“No student of our times can fail to see that not America alone but the whole civilized world is swinging away from its old governmental moorings and intrusting the fate of its civilization to the capacity of the popular mass to govern. By this pathway mankind is to travel, whithersoever it leads. Upon the success of this, our great undertaking, the hope of humanity depends.”
If what is needed to make a just and stable government possible is “an entity that knows how to obey, the popular masses” and an entity that thinks it “knows how to govern, the directing class,” then we might leave the islands at once, if willing to leave the wild tribes to their fate, but we have work to do before the civilization of the Filipinos can safely be intrusted to “the capacity of the popular mass to govern.”
Blount has said:—
“Any country that has plenty of good lawyers and plenty of good soldiers, backed by plenty of good farmers, is capable of self-government.”[11]
Do the Philippines fulfill even these requirements? Filipino lawyers are ready speakers, but have their peculiarities. When the civil suit which I brought against certain Filipinos for libel was drawing to its close, and the prosecution was limited to the submission of evidence in rebuttal, important new evidence was discovered. To my amazement, my lawyers put the witness who could give it on the stand. They asked him his age, his profession and a few equally irrelevant questions, and then turned him over to the lawyers for the defense, who promptly extracted from him the very testimony it was desired to get on record. Their very first question drew a most unjudicial snort of laughter from the judge, but even this did not stop them.
I was later informed that Filipino lawyers could usually be depended upon to do this very thing, and that their American colleagues habitually took advantage of this fact. The truth is that few of the Filipino lawyers are good, if judged by American standards.
I have elsewhere stated my views as to the excellence of the Filipino soldier, but no military leaders have as yet arisen who were capable of successfully carrying on other than guerilla operation.
The farmers of the islands are as a class anything but good. They are ignorant and superstitious, underfed, and consequently inclined to indolence, and are a century behind the times in their methods.
There are certain undesirable characteristics which are common to a large majority of the people correctly designated as Filipinos. Ignorance and superstition are still to be met at every turn. At the time of the census of 1903 the percentage of illiteracy in the Philippines was estimated to be 79.8. More than half of the persons counted as literate could read and write only some native dialect, and often did even that badly.
More recent, and therefore more interesting, as showing present day conditions, are the statistics obtained in connection with the elections of June 4, 1912. Ability to read and write English or Spanish entitles a male citizen of the Philippines, who is twenty-three or more years of age, to vote.