Part 39 (2/2)

The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1905, after the usual complaint about being made a political football by Benevolent a.s.similation on the one side, and Louisiana and our sugar-beet States on the other, and the usual annual and true description of the consequent poverty, says concerning hemp:

We have several times in our reports called attention to the practical workings of that portion of the Act of Congress approved March 8, 1902, which provides for the refund of duties paid on articles exported from the Philippine Islands to the United States and consumed therein, and have as repeatedly recommended its repeal. It is a direct burden upon the people of the Philippine Islands, because it takes from the insular treasury export duties collected from the people and gives them to manufacturers of hemp products in the United States. These manufacturers were already prosperous before this bounty was given them and it seems hardly consistent with our expressions of purpose to build up and develop the Philippine Islands when we are thus enriching a few of our own people at their expense. [519]

By the end of the fiscal year 1905 (June 30), the American importers of Manila hemp--of whom the International Harvester Company and its allied interests are the most influential--had, under the operation of the rebate system based on the Act of 1902, milked the Philippine people to the tune of about $1,000,000. Says the Philippine Commission's annual report for 1905, immediately after the pa.s.sage last above quoted:

The amount of duties refunded under this act to manufacturers in the United States during the three years ending June 30, 1905, is $1,057,251.12. Many of the departments of the government are much hampered in their operations because of the lack of funds, notably the bureau of education, and were the sum thus taken available for educational purposes, to say nothing of any other, the government would be enabled to give instruction to thousands of Filipino children whom they are now unable to reach and who must remain steeped in ignorance because of the lack of funds to provide such instruction.

Said the Manila Chamber of Commerce to the Taft Congressional party in August, 1905: ”The country is in a state of financial collapse.” [520]

Says the Philippine Commission's report for 1906 (pt. 1, p. 68):

The Commission has repeatedly called attention in its reports to the action of Congress providing for a refund of duties paid on articles exported from the Islands to the United States and consumed therein. The reasons that led the Commission heretofore to recommend the repeal of that provision are still operative. Since the pa.s.sage of that act on March 8, 1902, the amount of duties collected and paid into the Philippine treasury and handed over to manufacturers in the United States down to June 30, 1906, is $1,471,208.47. This money has been taken out of the poverty of the insular treasury to be delivered directly into the hands of manufacturers of cordage and other users of Philippine hemp in the United States for their enrichment. The cordage interests are prosperous and do not need this help; the Philippine Islands are poor. Legislation which takes money directly from the Philippine treasury and pa.s.ses it over to a particular industry in the United States is not founded on sound principles of political economy or of justice to the Filipinos. We renew our recommendation for the repeal of this provision.

You also find in the Commission's report for 1906 the usual annual protests against the Dingley tariff on Philippine sugar and tobacco. Said the Honorable Henry C. Ide in an article in the New York Independent for November 22, 1906, written shortly after he retired from the office of Governor-General of the Philippines and returned to the United States: ”By annexation we killed the Spanish market for Philippine sugar and tobacco, and our tariff shuts these products from the United States market, and to-day both these [industries]

are practically prostrated.” In their annual report for 1907, the Philippine Commission say with regard to the American corner on Philippine hemp: [521] ”The price of hemp has fallen from an average of twenty pesos ($10 American money) per picul [522] to thirteen pesos per picul.” It thus appears that by judicious manipulation of the hemp market at Manila, through the leverage of the refund system, based on collection and subsequent refunding of the export tax on hemp coming to the United States, the Manila agents of the American hemp manufacturers had, as early as 1907, beat the price of hemp down to not far above half of what it had been formerly. To-day (1912) the Filipino hemp farmer gets for his hemp just one half what he got just ten years ago. During all this period of economic depression, the public utterances and State papers both of President Roosevelt and Mr. Taft are full of such preposterous stuff as the following:

No great civilized power has ever managed with such wisdom and disinterestedness the affairs of a people committed by the accident of war to its hands. [523]

This is what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft were publicly pretending to believe. But at practically the same time, during as dark a year, economically, as the American occupation has seen, 1907, let us see what they were privately admitting to their intimate friends.

In the North American Review for January 18, 1907, in an article contributed to that Review by the author of this volume, our treatment of the Philippine people, through our Congress, was briefly discussed. The article chanced to attract the attention of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who gave a considerable sum of money to have it reprinted and distributed. Some correspondence followed between us, in the course of which Mr. Carnegie stated that he had been at the White House shortly before writing me, and described what happened as follows:

When at supper with the President [Mr. Roosevelt] recently, pointing to Judge Taft [then Secretary of War], who sat opposite, he [President Roosevelt] said: ”Here are the two men in all the world most anxious to get out of the Philippines.”

In another letter Mr. Carnegie described this same incident, this other letter's version of President Roosevelt's supper-table remark being:

Here are the two men in America most anxious to get rid of them [the Philippines]. [524]

Now why all this public boasting about our ”disinterestedness,”

when, if he had been a Filipino, Colonel Roosevelt would probably have hunted up all the American speeches of 1776 about taxation without representation, and played hide-and-seek with the public prosecutor at Manila, to see how far he could violate the sedition statute without getting in jail? And why this private admission to his friend Mr. Carnegie, which neither he nor Mr. Taft has ever publicly made? Why did he not send a message to Congress showing up the hemp rebate system? Simply because to do so would lose support for the Administration, would alienate powerful interests from the fatuous policy of Benevolent a.s.similation bequeathed to Mr. Roosevelt by Mr. McKinley. His party was irrevocably committed to indefinite retention of the Islands. It was like Lot's wife. It could not turn back. So the protected and subsidized interests were permitted to continue to prey upon the Philippine people. Tariff evils were never President Roosevelt's specialty. Nor has war against intrenched privilege of any sort ever been Mr. Taft's specialty. Mr. Taft went out to the Philippines in 1907 to open the Philippine a.s.sembly. In 1908 he came back and made a report to President Roosevelt which is as bland as his Winona declaration that the Payne-Aldrich bill is ”the best tariff bill the Republican party ever pa.s.sed.” It makes the American reader's heart swell with pious pride at what he is doing for his ”little brown brother,” in the matter of vaccination, sewers, school-books, and the like. President Roosevelt sent this report to Congress, accompanied by a message, from which we have already quoted. In that same message he said:

I question whether there is a brighter page in the annals of international dealing between the strong and the weak than the page which tells of our doings in the Philippines.

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