We have put the finances on a sound and sensible basis.
To this also I say Amen. The Forbes article then goes on to say that the government of the Islands is self-supporting. This is true, except the $14,000,000 a year it costs us to keep out there a garrison of 12,000 American troops (supplemented by certain native scouts—see chapter on “Cost of the Philippines,” hereafter). This garrison is conceded to be a mere handful, sufficient merely, and intended merely—as a witty English woman has put it in a book on the Philippines—“to knock the Filipino on the head in case he wants his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it.” In other words, we only attempt to keep force enough there to quell any outbreak that might occur. So far as possible invasion by any foreign power is concerned, our $14,000,000 per annum is an absolutely dead loss. Brigadier-General Clarence Edwards, U. S. A., commanding the Bureau of Insular Affairs, said recently[3] before the Finance Committee of the Senate:
I would never think of the Philippines as a military problem for defence. If any nation wants them, it is merely a declaration of war.
What a shameful admission for a great nation to subscribe to, relatively to people it pretends to be protecting! The programme of the War Department is to abandon the Islands to their fate, for the time being at least, in our next war, letting them remain a football until the end of such war, when, as an independent republic they could, and would, rally as one man to the defence of their country against invasion, and would, with a little help from us, make life unbearable for an invading force. As things stand, we are just as impotent as Spain was out there in 1898, and it is utter folly to forget what happened then.
But to return to Governor Forbes’s article and to a pleasanter feature of the situation. He says:
We have established schools throughout the archipelago, teaching upward of half a million children.
This also is true, and greatly to our credit. But as the American hemp trust mulcts the Philippine hemp output about a half million dollars a year (as above suggested, and later, in another chapter, more fully explained), it follows that each Filipino child pays the hemp trust a dollar a year for the privilege of going to school.
And now let us consider the most supremely important part of Governor Forbes’s magazine article above quoted. The burden of the song of the adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill (looking to Philippine independence in 1921)[4] is that because there are certain “wild tribes” scattered throughout the archipelago, in the mountain fastnesses, therefore we should cling to the present policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention until the wild tribes get civilized. Governor Forbes’s article is an absolute, complete, and final answer to the misinformed nonsense of the minority report aforesaid. He says, apropos of public order:
It is now safe to travel everywhere throughout the Islands without carrying a weapon, excepting only in some of the remote parts of the mountains, where lurk bands of wild tribes who might possibly mistake the object of a visit, and in the southern part of the great island of Mindanao which is inhabited by intractable Moros.
The foregoing unmasks, in all its contemptible falsehood, the pretence that the presence of a few wild tribes in the Philippines is a reason for withholding independence from 7,000,000 of Christian people in order that a greedy little set of American importers of Manila hemp may fatten thereon. True, hemp is not edible, but it is convertible into edibles—and also into campaign funds. That the existence of these wild tribes—the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903–4—constitute infinitely less reason for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American Indian constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123):[5]