When the convention heard that the Platt amendment must be complied with, a commission was sent to Washington to have this explained. Upon its return the convention, June 12, 1901, not without much opposition, adopted the amendment.
The first President of the Cuban Republic was Tomaso Estrada Palma. He had been years an exile in the United States, and was much in sympathy with our country. His home-coming was an ovation. In May, 1902, the Stars and Stripes were hauled down, and the Cuban tricolor raised. The military governor and all but a few of his soldiers left the island, as the Spaniards had done less than three years before; yet with a record of dazzling achievement that had in a few months done much to repair the mischiefs of Spain’s chronic misrule.
Cut off from her former free commercial intercourse with Spain, Cuba looked to the United States as the main market for her raw sugar. Advocates of reciprocity urged considerations of honor and fair dealing with Cuba, where, it was said, ruin stared planters in the face. The Administration and a majority of the Republicans favored the cause. Not so senators and representatives from beet-sugar sections. The “insurgents,” as the opponents of reciprocity were called, urged that raising sugar beets was a distinctively American industry, and that to sacrifice it was to relinquish the principle of protection altogether. The so-called “Sugar Trust” favored reciprocity, being accused of expending large sums in that interest. Against it was pitted the “Sugar Beet Trust,” a new figure among combinations.
During the long session of the Fifty-seventh Congress, a Cuban reciprocity bill being before the House, the sugar-beet interest demonstrated its power. The House “insurgents,” joining the Democratic members, overrode the Speaker and the Ways and Means chairman, and attached to the bill an amendment cutting off the existing differential duty in favor of refined sugar. A locking of horns thus arose, which outlasted the session, neither side being able to convince or outvote the other. Sanguine Democrats thought that they espied here a hopeful Republican schism like that of 1872.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE UNITED STATES IN THE ORIENT
PHILIPPINES AND FILIPINOS
The Philippine Archipelago lies between 4 degrees 45 minutes and 21 degrees north latitude and 118 and 127 degrees east longitude. It consists of nineteen considerable and perhaps fifteen hundred lesser islands, an area nearly equal that of New Jersey, New York, and New England combined. The island of Luzon comprises a third of this, that of Mindanao a fifth or a sixth. The archipelago is rich in natural resources, but mining and manufactures had not at the American occupation been developed. Agriculture was the main occupation, though only a ninth of the land surface was under cultivation. The islands were believed capable of sustaining a population like Japan’s 42,000,000. Luzon boasted a glorious and varied landscape and a climate salubrious and inviting, considering the low latitude. Manila hemp, sugar, tobaco, coffee, and indigo were raised and exported in large amounts.
General Bates. The Sultan.
The Jolo Treaty Commission.
The islands lay in three groups, the Luzon, the Visaya (Negros, Panay, Cebu, Bohol, Leyte, Samar, and islets), and the Mindanao, including Palawan and the Sulu Islands. Some of these islands were in parts unexplored. The Tagals and the Visayas, Christian and more or less civilized Malay tribes, dominated respectively the first and the second group. The Mindanao coasts held here and there a few Christian Filipinos, but the chief denizens of the southern islands were the fierce Arab-Malay Mohammedans known as Moros, most important and dangerous of whose tribes were the Illanos.