The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 36

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 statesmanship. 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, wishing 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 Washington 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 Washington.

CHAPTER XXII

GOVERNOR FORBES--1909-1912

The trouble with this country to-day is that, under long domination by the protected interests, a partnership 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"

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 receivership 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 statesmanship. 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