IslandCivilizedWildTotal
Luzon3,575,001223,5063,798,507
Panay728,71314,933743,646
Cebu592,247592,247
Bohol243,148243,148
Negros439,55921,217460,776
Leyte357,641357,641
Samar222,002688222,690
Mindanao246,694252,940499,634

I think the above table makes clear the enormity of the injustice I am now trying to crucify. Without stopping to use your pencil, you can see that Mindanao, the island where the “intractable Moros” Governor Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million people. Half of these are civilized Christians, and the other half are the wild, crudely Mohammedan Moro tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list, you behold what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except Mindanao), viz., Luzon and the six main Visayan Islands. If you will turn back to pages 225 et seq., especially to page 228, where the student of world politics was furnished with all he needs or will ever care to know about the geography of the Philippine Islands, you will there find all the rocks sticking out of the water and all the little daubs you see on the map eliminated from the equation as wholly unessential to a clear understanding of the problem of governing the Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzon and the six main Visayan Islands above, as constituting, for all practical governmental purposes all the Philippine archipelago except the Moro country, Mindanao (i.e., parts of it), and its adjacent islets; Luzon and the Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people, and of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at the above table, constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled in the pockets of their various mountain regions. Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame, peaceable, and tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they “might possibly mistake the object of a visit.” The half million “intractable Moros” of Mindanao, plus those in the adjacent islets, make up another 300,000. These last, it is true, will need policing for some time to come, but whether we do that policing by retaining Mindanao, or whether we let the Filipinos do it, is a detail that has no standing in court as a reason for continuing to deny independence to the 7,000,000 of people of Luzon and the Visayan Islands because they have some 300,000 backward people in the backwoods of their mountains. Yet see how the ingenuity of inspired ignorance states the case, by adding the 300,000 tame tribes of Luzon and the Visayas to the 300,000 fierce Moro savages away down in Mindanao, near Borneo, so as to get 600,000 “wild” people, and then alluding to the fact that so far only 200,000 Filipinos are qualified to vote. Says the report of the minority of the Committee on Insular Affairs on the pending Jones bill (proposing independence in 1921):

The wild and uncivilized inhabitants of the islands outnumber, 3 to 1, those who would be qualified to vote under the pending bill [the Jones bill].

You see the minority report is counting women and children, when it talks about the wild tribes, but not when it talks about voters. According to universally accepted general averages, among 7,500,000 people you should find 1,500,000 adult males. No one doubts that of these, by 1921, 500,000 will have become qualified voters. No one can deny that any such country having 500,000 qualified voters, the bulk of whom are good farmers, and the cream of whom are high-minded educated gentlemen, and all of whom are intensely patriotic, will be in good shape for promotion to independence. What wearies me about this whole matter is that the minority report above mentioned is permitted to get off such “rot,” and the New York Times, the Army and Navy Journal, and others, to applaud it, while the Administration sits by, silent, and reaps the benefit of such stale, though not intentional, falsehoods, without attempting to correct them, so that our people may get at the real merits of the question. You see this silence inures to the benefit of the interests that have cornered the Manila hemp industry.

In the campaign of 1912 for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, there was much mutual recrimination between Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Taft about which of them had been kindest to the International Harvester Company. It seems to me it is “up to” Governor Forbes, who in the Philippines has served under the present President and his predecessor also, to explain why he has abandoned the fight, so long waged by previous governors-general, to get what former Governor-General James F. Smith calls “the [hemp] joker” of the Act of Congress of 1902 concerning the Philippines, wiped from the statute books of this country.

[1] In June, 1912, Governor Forbes was still Governor-General.

[2] By “foreign” I mean, of course, American, i.e., non-resident.

[3] Hearings on Sugar, April 5, 1912.

[4] Introduced in the House of Representatives by Hon. W. A. Jones, of Va., Chairman of the Committee on Insular Affairs of the House, in March, 1912.