We have protected them in their property rights and encouraged them to increase their agricultural holdings. As they were too ignorant to understand and exercise their right to obtain free patent to small tracts of land which they had long occupied and cultivated, I sent out a special survey party to help them make out their applications in due form.
The gradual development of Baguio, first as a health resort and later as the summer capital, afforded them an ever increasing market for their products; while trail construction, the opening of the Benguet Road and the erection of buildings at Baguio made it possible for every one desiring it to secure remunerative employment. In the old Spanish days they had been forced to build trails without compensation, and to feed themselves while doing it. When they realized that the new régime had come to stay, their gratitude knew no bounds.
For a time they could not be persuaded to try the white man’s medicines, but ultimately the wife of the most important chief in the province, who was dying of dysentery, was persuaded to let Dr. J. B. Thomas, a very competent American government physician, treat her case. She recovered, and the news spread far and wide. After that Igorots came in constantly increasing numbers to the hospital which had meanwhile been established, and to-day their sick and injured are often carried to it from a distance of fifty miles or more.
Bontoc Igorot Women in Banana-leaf Costume.
Schools were soon established in several important settlements. The boys proved apt pupils. At the outset parents would not allow their girls to attend. Gradually the prejudice against sending them to school was overcome, and at three different places girls are now given instruction in English and in practical industrial work.
The children learn English readily and the old folks pick it up from them. Mrs. Alice M. Kelly, who started the first Igorot school, taught her boys respectfully to salute her in the morning, and shortly thereafter American travellers over the Benguet trails were addressed by Igorots with the cheerful greeting, “Good morning, Mrs. Kelly.” Their feelings were doubtless identical with those of the traveller in Japan to whom a beginning student of book English said, “Good morning, Sir, or Madam, as the case may be!”
The Benguet Igorots have responded quickly to the opportunities afforded them, and several serious dangers which have threatened their progress have been met and overcome.
The Filipino peoples will never become victims of alcoholism. They drink in moderation, but seldom become intoxicated. The non-Christian peoples, on the contrary, never lose an opportunity to get boiling drunk. All of them make fermented alcoholic drinks of their own. Fortunately most of these beverages are comparatively mild and harmless; but if a hill man can get hold of bad vino or worse whiskey he will get so drunk that he thinks he has to hang on to the grass in order to lie on the ground.
The Filipinos had long taken advantage of this weakness of the Benguet-Lepanto Igorots to debauch them with vino and cheat them while they were intoxicated. I regret to say that since the American occupation some white men who wanted them as labourers have used liquor as a bait. Because of these conditions, and of more or less similar ones throughout the rest of the wild man’s territory, I drafted and secured the passage of an act making it a criminal offence to sell or give white man’s liquor to a wild man, or for such a man to drink such liquor or have it in his possession. This law has been very successfully enforced. Although Benguet-Lepanto Igorots have sometimes succeeded in purchasing liquor at Baguio or Cervantes, their use of strong alcoholic stimulants has steadily decreased, and throughout much of the wild man’s territory strong drink is absolutely unobtainable.