for them: ”If you white men out here, not connected with the Government, you Americans, British, Germans and Spaniards, and the rest of you, do not like the way I am running this country, why, the boats have not quit running between here and your respective homes.” [422] Then he came back to the United States and has ever since been urging American capital to go to the Philippines, all the time opposing any declaration by the law-making power of the Government which will let the American who goes out there know ”where he is at,” i.e., whether we are or are not going to keep the Islands permanently, and how to formulate his earthly plans accordingly, though the educated Filipinos are concurrently permitted to clamor against American ”exploitation,” American rule, and Americans generally, and to keep alive among the ma.s.ses of their people what they call ”the spirit of liberty,” and what the insular government calls the spirit of ”irreconcilableness.” Clearly, a policy which makes for race friction and race hatred is essentially soft-headed, not soft-hearted, and ought not to be permitted to continue. Yet it has been true for twelve years, as one of President Taft's admiring friends proudly boasted concerning him some time since:
One man virtually holds in his keeping the American conscience with the regard to the Philippines. [423]
This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should either stop the clamor, or stop the American capital and energy from going to the Islands. After an American goes out to the Islands, invests his money there, and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade, he sticks to his own people out there. Then the Taft policy steps in and bullyrags him into what he calls ”knuckling to the Filipinos,”
every time he shows any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision reversing the verdict of all racial history--which has been up to date, that wheresoever white men dwell in any considerable numbers in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white man will rule. Yet the American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has taken his family to the Islands, and all his worldly interests are there. Yet he is living under a despotism, a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the non-office-holding American does not openly oppose the government's policies, but one which, however benevolent, is, so far as regards any brooking of opposition from any one outside the government hierarchy, as absolute as any of the other despotic governments of Asia. Though the Governor of the Philippines does not wear as much gilt braid as some of his fellow potentates on the mainland of Asia, still, in all executive matters he wields a power quite as immediate and substantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his royal colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either to the American Government official in the Philippines, or to the American citizen engaged in private business there who is in entire accord with the policies of the insular government and on terms of friends.h.i.+p with the officials, that the government under which he is living is any more of a despotism than the Government of the United States. The shoe never pinches the American citizen engaged in private business until he begins, for one reason or another, to be ”at outs” with the insular government, and to have ”opinions” which--American-like--he at once wants to express. If he permits himself to get thoroughly out of accord with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious single fact in the present situation. There is no public opinion to help such a person, in any case where he differs with any specific act or policy of the insular government. The American colony is comparatively small, say between ten and twenty thousand all told, outside the army (which consists of ten or twelve thousand individuals living wholly apart from the rest of the community). The doctor who is known to have the patronage of high government officials is sure of professional success, and his wife is sure to receive the social recognition her husband's position in the community naturally commands; and this permits her to make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at precedence with her next neighbor called ”society,” so dear to the hearts of many otherwise sensible and estimable women--to say nothing of carpet knights, callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also if the doctor and his lady have adult children, their opportunities to marry well are multiplied by the sunlight from the seats of the mighty. Thus the doctor and his wife are a standing lesson to the man ”with convictions” that yearn for utterance, but who is also blessed with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the general welfare and happiness of all the family than in seeing her husband's name in the paper. What is true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer known to be persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper man in favor with the government is sure to get his share of the government advertising, according to a very liberal construction, and that insures his being able to command reportorial and editorial talent such as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mercantile community, thus placing success for him on a solid, comfortable basis. Also, a contrary course will, slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash compet.i.tor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines is deprived of one of his most precious home pleasures, viz., letting off steam, in some opposition paper, about the real or imagined shortcomings of the men in charge of the government. For the reasonable expectancy of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically brief. The hapless editor on the prosperous paper, whatever his talents, who happens to become afflicted with ”views” which he airs in his editorial columns, is soon upbraided by his friends at his club as ”getting cranky,” and is told by the orthodox old-timers among them, ”John, you've been out here too long. You better go home.” If he does not change his tone, the receipts of the advertising department of his paper soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, who ”knows how to get along with people,” is not long in agreeing with the rest of his friends that he has ”been out here too long.” Again the successful merchant has too many interests at stake in which he needs the cordial friends.h.i.+p of the government to be able to afford to antagonize it. And so on, through every walk of life, the influence of the government permeates every nook and corner of the situation.
The average public man in the United States would not feel ”nat'ral”
unless intermittently bedewed with steam from the exhaust valve of the soul of some ”outraged citizen,” through the medium of the public press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous position with the government may be very generally detested and actually not know it. [424] The American in the Philippines, with all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or speech,--even supposing any paper would publish it--which, copied by the papers back in the United States, would embarra.s.s the National Administration's Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to talking too freely for the newspapers when home on a visit.
I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with shaping the course of the government out there for which they are responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable governmental a.s.set, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.
To show how absolute was the executive and legislative power over 8,000,000 of people entrusted by the sole authority of President McKinley to Governor Taft--without consulting Congress, though afterwards the authority so conferred was ratified by Congress and descended from Governor Taft to his successor--an incident related to me in the freedom of social intercourse, and not in the least in confidence, by my late beloved friend Arthur W. Fergusson, long Executive Secretary to Governor Taft, will suffice. In 1901 the Commission had pa.s.sed a law providing for the const.i.tution of the Philippine judiciary, [425] according to which law an American, in order to be eligible to appointment as a Judge of First Instance (the ordinary trial court, or nisi prius court, of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence) must be more than thirty years old, and must have practised law in the United States for a period of five years before appointed. In 1903 President Roosevelt wanted to make Hon. Beekman Winthrop (then under thirty years of age) now (1912), a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy, a Judge of First Instance. Governor Taft called Fergusson in and said: ”Fergy, make me out a commission for Beekman Winthrop as a Judge of First Instance.” Fergusson said: ”You can't do it, Governor. It's against the law. He's not old enough.” Winthrop was a graduate of the Harvard Law School. Governor Taft said humorously, ”I can't eh? I'll show you. Send me a stenographer.” A law was dictated [426] striking out thirty years and inserting twenty-five, and adding after the words ”must have practised law for a period of five years”
the words ”or be a graduate of a reputable law school.” Fergusson was then called in, and told to go down the hall, see the other commissioners, [427] and get them together, which he did, and the law was pa.s.sed in a few minutes. Then Fergusson was sent for, and the Governor said, handing him the new ”law”; ”Now make out that commission.” Even if Fergusson colored the incident up a bit, in the exercise of his inimitable artistic capacity to make anything interesting, his story was certainly substantially correct relatively to the absoluteness of the authority of the Governor, as will appear by reference to the two laws cited.
It is only fair to say that Winthrop made a very good judge. There used to be current in the Philippines a story that Governor Taft had said, in more or less humorous vein: ”Gentlemen, I'm somewhat of an expert on judges. What you need in a judge is”--counting with the index finger of one hand on the fingers of the other--”firstly, integrity; secondly, courage; thirdly, common sense; and fourthly, he must know a little law.” Winthrop's integrity, courage, and common sense were beyond all question. It could hardly have been otherwise. He came of a long line of st.u.r.dy and distinguished men, the first of whom had come over in the Mayflower days to the Ma.s.sachusetts coast. And, he did know a little law. But the manner of his appointment is none the less ill.u.s.trative of how much quicker, Governor Taft could make and publish a law than any of his fellow despots [428] over on the mainland of Asia, considering how slow-moving all their various grand viziers were, compared with Fergy, and his corps of stenographers.
Having now given, I hope, a more or less sympathetic insight into what absolute rulers our governors in the Philippines have been, in the very nature of the case, from the beginning, let us observe the change of tone of the government, after the reign of the first ended, and the reign of the second began.
CHAPTER XVIII
GOVERNOR WRIGHT--1904
The blame of those ye better The hate of those ye guard.
Kipling's White Man's Burden.
Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903, to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the governors.h.i.+p. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was no more hammering it into the American business men having money invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their ”little brown brother,” for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans, because, soon after he came into power, he ”let the cat out of the bag,” by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft's ”Philippines for the Filipinos” need not cause any specially billowy sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were wholly unfit for self-government--all of which, in effect, meant that Governor Taft had been merely ”Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.”
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