Ta-gá-la. This is the name applied to servants who receive regular compensation.
It is a matter of common knowledge throughout the sub-province that there are living to-day in Isabela hundreds of Ifugaos who have been sold to Filipinos as slaves.
In Nueva Vizcaya it has been possible to deal with the more flagrant cases since the passage by the commission of the law above referred to, but the commission is powerless to pass a law effective in Isabela.
The holders of slaves now seek to evade the law by nominally hiring them at a monthly salary which is not paid. The promulgation of Act No. 2071 prohibiting and penalizing slavery enabled Lieutenant-Governor Jeff D. Gallman of Ifugao to liberate some forty boys and girls held by Filipinos in Nueva Vizcaya. In no single case, however, could it be proved that the child had been sold. The persons who held them testified in each instance that they were “hired servants.”
When they learned of the provisions of the above-mentioned act they were easily prevailed upon to pay “salaries” long overdue to their “servants” and the latter were allowed to return to their homes.
It was found that some of the persons originally sold into slavery in Nueva Vizcaya had run away from their masters and become vagabonds. Few really wanted to return to their parents, whose language in many cases they had almost forgotten.
I wish this were the worst, but the worst is yet to come. Not only do the Filipinos buy, sell and hold the wild people as slaves, but Filipino children have been kidnapped, or enticed from their homes, by other Filipinos, and sold as slaves to their own kind. Young girls have been sold outright to Chinese who purchased and kept them for immoral purposes. They have been sold to panderers and keepers of houses of prostitution and compelled to enter upon lives of shame. Filipino children and young women have been sold to Chinese who have taken them to China. God only knows what fate may have befallen them there. In such cases the victims disappear from these islands, never to return.
Some slaves are well treated. Others are half starved, brutally beaten, injured or even killed. The Manobos and Manadayas of Agusan and Surigao, and the Bagobos of the Moro Province, have been accustomed to sacrifice slaves to appease their heathen deities. The Manobos on occasion even have their boys take lances and try the effect of different thrusts on slaves tied to trees or posts.
Those who desire long lists of specific cases of slavery will find them in my report. I think that I have here abundantly demonstrated the fact that genuine slavery exists in the Philippine Islands. It can never be successfully checked until there is a law of general application throughout the archipelago penalizing the sale, barter, or purchase of human beings. What reason has the Philippine Assembly for refusing to pass the necessary act?
