The Philippines: Past and Present Volume II Part 43

Juan Araneta, a very intelligent Visayan of Negros, put the matter brutally to me by saying that white blood was the only hope for his people, and that if he had his way he would put in jail every American soldier who did not leave at least three children behind him.

Blount pretends to find an obstacle to American control in the fact that American women will not marry Filipinos, and in the further fact that those American men who do marry Filipinas soon find themselves out of touch with their former a.s.sociates. He says that this is not as it should be. [205] He adds that many Filipinos are sons or grandsons of Spaniards, and therefore have a very warm place in their hearts for the people of that nation.

He neglects to mention the fact that the vast majority of the Spanish mestizo cla.s.s were born out of wedlock.

I believe that the att.i.tude of American women on this subject is eminently proper and that American men, who expect ever again to live in their own country, as a rule make a grave mistake if they marry native women. Even when they are to remain permanently in the islands, such a course is in my opinion usually most undesirable. I have known a limited number of happy mixed marriages of this sort, but in the large majority of cases which have come under my observation they have led to the rapid mental, moral and physical degeneration of the men concerned. While some of the children born of such marriages are very fair, there are occasional reversions to the ancestral type of the mothers, and the lot of dark-skinned children is not a happy one, as even their own mothers are almost sure to dislike them.

The mestizo cla.s.s is now large enough, and the problems which its existence presents are grave enough, to render undesirable its further growth. Finally, while the light-skinned mestiza girl almost always seeks a white husband, the real typical Filipinos, who are brown, are quite content to mate with each other, and do not dislike whites for declining to marry their daughters. The people of this cla.s.s are friendly toward Americans, if they have actually come in contact with them and learned how much they are indebted to them, and are hostile if their ignorance is so great that they can be led, by unscrupulous politicians, to believe that Americans are responsible for any ills from which they happen to be suffering, such as cholera, which they have often been told is due to our poisoning their wells!

Blount says [206] it is a "verdict of all racial history ... that wheresoever white men dwell in considerable numbers in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white men will rule."

Certainly Spanish and other European mestizos dwell in considerable numbers in the Philippines. Are individuals with three-fourths to thirty-one thirty-seconds white blood white men or Asiatics? They certainly would determine what form of government should be established were independence now granted, and it is interesting to determine what they consider to be the requisites for the establishment of a government by them. One of these men in an address made at the time the congressional party visited the islands, with Mr. Taft, put the case as follows:--

"If the ma.s.ses of the people are governable, a part must necessarily be denominated the directing cla.s.s, for as in the march of progress, moral or material, nations do not advance at the same rate, some going forward whilst others fall behind, so it is with the inhabitants of a country, as observation will prove.

"If the Philippine Archipelago has a governable popular ma.s.s called upon to obey and a directing cla.s.s charged with the duty of governing, it is in condition to govern itself. These factors, not counting incidental ones, are the only two by which to determine the political capacity of a country; an ent.i.ty that knows how to govern, the directing cla.s.s, and an ent.i.ty that knows how to obey, the popular ma.s.ses."

The conditions portrayed might make a government possible, but it would a.s.suredly not be a republic. The advocates of this view are hardly in harmony with the one so eloquently expressed at Rio Janeiro by Mr. Root:--

"No student of our times can fail to see that not America alone but the whole civilized world is swinging away from its old governmental moorings and intrusting the fate of its civilization to the capacity of the popular ma.s.s to govern. By this pathway mankind is to travel, whithersoever it leads. Upon the success of this, our great undertaking, the hope of humanity depends."

If what is needed to make a just and stable government possible is "an ent.i.ty that knows how to obey, the popular ma.s.ses" and an ent.i.ty that thinks it "knows how to govern, the directing cla.s.s," then we might leave the islands at once, if willing to leave the wild tribes to their fate, but we have work to do before the civilization of the Filipinos can safely be intrusted to "the capacity of the popular ma.s.s to govern."

Blount has said:--

"Any country that has plenty of good lawyers and plenty of good soldiers, backed by plenty of good farmers, is capable of self-government." [207]

Do the Philippines fulfill even these requirements? Filipino lawyers are ready speakers, but have their peculiarities. When the civil suit which I brought against certain Filipinos for libel was drawing to its close, and the prosecution was limited to the submission of evidence in reb.u.t.tal, important new evidence was discovered. To my amazement, my lawyers put the witness who could give it on the stand. They asked him his age, his profession and a few equally irrelevant questions, and then turned him over to the lawyers for the defense, who promptly extracted from him the very testimony it was desired to get on record. Their very first question drew a most unjudicial snort of laughter from the judge, but even this did not stop them.

I was later informed that Filipino lawyers could usually be depended upon to do this very thing, and that their American colleagues habitually took advantage of this fact. The truth is that few of the Filipino lawyers are good, if judged by American standards.

I have elsewhere stated my views as to the excellence of the Filipino soldier, but no military leaders have as yet arisen who were capable of successfully carrying on other than guerilla operation.

The farmers of the islands are as a cla.s.s anything but good. They are ignorant and superst.i.tious, underfed, and consequently inclined to indolence, and are a century behind the times in their methods.

There are certain undesirable characteristics which are common to a large majority of the people correctly designated as Filipinos. Ignorance and superst.i.tion are still to be met at every turn. At the time of the census of 1903 the percentage of illiteracy in the Philippines was estimated to be 79.8. More than half of the persons counted as literate could read and write only some native dialect, and often did even that badly.

More recent, and therefore more interesting, as showing present day conditions, are the statistics obtained in connection with the elections of June 4, 1912. Ability to read and write English or Spanish ent.i.tles a male citizen of the Philippines, who is twenty-three or more years of age, to vote.

The total number of registered votes was 248,154 only, of whom slightly less than one-third had the above-mentioned qualifications. In Manila 14 per cent of the voters were illiterate, and in the provinces 70 per cent. This lack of education opened wide the door to fraud and was one of the chief reasons why there were 240 protested elections out of a total of 824, made up as follows: munic.i.p.al, 709; provincial, 34; for delegate to a.s.sembly, 81.

The proportion of literate electors to total population in the territory in question was 1.47 per cent.

One of the easiest kinds of business to start in the Philippines, and one of the most profitable to conduct, is the establishment of a new religion.

We have recently had the "colorum," with headquarters on Mt. San Cristobal, an extinct volcano. People visited this place and paid large sums in order to persuade the G.o.d to talk to them. A big megaphone, carefully hidden away, was so trained that the voice of the person using it would carry across a canon and strike the trail on the other side. If payments were satisfactorily large the G.o.d talked to those who had made them in a most impressive manner when they reached this point in their homeward journey.

We have also had the Cabaruan fiasco in Pangasinan, in the course of which a new town with several thousand inhabitants sprang up in a short time. There was a place of worship where the devout were at prayer day and night. There was also a full-fledged holy Trinity made up of local talent. Unfortunately, some of the princ.i.p.al people connected with this movement became involved in carabao stealing and other forms of public disorder, and on a trip to Lingayen I saw the persons who had impersonated G.o.d the Son and the Virgin Mary in the provincial jail. We have had "Pope Isio" in Negros, who was in reality the leader of a strong ladrone band, and we have had various other popes elsewhere who occupied themselves in similar ways.

Hardly a year pa.s.ses that miraculous healers do not spring into ephemeral existence in the islands, and the people invariably flock to them in thousands. Conspicuous among this cla.s.s of imposters was the "Queen of Taytay," whose exploits I have already narrated.

The belief of the common people in asuang and in the black dog which causes cholera has also already been mentioned. A very large percentage of them are firmly convinced of the efficacy of charms, collectively known as anting-anting, supposed to make the bodies of the wearers proof against bullets or cutting weapons. Within the past year a bright young man of Paranaque, a town immediately adjacent to Manila, insisted that a friend should strike him with a bolo in order that he might demonstrate the virtues of his anting-anting, and received an injury from which he promptly died. Again and again the hapless victims of this particular superst.i.tion have gone to certain death, firm in the conviction that they could not be harmed.

The worst of it is that even the native press does not dare to combat such superst.i.tions, if indeed those who control it do not still themselves hold to them.

La Vanguardia, commonly considered to be the leading Filipino paper in the islands, published the following account of the event referred to above:--

"Basilio Aquino, a native of Paranaque, and Timoteo Kariaga, an Iloko residing in Manila, made a bet as to which of them had the better anting-anting, and to settle it Kariaga allowed himself to be struck twice on the right arm and once on the abdomen, but as they say,--Miracle of miracles! Although Aquino used all of his strength and the bolo was extremely sharp, he did not succeed in making the slightest scratch on Kariaga. In view of that, Aquino invited his rival to submit him to the same test. Kariaga was reluctant to do so, for he was sure he would wound Aquino, but the latter insisted so much that there was nothing to do but please him, and at the first cut his right arm was almost severed, and he died from loss of blood two hours later. The wounded man would not report the occurrence to the authorities, but the relatives of the victim were compelled to do so in view of his tragic end."

From the report of this occurrence in El Ideal, a paper believed to be controlled by Speaker Osmena, I quote the following:--

"The trial was made in the presence of a goodly number of bystanders, all of them townsmen, connections and friends of the actors.

"Timoteo Kariaga, that being the name of one of the actors, an Ilocano resident of Manila, was the first to submit to the ordeal. His companion and antagonist, named Basilio Aquino, from Paranaque, bolo in hand, aimed slashes at the former, endeavouring to wound him in the arms and abdomen, without success, the amulet of Kariaga offering apparently admirable resistance in the trial, so that the bolo hardly left a visible mark upon his body."

A very interesting and highly instructive book might be written on Filipino superst.i.tions, but I must here confine myself to a few typical ill.u.s.trations:--

The following extract from a narrative report of the senior constabulary inspector of the island of Leyte, dated April 3, 1913, is not without interest. It deals with a murder which it describes as follows:--

"Basilio Tarli had given the bolo thrust that killed the deceased, with a small fighting bolo belonging to Pastor Lumantal, who had given Basilio the bolo for this purpose. The deceased had the reputation of being a sort of witch doctor, and Pastor thought that his wife, Maria Subior, who was pregnant, had a dog or other animal in her womb instead of a child, placed there by the deceased. For this reason Pastor arranged with Basilio Tarli and Cecilio Cuenzona to kill the deceased."

Lieutenant George R. F. Cornish, P. C, stationed at Catubig in Samar, reported on "Pagloon" as follows during August, 1913:--

"Pagloon, a method of overcoming certain weak traits in children, is practiced by most of the inhabitants of Samar. If, for example, a father who is not in the military service, shoots a man, superst.i.tion has it that his child will shortly become sick. The father, to prevent this, uses a method known as 'pagloon,' which, being interpreted, means 'to vaporize,' 'to make clean.' He places the stock of the gun that did the shooting, along with a branch of a cocoanut tree that has been sanctified in incense by the padre of the Catholic church in a fire. The padre furnishes these incense leaves only once a year. The hands are dipped in water and then placed in the smoke. The vaporous healing incense that collects on the hands, from placing them in the fire, is rubbed on the child from head to foot. This operation is repeated three nights in succession and then the child ought to be free from any danger."

Serious trouble was made for men investigating the mineral resources of the island of Cebu by the circulation of a tale to the effect that they needed the blood of children to pour into cracks in the ground.

The following is an extract from a narrative report of the senior constabulary inspector of Pampanga for April, 1913:--

"April 9.--Between 2 and 3 P.M. in the barrio of San Pedro, Manilan, the two sisters (old women) Maria and Matea Ma.n.a.lili were cut up with a bolo by Hermogenes Castro of the barrio of Santa Catalina of the same town, resulting in the instant death of Matea. Maria, whose right hand was cut off, died on the 21st instant. Castro gave up and on the 10th instant was remanded to the Court of First Instance charged with murder. The two sisters were known in the locality as 'mangcuculan,' or witches, and were charged by Castro with having cast a spell on him, causing a stiff neck, which spell the sisters refused to remove."

A number of comparatively reputable Filipino physicians, in the city of Manila itself, have confessed that they have to pretend to depend, to some extent, on charms and exorcisms, in order to get and keep practice.