Says the Philippine Commission’s report for 1906 (pt. 1, p. 68):
The Commission has repeatedly called attention in its reports to the action of Congress providing for a refund of duties paid on articles exported from the Islands to the United States and consumed therein. The reasons that led the Commission heretofore to recommend the repeal of that provision are still operative. Since the passage of that act on March 8, 1902, the amount of duties collected and paid into the Philippine treasury and handed over to manufacturers in the United States down to June 30, 1906, is $1,471,208.47. This money has been taken out of the poverty of the insular treasury to be delivered directly into the hands of manufacturers of cordage and other users of Philippine hemp in the United States for their enrichment. The cordage interests are prosperous and do not need this help; the Philippine Islands are poor. Legislation which takes money directly from the Philippine treasury and passes it over to a particular industry in the United States is not founded on sound principles of political economy or of justice to the Filipinos. We renew our recommendation for the repeal of this provision.
You also find in the Commission’s report for 1906 the usual annual protests against the Dingley tariff on Philippine sugar and tobacco. Said the Honorable Henry C. Ide in an article in the New York Independent for November 22, 1906, written shortly after he retired from the office of Governor-General of the Philippines and returned to the United States: “By annexation we killed the Spanish market for Philippine sugar and tobacco, and our tariff shuts these products from the United States market, and to-day both these [industries] are practically prostrated.” In their annual report for 1907, the Philippine Commission say with regard to the American corner on Philippine hemp:[11] “The price of hemp has fallen from an average of twenty pesos ($10 American money) per picul[12] to thirteen pesos per picul.” It thus appears that by judicious manipulation of the hemp market at Manila, through the leverage of the refund system, based on collection and subsequent refunding of the export tax on hemp coming to the United States, the Manila agents of the American hemp manufacturers had, as early as 1907, beat the price of hemp down to not far above half of what it had been formerly. To-day (1912) the Filipino hemp farmer gets for his hemp just one half what he got just ten years ago. During all this period of economic depression, the public utterances and State papers both of President Roosevelt and Mr. Taft are full of such preposterous stuff as the following:
No great civilized power has ever managed with such wisdom and disinterestedness the affairs of a people committed by the accident of war to its hands.[13]
This is what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft were publicly pretending to believe. But at practically the same time, during as dark a year, economically, as the American occupation has seen, 1907, let us see what they were privately admitting to their intimate friends.
In the North American Review for January 18, 1907, in an article contributed to that Review by the author of this volume, our treatment of the Philippine people, through our Congress, was briefly discussed. The article chanced to attract the attention of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who gave a considerable sum of money to have it reprinted and distributed. Some correspondence followed between us, in the course of which Mr. Carnegie stated that he had been at the White House shortly before writing me, and described what happened as follows:
When at supper with the President [Mr. Roosevelt] recently, pointing to Judge Taft [then Secretary of War], who sat opposite, he [President Roosevelt] said: “Here are the two men in all the world most anxious to get out of the Philippines.”
In another letter Mr. Carnegie described this same incident, this other letter’s version of President Roosevelt’s supper-table remark being:
Here are the two men in America most anxious to get rid of them [the Philippines].[14]