Under American rule there has been brought about in the Philippines an admirable state of public order, and life and property are to-day safe throughout practically the whole of an archipelago which, at the close of Spanish sovereignty, was harried by tulisanes, ladrones and Moros. There were also very extensive areas in undisputed possession of wild and savage tribes where governmental control had never been established, where a man was esteemed in proportion to his success as a warrior, and where property was likely to find its way into the hands of men brave enough to seize it and strong enough to hold it.
We have established friendly relations with the very large majority of the wild people and the numerous changes for the better which we have brought about in their territory have been effected practically without bloodshed except in certain portions of the Moro country. By effective legislation, strictly enforced, we have saved these backward tribes from the threatened curse of alcoholism.
Good order was established in Filipino territory through the admirable work of the United States Army, assisted toward the close of military rule by the second Philippine Commission, which did much toward securing the coöperation of the better element among the Filipinos.
Under civil control Filipinos and wild men have been utilized as police officers and soldiers in their respective habitats, and have been an important factor in bringing about present conditions. The Philippine Constabulary, recruited in part from Filipinos and in part from Moros and other non-Christian peoples, has not only proved a most efficient body for the performance of ordinary police work but has rendered invaluable assistance to other bureaus of the government; notably to the Bureau of Health and the Bureau of Agriculture for which it has effectively performed very important quarantine work. It has furthermore proved to be a reliable and most useful body in meeting great public calamities like those caused by the recent eruption of Tall volcano, and the Cebú typhoon.
Reforms of radical importance in the judicial system have been another important factor in making life and property safe, and have resulted in bringing even-handed justice within the reach of many of the poor and the weak.
We found Manila and numerous provincial towns pestholes of disease, while the death-rate of the archipelago as a whole was so high that its climate had gained an evil reputation.
We have given Manila a modern sewer system. We have supplied its people with comparatively pure drinking water from a mountain watershed in place of the contaminated water of the Mariquina River which they were formerly forced to use. We have steadily reduced the death-rate of the city, which is now a safe and healthful place of residence for all who will observe a few simple precautions.
In the provinces, some eight hundred and fifty artesian wells have brought pure water to hundreds of thousands who were previously compelled to depend on infected wells, springs and streams. By making many of the previously most unsanitary regions of the archipelago healthful we have conclusively demonstrated that the lack of necessary sanitary measures, not the character of the climate, was responsible for the conditions which formerly prevailed.
The islands were periodically swept by frightful epidemics of disease. We have eliminated smallpox, previously rightly considered an almost inevitable disease of childhood, as an important factor in the death-rate. We have practically stamped out cholera and bubonic plague. Years have now passed since there has been a wide-spread epidemic of disease among the inhabitants.
The United States Public Health and Marine Hospital Service has not only thrown its protective line around the archipelago but has sent its outposts to important neighbouring Asiatic centres for the dissemination of disease, thus facilitating the exclusion from the archipelago of dangerous communicable ailments and preventing the introduction of pneumonic plague, the most fatal of them all. It would unquestionably have entered the islands had it not been stopped at quarantine.