Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 23

"'Kneel down, boy!'

"He knelt. I prayed. He wept."

This was the cryptic way the missionary came to the climax of his story.

Again the Southern Cross shot into view as we turned a curve in the river.

"The fountain broke. A boy's heart was won! I didn't have to fire him. I won him!"

"That lad came to me two years later as he started out from our school in Batavia, and said, 'Mr. Worthington, that moment when you called me into your office was the crucial moment of my life. If you had been unkind to me then; if you had punished me, even as much as I deserved it; if you had not been Christ-like, I should have killed you. I had my knife ready. There was a demon in me! Your kindness, your praying for me, broke something inside of me. I guess it was my heart. I cried. I prayed. That morning saved my soul!'"

"That was a marvelous experience, Mr. Missionary! It was a marvelous way to meet the situation," I said in a low tone, looking up at the white outline of the Southern Cross, and remembering two thieves.

"It was Christ's way!" said the missionary.

But perhaps the outstanding Flash-light of national Friendship is that of America for the Philippines. I shall never forget the day we started southward from winter-bound China for sun-warmed Manila.

As the great ship swung about in the muddy waters of the Yangsti and turned southward, the bitter winds of winter were blowing across her deserted decks. But in two days one felt not only a breath of warm tropical winds on his face but he also felt a breath of warmer friendship blowing into his soul as he thought of the Philippines and America.

The first breath of warm winds from southern tropical seas gently kissed one's cheeks that afternoon. It was a soothing breath of romance, freighted with the scent of tropical trees. It was much of a contrast with the bitter winter winds that had blown the day before at Shanghai.

There the snow was flying, and woolen suits were greatly needed.

But to-night men and women alike walk the decks of this Manila-bound ship. They are all in white. One stands at the bow of the ship, glad to catch the salt spray on tanned cheeks, glad to feel the sea-touched winds playing with his hair, glad to see fair women of the Orient tanned with summer suns; for it is summer in the Philippines, while winter reigns in China and the rest of the Oriental lands further north.

Last night we pa.s.sed the narrow straits leading out of Shanghai harbor directly south. Two lighthouses blinked through the dusk of evening, the one to the north in short sharp notes, like a musician of the sea singing coasts, rapidly beating time. The light to the south seemed to count four in blinks and then hold its last count like a note of music.

In between the two lighthouses vague, dim, mist-belted mountains of the China coast loomed through the dusk.

This morning and all day long we have been sailing past the huge outlines of mountainous Formosa, that rich island off the coast of China, between Shanghai and Manila. It looks like some fairly island with its coves and caves, into which pours the purple sea, visible through the faint mists of morning and noontime. Its precipitous sides shoot down to the sea in great bare cliffs, save where, here and there, a beautiful bay runs in from the southern sea to kiss the green lips of the land.

But now the sun is setting. I am watching it from my stateroom window.

And now it is the rainy season in the Philippines.

It doesn't rain in Luzon; it opens up clouds, and oceans suddenly drop to the land. Lakes and rivers form overnight. Bridges wash out, fields are inundated, houses by thousands are swept away, and railroad tracks twisted and played with, as if they were grappled by gigantic fists.

Men will tell you of the great Typhoon that suddenly dropped out of the mountains at Baguio, sliced off a few sections of the mountains, rushed down through the great gorge, and left in its trail the iron ruins of eight or ten bridges, put in by American engineers, founded on solid granite; but swept away like playthings of wood, in an hour.

One night we were driving from Baguio to Manila.

A storm dropped suddenly out of the nowhere. We had no side curtains on, and in just three minutes we were soaked to the skin, and dripping streams of water. The artesian wells along the way were but dribbling springs compared with us.

The storm came out of a clear, star-lit sky. Storms come that way in the Philippines. Only a few minutes before I had been looking up at the Southern Cross admiring its beauty. I looked again and there was no Southern Cross. A few great drops of rain fell and then came the deluge.

Candle lights flickered in innumerable thatched houses where brown and naked women fluttered about dodging the rain, looking strangely like great paintings in the night. At the edge of each side porch a Bamboo ladder reached up from the ground. A fire burned against the rain. This fire leapt up for two feet.

One could easily imagine on this stormy night, with every road a river, every field a flood, and every vacant s.p.a.ce a sea, that the thatched houses raised on Bamboo poles were boats, afloat in a great ocean. The fires on the back porches looked for all the world like the fires that I have seen flaring against the night from j.a.panese fishing boats.

We had been warm, personal friends since college days, this driver and I. He had chosen the harder way of the mission fields to spend his life.

"After all," said he, "that was a dream worth dreaming!"

"What do you mean?" I asked him, a bit startled.

"Why the American occupation of these islands; the dream that McKinley had, of teaching them to govern themselves; and then giving them their independence; an Imperial Dream such as the world never heard of before; a dream that, if it has done nothing else, has won for America the undying friendship of the intelligent Filipino."

"Right you are, man! But why such a thought at this unG.o.dly hour? I should think rather that you would be sending out an S. O. S."

"Dunno! Just flashed over me that that was a dream worth dreaming; and, by gad, boy, we're seeing it come to pa.s.s. Look at those contented people living in peace and security; their home fires lighted; their children in school; plenty to eat; not afraid that to-morrow morning some Friar will sell their home from under them. No wonder they have given their undying friendship to America!"

He continued as we sped through the rain.

"England and Germany sneered at America's dream. Such a dream of friendship through serving its colony had never been born in any other national soul from the Genesis of colonization up to this day, save in the soul of America in the Philippines. We have set the ideals of the world in many ways but never in a more marked way than this.

"The Phoenicians were the first colonizers and they swept the Mediterranean with a policy of exploitation and slavery which was selfish and sordid. Then came Greece which had some such ideal of colonization as America. Her ideal was, that colonies, like fruit from a tree, when ripe, should fall off of the mother tree. Or the ideal of Greece was that colonizing should come about like the swarming of bees."

I nodded my head. He went on as we slashed through the muddy ways, "Rome with her Imperial dream, her army to back it up, failed as have failed both Germany and j.a.pan; three nations with kindred ideals as to colonization.

"Venice was cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black blotch on the world's pages.

"Modern colonization began with Spain in South America, Mexico and the Philippines. Spain has nothing over which to boast in that record. The Dutch in Java, the record of Belgium in the Congo; that of the Portuguese in the Far East; the French in Africa; the English in India; Germany in China and Africa, and j.a.pan in Korea, have not been entirely for the service of the subjected people, for all of these Governments have gone on the fundamental theory that the colony exists for the Mother States."

He paused a moment as we made a cautious way around a big caribou. "Then came the great dream of America that the Mother State exists for the benefit of the colony.

"Elihu Root said, 'We have declared a trust for the benefit of the people of the Philippine Islands!'

"President William McKinley said: The government is designed not for exploitation nor for our own satisfaction, or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.'

"Ex-President Taft said when he was Governor-General of the Islands: The chief difference between the English policy and treatment of tropical peoples and ours, arises from the fact that we are seeking to prepare them under our guidance for popular self-government. We are attempting to do this, first by primary and secondary education offered freely to the Filipino people.'

"This spirit has won the undying friendship of the Filipino people. True enough, they will finally want their independence. That is natural, but there is a deep love for America buried in their hearts because America has been square with them; has fulfilled her promises; has not exploited them, but has served them. That is why I call the colonization policy of America here in the Philippines a dream worth dreaming." My friend was right.

"We love America, because America is our friend!" said a humble fisherman to me one day on the banks of the Pasig.

"Yes, the United States; it is our own! You are our brothers!" said a Filipino boy who had been educated in a Mission school.

"We are no longer our own. We belong to America. You have bought us with a price! It cost the blood of American soldiers to buy us!" said an old Filipino, gray with years, but high in the councils of the Government.

One night on the Lunetta the Filipino Band was playing. It was a beautiful evening with a sunset that lifted one into the very skies with its bewildering glory and ecstasy. I had been sitting there, drinking in the beautiful music made by the world-famous Constabulary Band, and watching the quicksilver-like changing colors of the sunset. Then the band started to play "The Star Spangled Banner." I was so lost in the sunset and the music that I did not notice.

I heard a sudden stirring. Brown bodies, half-naked Filipinos all about me, had leapt to their feet at the playing of our national hymn.

Beautiful Filipino women in their dainty and delicately winged gowns, bare brown shoulders heaving with pride and friendship, stood reverently. Filipino soldiers all over the Lunetta stood at attention facing the flag, the Stars and Stripes waving in the winds from the old walled city. Side by side with American soldiers who had just returned from Siberia stood Filipino Constabulary soldiers. Side by side with well-dressed American children stood half-naked Filipino children at reverent attention, paying a wholesome respect to the Stars and Stripes as the old hymn swept across the Lunetta.

"That is a thrilling thing to see!" I said to a friend.

"It could not have happened ten years ago! M he replied.