The cost per annum of the Philippine (native) scouts, of which there are 4000, is paid out of the United States Treasury, and amounts to $2,000,000 per annum.[10] The number of American troops in the islands for the last few years has been about 12,000. Those who are wedded to the present Philippine policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention, insist that our military expenses in the Philippines, in respect to the regular army out there, are not fairly chargeable as a part of the current expenses of the Philippine occupation. This argument must be admitted to have some force as far as the navy is concerned, but as to the army it is clearly without merit. Under the Act of Congress reorganizing the army of the United States after the Spanish War, provision was made for a skeleton army of about 60,000 men capable of expansion to something like 100,000 in time of war. The method of expansion thus contemplated was to have companies of, say, for illustration, sixty men, in time of peace, which companies could be recruited up to a war footing of one hundred men, in time of war. The suggestion that the cost of the part of the regular army which we have to keep in the Philippines is not chargeable to the Philippines because those same troops would have to be somewhere in the United States if they were not where they are, is not well taken. If we did not need 12,000 men continually in the Philippines, the army could be at once reduced by that much without affecting its present organization. If we had no troops in the Philippines this would not mean the absolute elimination from the army of enough regiments to represent twelve thousand men. It would not eliminate any existing organization. It would simply mean contraction of the number of men in the several companies of the several regiments of the army toward a peace basis to the extent of a total of twelve thousand men, more or less. The War Department has long figured on the cost of an American soldier in the Philippines per annum including his pay, allowances, and transportation out and back, at $1000 per annum. The cost of 12,000 soldiers at $1000 per annum is $12,000,000, per annum. The conclusion would, therefore, seem inevitable that the extra military current expense chargeable to our occupation of the Philippines is $12,000,000, per annum, outside the Philippine scouts, or, a total of $14,000,000. Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, that is no reason why we should continue to run a kindergarten for adults out there, and let the Monroe Doctrine run to seed. “Something” is not “bound to turn up.” The Philippine Islands will not prove a blessing in disguise. In every war with a nation having discontented colonial subjects, the enemy will always strike the colony first, and hope for aid from the inhabitants thereof.
Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, we are a nation of nearly 100,000,000 people. So they have cost us, all told, in the neighborhood of only about $3 a piece. And we subjugated them by mistake, after freeing a less capable people, the Cubans.
The Panama Canal is to be finished in 1913. This means a splendid, but free-for-all contest, for the trade of South America. In South America we will meet a tremendous pro-German sentiment, and a by no means inconsiderable anti-“Yankee” sentiment. The bigger Germany’s army and navy grows, the more she will loom up as the one great menace to the peace of the world, and the one avowed enemy of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit de corps, based on the instinct of self-defence. We must win the good will of South America, and we cannot do it so long as we insist, in another part of the world, upon the righteousness of the principle of one Christian people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly to keep them from having revolutions, and really in the hope of ultimate profit. To free the Filipinos should be the first step we take after the Panama Canal is completed toward getting ourselves foot-loose entirely, with a view of getting everything from the Canadian border to the Argentine wheat fields and beyond, solidly and sincerely for the Monroe Doctrine. In that direction lies our only sensible and reasonable hope that the canal will get for us the trade and friendship of South America. With such tremendous issues at stake, what does it matter to the richest nation on earth what the Philippines cost? What does it matter, anyhow, how much it costs to do right?
[1] War Department Report, 1899, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 142.
[2] Ibid., pp. 559–560.
[3] See War Department Report, 1901, vol. i., pt. 4, p. 98.
[4] War Department Report, vol. i., pt. 5, p. 60.
[5] From July 31, 1898, to May 24, 1900, we lost 1138 men by disease. See special report of the Surgeon-General of the Army, Senate Document 426, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. By the middle of 1900 our soldiers had pretty well learned how to take care of themselves in the tropics.
[6] See vol. ii., p. 102.