It has been found necessary to exercise close supervision over them in order to correct a constant tendency on the part of those having authority to abuse it.
Practically all the time of three lawyers in the executive bureau is taken up in examining evidence and reports of administrative investigations of charges against municipal officials and justices of the peace, of whom about two hundred are found guilty each year. Half that number are removed from office. One of the commonest charges against these officers is “abuse of authority,” and one of the most difficult and endless tasks of the American administrative officers is to impress on the elective native official a sense of obligation toward his “inferiors,” that is, the plain people who elected him.
He expects obsequiousness and even servility, and if they are lacking, endeavours to get square.[14]
Surely I have given enough illustrations of the ferocious brutality with which Filipino officials treated the common people in the days of the “Republic.” Such brutality would again be in evidence were there to be any failure to hold officers strictly accountable.
The following case, called to my attention by a reliable American woman, illustrates the fact that provincial governors are sometimes swayed by other than humanitarian motives:—
“In 1902 when I was living at Capiz, a very pretty little fellow, a child of 7 or 8, often came begging to my house. Finally he ceased to come and I saw nothing of him for several months. Then I met him one morning, stone blind, his eyes in frightful condition. I made inquiry and learned that the people with whom he lived (his parents were dead) not finding him a remunerative investment had decided that he must be made more pitiful looking to bring in good returns as a beggar. So they filled his eyes with lime and held his head in a tub of water. I took the child to the Governor (the late Hugo Vidal) to make complaint. The Governor listened to my story, and then exclaimed, ‘You are mistaken. I have known this child for years and he has been like this all the time.’ The local sanitary chief agreed with him, and I was forced to give up all hope of having the inhuman wretches that had tortured the child punished.”
The attitude of provincial and municipal officials toward very necessary sanitary measures has often been exceedingly unfortunate.
In 1910 the officials of the town of Bautista, Pangasinán, voted to have a fiesta, in spite of the fact that the health authorities had informed them that this could not be done safely, owing to the existence of cholera in the neighbouring towns. The town council preferred the merry-making to the protection of the lives of the people, and voted to disregard the warnings of the Bureau of Health, with the result that several of the neighbouring municipalities were infected with cholera, and many lives were needlessly lost. The governor of the province, himself a Filipino, was lax in attention to duty in this instance or the town council would have been suspended before, instead of after, this action on its part.
For a long time municipal policemen were commonly utilized as servants by the town officials, and were nearly useless for actual police work. To put firearms into their hands was little better than to present them outright to the ladrones. At present the constabulary exercise a considerable amount of control over municipal police, and there has resulted very material improvement in their appearance, discipline and effectiveness.
Municipal councils in the majority of cases voted all of the town money for salaries, leaving nothing for maintenance of public buildings, roads and public works, with the result that streets in the very centres of towns became impassable even for foot passengers. They were often indescribably filthy, cluttered with all sorts of waste material, and served as a meeting ground for all the horses, cattle, dogs, pigs, hens and goats of the neighbourhood.