A sparse population, scattered over a poor soil, can carry on production only by primitive methods and on a small scale. It can have only the most rudimentary division of labor; it cannot have manufacturing industries, or good roads, or a rapid interchange of intelligence; all of which, together with a highly developed industrial organization and a perfect utilization of capital, are possible to the populations that are relatively dense.
A highly developed political life, too, is found only where population is compact. Civil liberty means discussion, and discussion is dependent on the frequent meeting of considerable bodies of men who have varied interests and who look at life from different points of view. Movements for the increase of popular freedom have usually started in towns.
Education, religion, art, science, and literature are all dependent on a certain density of population. Schools, universities, churches, the daily newspaper, great publishing houses, libraries, and museums come only when the population per square mile is expressed by more than one unit, and their decay is one of the first symptoms that population is declining. * * *.”—Franklin H. Giddings, The Principles of Sociology, (New York, 1911), pp. 366–367.
[32] “These changes show how important it was to establish at different points, extending over two hundred miles of the Archipelago, commercial centers, where it was desirable that foreigners should settle. Without these latter, and the facilities afforded to credit which hereby ensued, the sudden rise and prosperity of Iloilo would not have been possible, inasmuch as the mercantile houses in that capital would have been debarred from trading with unknown planters in distant provinces, otherwise than for ready money.” Jagor, Travels in the Philippines. (London, 1875), p. 304.
Azcarraga, pp. 168–177; 197–198.
Le Roy, Bibliographical Notes, 1860–1898.—Bl. and Rb., Vol. 52, pp. 112–114.
[33] Jagor gives credit to the two American houses in the Philippines for the development of the abacá into an important article of export. These American houses in the first years sank large sums of money in advance loans, and were only able to get the business on a paying basis when, in 1863, they were permitted to establish warehouses and presses in the provinces at the principal points where the crop was produced, and to deal directly with the producers. Jagor (Spanish edition, p. 264); Le Roy, The Americans in the Philippines, Vol. 1, pp. 33–34.
For an interesting discussion of the struggle between England and the United States for supremacy in the Philippines, and the role played by the English banks in that struggle, see a pamphlet entitled Commercial Progress in the Philippine Islands, by Antonio M. Regidor and J. Warren T. Mason, (1905).