The poor blind people wandered from village to village in groups of two to twenty. Quite a number of the moderately insane would go about begging, too, but the worst were chained to trees or put in stocks and their food thrown at them. Even the dumb brutes were not so poorly cared for.
The houses of the rich, while not cleanly and not well furnished, always have one large room in which stands a ring of chairs with a rug in the center of the floor and a cuspidor by each seat. You are ushered in and seated in one of these low square chairs, usually cane seated. After the courtesies of the day and the hostess’s comments on the fineness of your clothing, refreshments are brought in,—cigars, cigarettes, wine, cake, and preserved cocoanut. Sometimes American beer is added as possibly more acceptable than the wine.
The citizens of Jaro seemed to be friendly, they often invited me to their festivities; committees would wait upon me, presenting me sometimes invitations engraved upon silver with every appearance of cordiality in expression and manner. They could not understand why I would not accept; I would explain, that first, I had no desire; second, I thought it poor policy to do so when our soldiers were obliged to fight their soldiers, and they were furnishing the money to carry on the warfare; then too, most of their balls were given on Sunday night. True, a Filipino Sunday never seemed Sunday to me. I could only say, foolishly enough, “But it is not Sunday at home.” I could not attend their parties and I had little heart to dance. I had only to go to the window to see their various functions; it could hardly be called merry as they went at it in such a listless, lazy way, with apparently little enjoyment, the air that they carry into all their pleasures.
Philippine Agriculture.
Chapter Fourteen.
It has been said that the prosperity of any nation depends largely upon its agriculture. The soil in the Philippines is very rich. The chief product, which the natives spend the most time upon, is rice; and even that is grown, one almost might say, without any care, especially after seeing the way the Japanese till their rice. They sow the rice broadcast in little square places of about half an acre which is partly filled with water. When this has grown eight or ten inches high they transplant it into other patches which have been previously scratched over with a rude one-handled plow that often has for a point only a piece of an old tin can or a straggly root, and into this prepared bit of land they open the dyke and let in the water; that is all that is necessary until the harvesting. They have a great pest, the langousta or grasshopper, and they are obliged, when these insects fly over a section of the country, to scare them away by any means in their power, which is usually by running about through the rice fields waving a red rag.
As I have said before they gather these pests and eat them. I have seen bushels of fried langousta for sale in the markets. When they gather the rice harvest, it is carried to some nearby store room, usually in the lower part of the house in which they live. Then comes the threshing, which is done with old-fashioned mills, by pounding with a wooden mallet, or by rubbing between two large pieces of wood. Then they winnow it, holding it up by the peck or half bushel to let the wind blow the hulls off, and dry it by placing it on mats of woven bamboo. I saw tons of rice prepared in this way by the side of the road near where I lived. This being their staple, the food for man and beast, one can form some idea of the vast quantities that are needed. There was a famine while I was there and the U. S. government was obliged to supply the natives with rice for seed and food.
There is no grass grown except a sort of swamp grass. The rice cut when it is green is used in the place of grass. It is never dried, as it grows the year round. One can look out any day and see rows of small bundles of this rice paddy laid by the road side for sale or carried by the natives on bamboo poles, a bundle before and one behind to balance. It was astonishing to see these small men and boys struggling under the weight of their “loads of hay.” None of the American horses cared for it; their hay and grain had to be stacked up along the wharf and guarded. It would be of little use, however, to the natives as they know nothing about the use of our products.
If there was any wheat grown in the islands, we never heard of it, and judging from the way in which flour was sold in their markets at ten cents for a small cornucopia that would hold about a gill, it was probably brought from either Australia or America.