A Possible Office-holder.
The man with the lance could be elected senator for the Mountain Province were the Jones Bill to be enacted. He has the qualifications therein prescribed as necessary to eligibility for this high office.
The case has been admirably stated by that distinguished gentleman who to-day occupies the highest post within the gift of the American people. He has said:—
“There is profound truth in Sir Henry Maine’s remark that the men who colonized America and made its governments, to the admiration of the world, could never have thus masterfully taken charge of their own affairs and combined stability with liberty in the process of absolute self-government if they had not sprung of a race habituated to submit to law and authority, if their fathers had not been subjects of kings, if the stock of which they came had not served the long apprenticeship of political childhood during which law was law without choice of their own.
“Self-government is not a mere form of institutions, to be had when desired, if only proper pains be taken. It is a form of character. It follows upon the long discipline which gives a people self-possession, self-mastery, the habit of order and peace and common counsel, and a reverence for law which will not fail when they themselves become the makers of law; the steadiness and self-control of political maturity. And these things cannot be had without long discipline.
“The distinction is of vital concern to us in respect of practical choices of policy which we must make, and make very soon. We have dependencies to deal with and must deal with them in the true spirit of our own institutions. We can give the Filipinos constitutional government, a government which they may count upon to be just, a government based upon some clear and equitable understanding, intended for their good and not for our aggrandizement; but we must ourselves for the present supply that government. It would, it is true, be an unprecedented operation, reversing the process of Runnymede, but America has before this shown the world enlightened processes of politics that were without precedent. It would have been within the choice of John to summon his barons to Runnymede and of his own initiative enter into a constitutional understanding with them; and it is within our choice to do a similar thing, at once wise and generous, in the government of the Philippine Islands. But we cannot give them self-government. Self-government is not a thing that can be ‘given’ to any people, because it is a form of character and not a form of constitution. No people can be ‘given’ the self-control of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure them the precious possession, a thing no more to be bought than given. They cannot he presented with the character of a community, but it may confidently be hoped that they will become a community under the wholesome and salutary influences of just laws and a sympathetic administration; that they will after a while understand and master themselves, if in the meantime they are understood and served in good conscience by those set over them in authority.
“We of all people in the world should know these fundamental things and should act upon them, if only to illustrate the mastery in politics which belongs to us of hereditary right. To ignore them would be not only to fail and fail miserably, but to fail ridiculously and belie ourselves. Having ourselves gained self-government by a definite process which can have no substitute, let us put the peoples dependent upon us in the right way to gain it also.”[4]
These views will be indorsed by every intelligent American who knows the Filipino, and has some adequate conception of the problems presented by the presence, in the same country with him, of the Ifugao, the Igorot, the Manobo, the Bukidnon, and the Moro. They are the views of Professor Wilson, historian and political philosopher, at a time when he was unswayed by party prejudices and untrammelled by party policy. Let us hope that President Wilson, the titular leader of the Democratic party and the dispenser of political patronage, has not entirely abandoned them, and that in embarking so boldly, not to say so rashly, as he has done, on the policy of suddenly giving to the Filipinos a radical increase in the control which they are allowed to have over their own affairs, and of leaving them subsequently to demonstrate their fitness or unfitness to exercise it, he will at least be bound by the actual results of an experiment which, as every one familiar with local conditions in the islands well knows, is fraught with the gravest danger.
After all is said and done, the real Philippine question is not what path they shall take. That has been determined, for all nations alike, by a Divine Providence that is all-seeing, all-wise and inexorable. It is not whether they shall travel the old, old road a little faster, or a little more slowly. That will ultimately be settled, for them and for us, by the unanswerable logic of events, and we need not worry over it. The real question is, shall they make their long and adventurous journey, guided, helped and protected by the strong and kindly hand of the United States of America, or shall they be left to stagger along alone, blind in their own conceit, under the keen and watchful eye of another powerful nation, hungrily awaiting their first misstep?