Juan Araneta, a very intelligent Visayan of Negros, put the matter brutally to me by saying that white blood was the only hope for his people, and that if he had his way he would put in jail every American soldier who did not leave at least three children behind him.
Blount pretends to find an obstacle to American control in the fact that American women will not marry Filipinos, and in the further fact that those American men who do marry Filipinas soon find themselves out of touch with their former associates. He says that this is not as it should be.[9] He adds that many Filipinos are sons or grandsons of Spaniards, and therefore have a very warm place in their hearts for the people of that nation.
He neglects to mention the fact that the vast majority of the Spanish mestizo class were born out of wedlock.
I believe that the attitude of American women on this subject is eminently proper and that American men, who expect ever again to live in their own country, as a rule make a grave mistake if they marry native women. Even when they are to remain permanently in the islands, such a course is in my opinion usually most undesirable. I have known a limited number of happy mixed marriages of this sort, but in the large majority of cases which have come under my observation they have led to the rapid mental, moral and physical degeneration of the men concerned. While some of the children born of such marriages are very fair, there are occasional reversions to the ancestral type of the mothers, and the lot of dark-skinned children is not a happy one, as even their own mothers are almost sure to dislike them.
The mestizo class is now large enough, and the problems which its existence presents are grave enough, to render undesirable its further growth. Finally, while the light-skinned mestiza girl almost always seeks a white husband, the real typical Filipinos, who are brown, are quite content to mate with each other, and do not dislike whites for declining to marry their daughters. The people of this class are friendly toward Americans, if they have actually come in contact with them and learned how much they are indebted to them, and are hostile if their ignorance is so great that they can be led, by unscrupulous politicians, to believe that Americans are responsible for any ills from which they happen to be suffering, such as cholera, which they have often been told is due to our poisoning their wells!
Blount says[10] it is a “verdict of all racial history ... that wheresoever white men dwell in considerable numbers in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white men will rule.”
Certainly Spanish and other European mestizos dwell in considerable numbers in the Philippines. Are individuals with three-fourths to thirty-one thirty-seconds white blood white men or Asiatics? They certainly would determine what form of government should be established were independence now granted, and it is interesting to determine what they consider to be the requisites for the establishment of a government by them. One of these men in an address made at the time the congressional party visited the islands, with Mr. Taft, put the case as follows:—
“If the masses of the people are governable, a part must necessarily be denominated the directing class, for as in the march of progress, moral or material, nations do not advance at the same rate, some going forward whilst others fall behind, so it is with the inhabitants of a country, as observation will prove.
“If the Philippine Archipelago has a governable popular mass called upon to obey and a directing class charged with the duty of governing, it is in condition to govern itself. These factors, not counting incidental ones, are the only two by which to determine the political capacity of a country; an entity that knows how to govern, the directing class, and an entity that knows how to obey, the popular masses.”
The conditions portrayed might make a government possible, but it would assuredly not be a republic. The advocates of this view are hardly in harmony with the one so eloquently expressed at Rio Janeiro by Mr. Root:—