By the victory of our fleet at Manila Bay, one more of the world's
side-tracked capitals has been pulled from obscurity into main lines
of prominence and the average citizen is no longer left, as in days
gone by, to suppose that Manila is spelt with two l's and is floating
around in the South Sea somewhere between Fiji and Patagonia. The
Philippines have been discovered, and the daily journals with their
cheap maps have at last located Spain's Havana in the Far East. It is
indeed curious that a city of a third of a million people--capital
of a group of islands as large as New England, New York, Delaware,
Maryland, and New Jersey, which have long furnished the whole world
with its entire supply of Manila hemp, which have exported some
160,000 tons of sugar in a single year and which to-day produce as
excellent tobacco as that coming from the West Indies--it is curious,
I say, that a city of this size should have gone so long unnoticed
and misspelt. But such has been the case, and until Admiral Dewey
fired the shots that made Manila heard round the world, the people of
these United States--with but few exceptions--lived and died without
knowing where the stuff in their clothes-lines came from.
Now that the Philippines are ours, do we want them? Can we run
them? Are they the long-looked-for El Dorado which those who have
never been there suppose? To all of which questions--even at the risk
of being called unpatriotic--I am inclined to answer, No.
Do we want them? Do we want a group of 1,400 islands, nearly 8,000
miles from our Western shores, sweltering in the tropics, swept
with typhoons and shaken with earthquakes? Do we want to undertake
the responsibility of protecting those islands from the powers in
Europe or the East, and of standing sponsor for the nearly 8,000,000
native inhabitants that speak a score of different tongues and live
on anything from rice to stewed grasshoppers? Do we want the task of
civilizing this race, of opening up the jungle, of setting up officials
in frontier, out-of-the-way towns who won't have been there a month
before they will wish to return?
Do we want them? No. Why? Because we have got enough to look after
at home. Because--unlike the Englishman or the German who, early
realizing that his country is too small to support him, grows up
with the feeling that he must relieve the burden by going to the
uttermost parts of the sea--our young men have room enough at home
in which to exert their best energies without going eight or eleven
thousand miles across land and water to tropic islands in the Far East.
Can we run them? The Philippines are hard material with which to
make our first colonial experiment, and seem to demand a different
sort of treatment from that which our national policy favors or has
had experience in giving. Besides the peaceable natives occupying
the accessible towns, the interiors of many of the islands are
filled with aboriginal savages who have never even recognized the
rule of Spain--who have never even heard of Spain, and who still
think they are possessors of the soil. Even on the coast itself are
tribes of savages who are almost as ignorant as their brethren in the
interior, and only thirty miles from Manila are races of dwarfs that
go without clothes, wear knee-bracelets of horsehair, and respect
nothing save the jungle in which they live. To the north are the
Igorrotes, to the south the Moros, and in between, scores of wild
tribes that are ready to dispute possession. And is the United States
prepared to maintain the forces and carry on the military operations
in the fever-stricken jungles necessary in the march of progress to
exterminate or civilize such races? Have we, like England for instance,
the class of troops who could undertake that sort of work, and do we
feel called upon to do it, when the same expenditure at home would go
so much further? The Philippines must be run under a despotic though
kindly form of government, supported by arms and armor-clads, and to
deal with the perplexing questions and perplexing difficulties that
arise, needs knowledge gained by experience, by having dealt with
other such problems before.
Are the Philippines an El Dorado? Like Borneo, like Java and the Spice
Islands, the Philippines are rich in natural resources, but their
capacity to yield more than the ordinary remuneration to labor I much
question. Leaving aside the question of gold and coal, in the working
of which, so far, more money has been put into the ground than has
ever been taken out, the great crops in these islands are sugar, hemp,
and tobacco. The sugar crop, to be sure, has the possibilities that
it has anywhere, where the soil is rich and conditions favorable. The
tobacco industry has perhaps more possibilities, and might be made
a close rival to that in Cuba. But the hemp crop is limited by
the world's needs, and as those needs are just so much each year,
there is no object in increasing a supply which up to date has been
adequate. There are foreigners in the Philippines, who have been
there for years, who have controlled the exports of sugar or hemp or
tobacco, who have made their living, and who from having been longer
on the ground should be the first to improve the opportunities that
may come with the downfall of Spanish rule. There are some things
which the United States can send to the Philippines cheaper than the
Continental manufacturers, but not many. She can send flour and some
kinds of machinery, she can put in electric plants, she can build
railways, but at present she can't produce the cheap implements,
and the necessaries required by the great bulk of poor natives at
the low price which England and Germany can.
The Philippines are not an El Dorado simply because for the first
time they have been brought to our notice. They should not yield
more than the ordinary return to labor, and the question is, does the
average American want to live in a distant land, cut off from friends
and a civilized climate, only to get the ordinary return for his
efforts? To which, even though of course there is much to be said on
the other side, I would answer, No. We have gone to war, remembering
the Maine, to free Cuba, and at the first blow have taken another
group of islands--a Cuba in the East--to deal with. I have not the
space here to discuss the solution of the problem, but, for my part,
I should like to see England interested in buying back an archipelago
which she formerly held for ransom, leaving us perhaps a coaling port,
and opening up the country to such as chose to go there. Then, with
someone else to shoulder the burden of government and protection, we
should still have all the opportunities for proving whether or not the
islands were the El Dorado dreamed of in our clubs or counting-rooms.
At the close of 1893, I went to Manila for Messrs. Henry W. Peabody &
Co., of Boston and New York, in the interest of their hemp business,
and, associated with Mr. A. H. Rand, remained there for two years. We
two were the representatives of the only American house doing business
in the Philippines, and made up practically fifty per cent. of the
American business colony in Manila. The years from 1894 to 1896 were
peculiarly peaceful with the quiet coming before the storm, and we were
fortunate enough to be able to make many excursions and go into many
parts of the island that later would have been dangerous. But as the
short term of our service drew to a close, rumors of trouble began to
circulate. The natives had long suffered from the demands made by the
Church and the tax-gatherer, and there was a feeling that they might
again attempt to throw off the Spanish yoke, as they attempted, without
success, some years before. It was at this period that Messrs. Peabody
& Co. decided it would be to their unquestionable advantage to retire
from the islands and to place their business in the hands of an English
firm, long established on the ground, and well equipped with men who,
unlike ourselves, looked forward to passing the rest of their days
in the Philippines. And the move was a good one, for no sooner had
we left Manila than revolution broke out. The Spanish troops were at
the south, and that mysterious native brotherhood of the Katipunan
called its members to attack the capital. A massacre was planned,
but the right leaders were lacking and the attempt failed. The troops
were recalled, guards doubled, drawbridges into old Manila pulled up
nightly, arrests and executions made. As is well known, one hundred
suspects were crowded into that old dungeon on the river, just at the
corner of the city wall, and because it came on to rain, at night-fall,
an officer shut down the trap-door leading to the prisoners' cells to
keep out the water. But it also kept out the air, and next morning
sixty out of the one hundred persons were suffocated. Then Manila
had her Black Hole. Later, other suspects were stood on the curbing
that surrounds the Luneta and were shot down while the big artillery
band discoursed patriotic music to the crowds that thronged the
promenade. And from then until Admiral Dewey silenced the guns at
Cavité and sunk the Spanish ships that used to swing peacefully at
anchor off the breakwater, the Spaniards had their hands full with
a revolution brought on by their own rotten system of government.
If in place of the more systematic narratives of description, the more
serious presentations of statistics, or the more exciting accounts
of the bloody months of the revolution and the wonderful victory of
our gallant fleet, which are to be looked for from other sources, the
reader cares to get some idea of casual life in Manila, by accepting
the rather colloquial chronicle of an ex-resident that follows, I shall
have made some little return to islands that robbed me of little else
than two years of a more hurried existence in State Street or Broadway.