Part 36 (2/2)

is to-day not a fear, but a fact. The International Harvester Company has its agents at Manila. The said company or allied interests, or both, are large importers of Manila hemp. The reports of all the governors-general of the Philippines who have preceded Governor Forbes tell, year after year, of the millions ”handed over” to American hemp importers through ”the hemp joker” of the Act of Congress of 1902, hereinafter explained, in the chapter on Congressional Legislation (Chapter XXVI.). Why did these complaints--made with annual regularity up to Governor Forbes's accession--cease thereafter? You will find these complaints of his predecessors transcribed in the chapter mentioned, because if I had re-stated them you might suspect exaggeration. The ”rake-off” of the American importers of Manila hemp for 1910 was nearly $750,000, as fully explained in Chapter XXVI.

Governor Forbes will be in this country when this book is issued. I think he owes it to the American people to explain why he does not continue the efforts of his predecessors to halt the depredations of the Hemp Trust. Why does he content himself in his last annual report with a mild allusion to the fact that the condition of the hemp industry is ”not satisfactory”? I have said that Governor Forbes is a man of high character, and take pleasure in repeating that statement in this connection. The truth is we are running a political kindergarten for adults in the Philippines, and those responsible for the original blunder of taking them, and all their political heirs and a.s.signs since, have sought to evade admitting and setting to work to rectify the blunder. Unmasked, this is what the policy of Benevolent a.s.similation now is. They allege an end, and so justify all the ways and means. Benevolent a.s.similation needs the support of the International Harvester Company and of all other Big Business interested directly or indirectly in Manila hemp. The end justifies the means. Hence the silence. Philippine gubernatorial reticence is always most reticent about that particular subject on which at the time the American people are most peculiarly ent.i.tled to information. As long as public order was the most pressing question, Philippine gubernatorial reticence selected that branch of our colonial problem either for especial silence or for superlatively casual allusion, as we have already seen. So now with the economic distresses. Frankness would obviously furnish too much good argument for winding up this Oriental receivers.h.i.+p of ours. The Philippine Government will never tell its main current troubles until after they are over. But as the present trouble--the economic depredations of powerful special interests--must necessarily be fruitful of discontent which will crop out some day to remind us that as we sow so shall we reap, any one who helps expose the root of the trouble is doing a public service. No Congressman who in silence would permit Big Business to prey upon his const.i.tuents as Governor Forbes has, could long remain in office. Taxation without representation may amount to depredation, and yet never be corrected, when the powers that prey have the ear of the court, and the victims cannot get the ear of the American people. So the Hemp Trust continues to rob the Filipinos under the forms of law, and the Mohonk Conference continues to kiss Benevolent a.s.similation on both cheeks. And Dr. Lyman Abbott periodically says Amen. I am not speaking disrespectfully of Dr. Abbott. I am deploring the lack of information of our people at home as to conditions in the Philippines.

It is a relief to turn from such matters to some of the real substantial good we have done out there to which Governor Forbes has heretofore publicly pointed with just pride. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909, Governor Forbes (then Vice-Governor) said, among other things:

We have completed the separation of Church and State, buying out from the religious orders their large agricultural properties, which are now administered by the government for the benefit of the tenants.

This statement I cannot too cordially endorse. It would be grossly unfair not to accord full measure of acclaim to Governor Taft for the way he worked out the problem of the Friar Lands. He has been attacked in some quarters in this regard, and most unjustly. Not being a Catholic, and all my people being Protestants, I have no fear of being suspected of special pleading in the matter. The working out of the Friar Land problem by Governor Taft in the Philippines was a splendid piece of constructive statesmans.h.i.+p. He was at his greatest and best in that very transaction. The Treaty of Paris had guaranteed that all vested rights should be respected, including those of ecclesiastical bodies. The friars had long owned the lands in question. There can be no particle of doubt on this point. The tenants on the land had all long ago attorned to them, father and son, from time out of mind, paying rent regularly. But by claiming jurisdiction over their tenants' souls also, and getting that jurisdiction effectively recognized, the thrifty friars used to raise the rent regularly, quieting incipient protest with threats of eternal punishment, or protracted stay in purgatory. The advent of our government let loose a revolt against the authority of the friars generally, and, their spiritual hold once loosened, this led the tenants to dispute the land t.i.tles of their spiritual shepherds, who were also their temporal landlords. Of course the t.i.tles had all been long recorded, and looked after by the best legal talent the country afforded. As long as you control the future of your tenant's soul, you can make him pay his last copeck for rent. But as soon as that control is lost, the man on whom the governing of the country thereafter devolves has a certain prospect of a great agrarian revolution on his hands, having in it many elements of substantial righteousness. Governor Taft's capacious mind, prompted by his strongest instinct, love of justice, conceived the idea of having the Philippine Government raise the money to buy the Friar Lands, by issuing bonds, and then buying the Friars out and re-selling the land to the tenants on long time, on the instalment plan, the instalments to be so graduated as to be equal to a moderate rental. Each tenant stayed right where he had been all the time, in possession of the tract he had always tilled, he and his father before him. To arrange all this it took an Act of Congress authorizing the bond issue, and a visit to Rome to arrange the bargain with the Pope. Some say His Holiness drove a hard bargain with Governor Taft, or to put it another way, that Governor Taft paid the Church people too much for the land. He did not. He may not have counted pennies with them, but the lands were worth what he paid for them. And the purchase protected the faith and honor of our government, as pledged by the Treaty of Paris, and at the same time prevented an agrarian revolution--which would have had a lot of elemental justice on its side.

Another of the good works we have done in the Philippines, to which Governor Forbes points in his magazine article above mentioned, is thus noted by him:

We have put the finances on a sound and sensible basis.

To this also I say Amen. The Forbes article then goes on to say that the government of the Islands is self-supporting. This is true, except the $14,000,000 a year it costs us to keep out there a garrison of 12,000 American troops (supplemented by certain native scouts--see chapter on ”Cost of the Philippines,” hereafter). This garrison is conceded to be a mere handful, sufficient merely, and intended merely--as a witty English woman has put it in a book on the Philippines--”to knock the Filipino on the head in case he wants his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it.” In other words, we only attempt to keep force enough there to quell any outbreak that might occur. So far as possible invasion by any foreign power is concerned, our $14,000,000 per annum is an absolutely dead loss. Brigadier-General Clarence Edwards, U. S. A., commanding the Bureau of Insular Affairs, said recently [492] before the Finance Committee of the Senate:

I would never think of the Philippines as a military problem for defence. If any nation wants them, it is merely a declaration of war.

What a shameful admission for a great nation to subscribe to, relatively to people it pretends to be protecting! The programme of the War Department is to abandon the Islands to their fate, for the time being at least, in our next war, letting them remain a football until the end of such war, when, as an independent republic they could, and would, rally as one man to the defence of their country against invasion, and would, with a little help from us, make life unbearable for an invading force. As things stand, we are just as impotent as Spain was out there in 1898, and it is utter folly to forget what happened then.

But to return to Governor Forbes's article and to a pleasanter feature of the situation. He says:

We have established schools throughout the archipelago, teaching upward of half a million children.

This also is true, and greatly to our credit. But as the American hemp trust mulcts the Philippine hemp output about a half million dollars a year (as above suggested, and later, in another chapter, more fully explained), it follows that each Filipino child pays the hemp trust a dollar a year for the privilege of going to school.

And now let us consider the most supremely important part of Governor Forbes's magazine article above quoted. The burden of the song of the adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill (looking to Philippine independence in 1921) [493] is that because there are certain ”wild tribes” scattered throughout the archipelago, in the mountain fastnesses, therefore we should cling to the present policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention until the wild tribes get civilized. Governor Forbes's article is an absolute, complete, and final answer to the misinformed nonsense of the minority report aforesaid. He says, apropos of public order:

It is now safe to travel everywhere throughout the Islands without carrying a weapon, excepting only in some of the remote parts of the mountains, where lurk bands of wild tribes who might possibly mistake the object of a visit, and in the southern part of the great island of Mindanao which is inhabited by intractable Moros.

The foregoing unmasks, in all its contemptible falsehood, the pretence that the presence of a few wild tribes in the Philippines is a reason for withholding independence from 7,000,000 of Christian people in order that a greedy little set of American importers of Manila hemp may fatten thereon. True, hemp is not edible, but it is convertible into edibles--and also into campaign funds. That the existence of these wild tribes--the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903-4--const.i.tute infinitely less reason for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American Indian const.i.tuted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123): [494]

Island Civilized Wild Total

Luzon 3,575,001 223,506 3,798,507 Panay 728,713 14,933 743,646 Cebu 592,247 592,247 Bohol 243,148 243,148 Negros 439,559 21,217 460,776 Leyte 357,641 357,641 Samar 222,002 688 222,690 Mindanao 246,694 252,940 499,634

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