To-day there seems a place in Manila for just suets, missionary work as The Indolence of the Filipino aimed at. It may help on the present improving understanding between Continental Americans and their countrymen of these "Far Off Eden Isles", for the writer submits as his mature opinion, based on ten years' acquaintance among Filipinos through studies which enlisted their interest, that the political problem would have been greatly simplified had it been understood in Dewey's day that among intelligent Americans the much-talked-of lack of "capacity" referred to the mass of the people's want of political experience and not to any alleged racial inferiority. To wounded pride has the discontent been due rather than to withholding of political privileges.
Spanish Philippine history has curiously repeated itself during the fifteen years of America's administration of this archipelago.
Just as some colonial Spaniards seemed to the Filipinos less creditable representatives of the metropolis than the average of those who remained in the Peninsula, so not all who now pass for Americans in the Philippines are believed here to measure up to the highest homestandard.
Sitters in swivel-chairs underneath electric fans hold hopeless the future of the land where men do not desire to be drudges just as did their predecessors who in wide armed lazy seats, beneath punkahs, talked of Filipino indolence.
Ingratitude, to-day as then, is the regular rejoinder to the progressing people's protest against paternalism, and altruistic regard for their real welfare is still represented as the reason why special legislation should be provided when Filipinos prefer the same laws as govern the sovereign people.
Though those who claim to champion the Philippines' cause apparently are unaware of it, these Islands have a population strangely alike in its make up to the people of America; their history is full of American associations; Americans developed their leading resources, and American ideas have inspired their political aspirations. It betrays blindness somewhere that ever since 1898 Filipinos have been trying to get loose from America in order to set up here an American form of government,
There seems now a, prospect that insular legislation may make available to the individual the guarantees of personal liberty upon which America at home prides itself, that municipal self-government and provincial autonomy may become realities in the Philippines, and possibly even that both Filipinos and Americans may realize before it is too late how our elastic territorial government could be made to exact from them much less of their independence than the sacrifice of sovereignty necessary in Neutralization or internationalization.
Unwillingness to work when there is nothing in it for them is common to Filipinos and Americans, for Thomas Jefferson admitted that extravagance and indolence were the chief faults of his countrymen. Labor-saving machinery has made the fruits of Americans' labors in their land of abundance afford a luxury in living not elsewhere existing. But the Filipino, in his rich and not over-populated home, shutting out, as we do, oriental cheap labor, may employ American machinery and attain the same standard. The possibilities for the prosperity of the population put the Philippines in the New World, just as their discovery and their history group them with the Western Hemisphere.
Austin Craig,
University of the Philippines,