Part 36 (1/2)
When he visited the Philippines to open their a.s.sembly in 1907, Mr. Taft had said nothing definite and final on the question of promising independence since his departure from the Islands in 1903. His then benevolent unwillingness to tell them frankly he did not think they had sense enough to run a government of their own, and that they were unfit for self-government, has already been reviewed. For two years after 1903 Governor Wright had made them pine for the return of Mr. Taft. They longed to hear again some of the siren notes of the celebrated speech ”the Philippines for the Filipinos.” They had gotten very excited and very happy over that speech. Of course they would not have gotten very excited over independence supposed to be coming long after they should be dead and buried. During the two dark frank years of Governor Wright's regime, they had frequently been told that they were not fit for independence. So that when Secretary of War Taft had visited the Islands in 1905 they all had been on the qui vive for more statements vaguely implying an independence they might hope to live to see. During the visit of 1905 the time of the visiting Congressional party was consumed princ.i.p.ally with tariff hearings, and comparatively little was said on the subject uppermost in the minds of all Filipinos. It is true that Mr. Taft said then he was of the opinion that it would take a generation or longer to get the country ready for self-government, but he said it in a tactful, kindly way, and did not forever crush their hopes. So when he went out to the Islands to open the a.s.sembly in 1907, the att.i.tude of the whole people in expectation of some definite utterances on the question of a definite promise of independence at some future time, was just the att.i.tude of an audience in a theatre as to which one affirms ”you could hear a pin fall.” In this regard Mr. Taft's utterances were as follows [488]:
I am aware that in view of the issues discussed at the election of this a.s.sembly I am expected to say something regarding the policy of the United States toward these islands. I cannot speak with the authority of one who may control that policy. The Philippine Islands are territory belonging to the United States, and by the Const.i.tution, the branch of that government vested with the power and charged with the duty of making rules and regulations for their government is Congress. The policy to be pursued with respect to them is therefore ultimately for Congress to determine. * * *
I have no authority to speak for Congress in respect to the ultimate disposition of the Islands.
After that there was some talk about ”mutually beneficial trade relations” and ”improvement of the people both industrially and in self-governing capacity.” But with regard to the ”process of political preparation of the Filipino people” for self-government the Secretary said that was a question no one could certainly answer; and so far as he was concerned he thought it would take ”considerable longer than a generation.” Somewhere in the early Philippine State papers there is a quotation used by Mr. Taft from Shakespeare about ”Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.” The Filipinos have eagerly read for the last twelve years every utterance of Mr. Taft's that they could get hold of. If any of those embryonic statesmen of the first Philippine a.s.sembly, familiar with the various Taft utterances, had looked up the context of the Shakespearian quotation above alluded to, he would have found it to be as follows:
And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd, That palter with us in a double sense: That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope. [489]
Since the announcement by Secretary of War Taft at the opening of the Philippine a.s.sembly in October, 1907, of the policy of indefinite retention of the Islands with undeclared intention, the Filipinos have of course clearly understood that if they were ever to have independence they must look to Congress for it. But they know Congress is not interested in them and that they have no influence with it, and that the Hemp Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Sugar Trust, have. So that since 1907, both the American authorities in the Philippines and the Filipinos have settled down, the former suffused with benevolence--hardened however by paternalistic firmness, the latter stoically, to the programme of indefinite retention with undeclared intention. No conceivable programme could be devised more ingeniously calculated to engender race hatred. The Filipino newspapers call the present policy one of ”permanent administration for inferior and incapable races.” The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act, which is the ”Const.i.tution,” so to speak, we have given the Filipinos, accords ”liberty of the press” in the exact language of our own Const.i.tution. The native press does not fail to use this liberty to the limit. Naturally the American press does not remain silent. So here are a pair of bellows ever fanning the charcoals of discontent. And the ma.s.ses of the Filipino people read the Filipino papers. If they cannot read, their children can. In one of the reports of one of the American constabulary officials in the Philippines, there is an account of the influence of the native press too graphic to be otherwise than accurate. He says one can often see, in the country districts, a group of natives gathered about some village Hampden, listening to his reading the latest diatribe against the American Occupation. Never was there such folly in the annals of statesmans.h.i.+p. In their native papers, the race situation of course comes in for much comment. Now the most notorious and inflexible fact of that race situation is that the colonial Anglo-Saxon does not intermarry with ”the yellow and brown” subject people, as the Latin colonizing races do. It would be an over-statement of the case to say that the Filipinos to-day had rather have the Spaniards back as their overlords instead of us. In 1898, they ”tasted the sweets of liberty,” to use an expression of one of their leaders, and I am perfectly sure that to-day the desire of all those people for a government of their own is so genuine and universal as that it amounts to a very hopeful positive factor in the equation of their capacity for self-government. But there is no doubt that many of the Filipinos after all have a very warm place in their hearts for the Spanish people. How could it be otherwise when so many of the Filipinos are sons and grandsons of Spaniards? Much of like and dislike in life's journey is determined pre-natally. On the other hand, the American women in the Philippines maintain an att.i.tude toward the natives quite like that of their British sisters in Hong Kong toward the Chinese, and in Calcutta toward the natives there. The social status of an American woman who marries a native,--I myself have never heard of but one case--is like that of a Pacific coast girl who marries a j.a.p. This is merely the instinct of self-defence with which Nature provides the weaker s.e.x, just as she provides the porcupine with quills. But look at the other side of the picture. When an American man marries a native woman, he thereafter finds himself more in touch with his native ”in-laws”
it is true, but correspondingly, and ever increasingly, out of touch with his former a.s.sociations. This is not as it should be. But it is a most unpleasant and inexorable fact of the present situation. In an address delivered at the Quill Club in Manila on January 25, 1909, Governor Smith, after reciting the various beneficent designs contemplated by the government and the various public works consummated (at the expense of the people of the Islands) deplored, in spite of it all, what he termed ”the growing gulf between the races.” Said he:
An era of ill feeling has started between Americans and Filipinos, and, I hesitate to say it, race hatred.
Cherchez la femme! You find her, on the one hand, in the American woman whose att.i.tude has been indicated, and you find her, on the other, in the refined and virtuous native woman, who finds her American husband's relations to his compatriots altered--queered--since his marriage to her, no matter how faithful a wife and mother she may be. This is the unspeakably cruel situation we have forced upon the Filipino people--whom I really learned to respect, and became much attached to, before I left the Islands--and President Taft knows it as well as I do. Yet he does not take the American people into his confidence. He simply worries along with the situation, wis.h.i.+ng it would get better, but knowing it will get worse. That this situation is a permanent one is clearly shown by all the previous teachings of racial history. In his Winning of the West, written in 1889, speaking of the French settlers in the Ohio valley before 1776, and the cordial social relations of the dominant race with the natives--relations which have always obtained with all Latin races under like circ.u.mstances--Mr. Roosevelt says (vol. i., page 41):
They were not trammelled by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine.
Men of English stock have changed but little in the matter of race instinct since 1776. If we had a definite policy, declared by Congress, promising independence, the American att.i.tude in the Philippines toward the Filipinos would at once change, from the present impossible one, to our ordinary natural att.i.tude of courtesy toward all foreigners, regardless of their color.
On May 7, 1909, the Honorable James F. Smith took his departure from the Philippine Islands forever and turned over the duties of his office to the Honorable W. Cameron Forbes, as Acting President of the Commission and Governor-General. As in the case of Governors Wright and Ide, so in that of Governor Smith, no reason is apparent why the Was.h.i.+ngton Government should have been willing to dispense with the services of the inc.u.mbent. This was peculiarly true in the case of General Smith. He was but fifty years of age when he left the Islands in 1909. He has rendered more different kinds of distinguished public service than any American who has ever been in the Philippine Islands from the time Dewey's guns first thundered out over Manila Bay down to this good hour. Going out with the first expedition in 1898 as Colonel of the 1st California Regiment, he distinguished himself on more than one battlefield in the early fighting and in recognition thereof was made a brigadier-general. Subsequent to this he became Military Governor of the island of Negros, that one of the six princ.i.p.al Visayan Islands which gave less trouble during the insurrection and after than any other--a circ.u.mstance doubtless not wholly unrelated to General Smith's wise and tactful administration there. Later on during the military regime he became Collector of Customs of the archipelago. The revenues from customs are the princ.i.p.al source of revenue of the Philippine Government and the sums of money handled are enormous. The customs service, moreover, in most countries, and especially in the Philippines, is more subject to the creeping in of graft than any other. General Smith's administration of this post was in keeping with everything else he did in the Islands. When the civil government was founded by Judge Taft in 1901, he was appointed one of the Justices of the Supreme Court and filled the duties of that office most creditably. Thence he was promoted to the Philippine Commission, which is, virtually, the cabinet of the Governor-General. Still later he became Vice-Governor, and finally Governor, serving as such from September, 1906, to May, 1909. Any other government on earth that has over-seas colonies and recognizes the supreme importance of a maximum of continuity of policy, would have kept Governor Smith as long as it could have possibly induced him to stay, just as the British kept Lord Cromer in Egypt. Governor Smith was succeeded by a young man from Boston, who had come out to the Islands four years before, and who, prior to that time, had never had any public service in the United States of any kind, had never been in the Philippine Islands, and probably had never seen a Filipino until he landed at Manila.
General Smith is now (1912) one of the Judges of the Court of Customs Appeals at Was.h.i.+ngton.
CHAPTER XXII
GOVERNOR FORBES--1909-1912
The trouble with this country to-day is that, under long domination by the protected interests, a partners.h.i.+p has grown up between them and the Government which the best men in the Republican party could not break up if they would.--Woodrow Wilson.
When Governor Forbes a.s.sumed the duties of Governor-General of the Philippines, some ten years after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris whereby we bought the Islands, he was the ninth supreme representative of American authority we had had there since the American occupation began. The following is the list:
(1) Gen. Thomas M. Anderson June 30, 1898-July 25, 1898 (2) Gen. Wesley Merritt July 25, 1898-Aug. 29, 1898 (3) Gen. Elwell S. Otis Aug. 29, 1898-May 5, 1900 (4) Gen. Arthur MacArthur May 5, 1900-July 4, 1901 (5) Hon. William H. Taft July 4, 1901-Dec. 23, 1903 (6) Hon. Luke E. Wright Dec. 23, 1903-Nov. 4, 1905 (7) Hon. Henry C. Ide Nov. 4, 1905-Sept. 20, 1906 (8) Hon. James F. Smith Sept. 20, 1906-May 7, 1909 (9) Hon. W. Cameron Forbes May 7, 1909- [490]
No one of these distinguished gentlemen has ever had any authority to tell the Filipinos what we expect ultimately to do with them. They have not known themselves. Is not this distinctly unfair both to governors and governed?
Before Governor Forbes went to the Philippines he had been a largely successful business man. He is a man of the very highest personal character, and an indefatigable worker. He has done as well as the conditions of the problem permit. But he is always between Scylla and Charybdis. American capital in or contemplating investment in the Islands is continually pressing to be permitted to go ahead and develop the resources of the Islands. To keep the Islands from being exploited Congress early limited grants of land to a maximum too small to attract capital. So those who desire to build up the country, knowing they cannot get the law changed, are forever seeking to invent ways to get around the law. And, being firm in the orthodox Administration belief that discussion of ultimate independence is purely academic, i.e., a matter of no concern to anybody now living, Governor Forbes is of course in sympathy with Americans who wish to develop the resources of the Islands. On the other hand, he knows that such a course will daily and hourly make ultimate independence more certain never to come. So do the Filipinos know this. Therefore they clamor ever louder and louder against all American attempts to repeal the anti-exploiting Acts of Congress by ”liberal” interpretation. Many an American just here is sure to ask himself, ”Why all this 'clamor'? Do we not give them good government? What just ground have they for complaint?” Yes, we do give them very good government, so far as the Manila end of the business is concerned, except that it is a far more expensive government than any people on the earth would be willing to impose on themselves. But their main staples are hemp, sugar, and tobacco, and we raise the last two in this country. Their sugar and tobacco were allowed free entry into the United States by the Paine Law of 1909 up to amounts limited in the law, but the Philippine people know very well that American sugar and tobacco interests will either dwarf the growth of their sugar and tobacco industries by refusing to allow the limit raised--the limit of amounts admitted free of duty--or else that our Sugar Trust and our Tobacco Trust will simply ultimately eliminate them by absorption, just as the Standard Oil Company used to do with small compet.i.tors. In this sort of prospect certainly even the dullest intellect must recognize just ground for fearing--nay for plainly foreseeing--practical industrial slavery through control by foreign [491] corporations of economic conditions. So much for the two staples in which the Philippines may some day become compet.i.tors of ours. It took Mr. Taft nine years to persuade American sugar and tobacco that they would not be in any immediate danger by letting in a little Philippine sugar and tobacco free of duty. Then they consented. Not until then did they promise not to shout ”Down with cheap Asiatic labor. We will not consent to compete with it.” Their mental reservation was, of course, and is, ”if the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries get too prosperous, we will either buy them, or cripple them by defeating their next attempt to get legislation increasing the amounts of Philippine sugar and tobacco admitted into the United States free of duty.” And the Filipinos know that this is the fate that awaits two out of the three main sources of the wealth of their country. Their third source of wealth, their main staple, is the world-famous Manila hemp. This represents more than half the value of their total annual exports. And as to it, ”practical industrial slavery through control by foreign corporations of economic conditions”