V.
Intimately allied with this question of reasonableness are those of readiness, preparedness, capacity to assume the burdens as well as the rights and privileges of independence.
On readiness, we need not dwell; it is the readiness of acquiescence, not of preparation: the Filipinos are ready, just as children are ready to play with matches. But preparedness and capacity call for more consideration, however brief.
No one will pretend that the Filipinos have had any political training. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, only 350 years ago, they were all uncivilized. Many of them are still semi-savages; others are savages pure and simple. These facts are indisputable. If, then, we turn to history for assistance, we can not find a single instance of any real political evolution in any of the various divisions of the inhabitants of the Archipelago. The exception furnished by the debased Mohammedan sultanates of the great Island of Mindanao is only apparent. The germ of fruitful growth is everywhere missing. Now, the Spaniards assuredly took no steps to teach their new subjects the art and science of government; there was every reason, from their point of view, why they should not teach this art and science. On the other hand, our own course has been totally different. We have lost no time in putting political power into the hands of the natives, so that to-day, after fourteen years’ possession, municipal and provincial government are almost wholly native. To crown all, we have given the Filipinos an elective legislature, an Assembly, all the members of which are native. Students of the subject at first hand, impartial observers on the spot, declare freely that we have gone much too fast, and that we have granted a measure of political administration and government beyond the native power of assimilation and digestion. With this opinion, sound though it be, we are not immediately concerned: the point we wish to bring out is that the experiment we have made is not free; that the case is one of constrained motion, since everyone knows that the mighty power of the United States dominates the entire situation, and that under these conditions the Filipinos have been exercising themselves in the form of government, rather than in responsible government itself. The Filipino government as such has faced no crisis: behind its treasury stands that of the metropolis. Order is assured by the garrison maintained by us, internal police by the Constabulary, another agency of American origin. But, even if all this were not true, it is questionable if an experience of only eight or nine years affords sufficient ground for the belief that a nascent government could exist and advance under its own power alone.
Our training, ample and generous though it may have been, as it has not, for lack of time if for no other reason, prepared the native to govern himself, so it furnishes no real test of his capacity to govern himself. Self-government is not a function of the mere ability to fill certain offices, to discharge certain routine duties of administration: it depends for its existence and maintenance on the possession of certain qualities, and still more, perhaps, on the possession of those qualities by a majority of the people who practice or are to practice self-government, on an educated and inherited interest of the citizen in the questions affecting his welfare in so far as this is conditioned by government. Tested in this wise, the Filipino breaks down locally; to believe that anything else will happen internationally is to blind one’s self to the teaching of experience.
But there is yet another test. If political independence is to be of value to those who have it, if it is to endure in any useful way, it must rest on economic independence. The state must be able to meet its obligations, and by this we do not mean merely its current bills, its housekeeping bills, as it were, but its obligations of all and whatever nature, interior police, finance, administration, dispensation of justice, communications, sanitation, education, defense. We do not find these things too easy in our own land, and all of us can without effort bring to mind examples of independent societies in tropical regions, where, these things being neglected, the resultant government is a mockery. Have we any reason to believe that the Filipino, untrained, inexperienced, occupying an undeveloped area of special configuration in a region where continuous effort is disagreeable and initiative distressing, will achieve success where others of greater original fitness have made a failure?
Evidently the possibility of obtaining an answer to this question depends on the possibility of determining, within allowable limits of precision, the qualities and defects of the Filipino peoples. Now, this is a difficult thing to do, but it is not an impossible thing; at any rate, a first approximation may be derived from the authorities quoted in the “Census of the Philippine Islands,” 1903, pp 492 et seq. In time, these authorities range from Legaspi, 1565, to our own day, and include governors, prelates, travellers, engineers, priests, etc., among whom are found Spaniards, Englishmen, Americans, and Filipinos, As might be expected, all sorts of qualities and defects are reported. Classifying these, and rejecting from consideration all, whether quality or defect, not supported by at least five authorities, it may be concluded, so far as this induction goes, that the Filipino is, on the one hand, hospitable, courageous, fond of music, show, and display; and, on the other, indolent, superstitious, dishonest, and addicted to gambling. One quality, imitativeness, is possibly neutral. It would appear that his virtues do not especially look toward thrift—i.e., economic independence—and that his defects positively look the other way. If the witnesses testifying be challenged on the score of incompetency, let us turn to the reports of the supervisors of the census, contained in the volume already cited; for these cover the entire Archipelago, and set forth actual conditions at one and the same epoch, 1903, the date of the census. Moreover, these supervisors, as welt as the special agents and enumerators, were nearly all natives. When, therefore, these supervisors report the mass of the Christianized Filipinos as simple and superstitious, we may be sure that we have the truth; but we are also inevitably led to the conclusion of economic unfitness. As this matter of economic independence is one of the first importance in determining the future of the Islands, we must look for all the light possible on the question. A flood is thrown on it by an article entitled “Nulla est Redemptio,” published in the (native) La Democracia, of Manila, October 10, 1910, and believed to be the production of perhaps the ablest Filipino alive to-day. Premising that agriculture is the chief source of Philippine wealth, and that this source failing, all others must fail, the author points out that, although taxes are lighter in the Archipelago than in any other country, production is much less, and that this is the chief cause of the prevailing economic distress. He points out further that the Assembly is wholly native, as are all municipal and nearly all provincial officers, and that therefore they, and the constituencies that elected them, must assume responsibility. Now, what has been achieved? The provinces have spent money on buildings and parks, but, with one brilliant exception, none on roads. Nothing has been done for agriculture. Of the municipalities, the least said the better; they are a wreck in the full extension of the word. And, as the hope of a people must rest in its youth, what does he find to be the case? Thousands of candidates in pharmacy, law, medicine; as regards the Civil Service, enough candidates to fill all the posts in the Islands for generations to come. But of farmers, young men willing to return to the fields, their own fields, and by the sweat of their brow to work out the salvation of the country? None: the development of this principal element of national existence is left to the ignorant and indolent peasantry. He draws no less gloomy a picture in respect of capital and property. Nine-tenths of Manila, and all important provincial real estate, is mortgaged. Capital is furnished at exorbitant rates of interest, and usury prevails. In the country, no security is accepted save real property, and then only when the lender is satisfied that his debtor will be unable to pay, and that the security will pass.
Bad as the outlook is, no remedy suggests itself. For, returning to the theme that agriculture is recognized as vital, much energy is spent in discussion, discourses, lectures, in writing articles, in discovering reasons why agriculture does not flourish, but nothing else and nothing more.[4]
The picture may be overdrawn; but it is a Filipino picture, drawn by a Filipino hand. Let us now permit, the native press to speak again on the subject engaging our attention. Thus Vanguardia[5] a bitter anti-American sheet, arraigns its wealthy fellow-countrymen for lack of initiative and fondness of routine. It accuses them of a willingness to invest in city property, to deposit money in banks, “to make loans at usurious rates, in which they take advantage of the urgent and pressing necessities of their countrymen,” but of unwillingness “to engage in agriculture, marine or industrial enterprise”; and says they are “generally lacking in the spirit of progression.” According to another native newspaper, the vice of gambling has infected all classes of society, men and women alike, rich and poor, young and old. Mere it is almost impossible to overdraw the picture, so widespread is the vice. Let us now couple these statements, drawn from native sources, with the fact that the Christianized tribes, all told, number some 7,000,000; that of these but one-tenth speak Spanish; and that of this tenth only a very few are educated in any accepted sense of the word. Repeating here a form of summation already employed in this discussion, let us bear in mind that, if we decide to make a grant of independence, we shall be deciding to grant it to a population, composed, first, of a very few educated persons; next, of a small fraction able, through the possession of Spanish, to communicate, with one another; and, lastly, of a remainder—the vast, the immense majority—not only unable so to communicate, but characterized by qualities that, however commendable in themselves, do not constitute a foundation on which popular self-government may safely rest. Further, we mean to grant it to a population which contains no middle class, to one in which the poor are peculiarly at the mercy of the rich, and in which nearly all the elements that make for economic independence are conspicuously lacking.