A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

Almost the first act of the military was to open the schools. The schoolhouses had been used as barracks by the Tagalogs. The chaplain of the Eighteenth Infantry, the children told me, was their first teacher. The opening of the schools was a great surprise to the Filipinos, who were clever enough to appreciate the national standards which the act implied.

At the time of my arrival the foregoing facts were, in the rush of events, almost ancient history. Two years had passed. American women, wives of officers, had come and gone. Peace had been declared and the machinery of civil government had been put in action.

It would be foolish for me to spend time discussing the Filipino’s aptitude for self-government. Wiser heads than mine have already arrived at a hopeless impasse of opinion on that point. There are peculiarities of temperament in the Filipino people which are seldom discussed in detail, but which offer premises for statements and denials, not infrequently acrimonious, and rarely approached in a desire to make those judging from a distance take into consideration all that makes opinions reliable. Such peculiarities of character seem to me pertinent to a book which deals with impressions.

Whatever their capacity for achieving the Anglo-Saxon ideal of self-government, it ought to be recognized that the Filipinos are both aided and handicapped by receiving not only their government but their civilization ready made. Their newly aroused sense of nationality is asserting itself at a period in the world’s development when the mechanical aids to industry and the conscience of a humane and civilized world relieve Filipino development from the birth throes by which other nations have struggled to the place at which the Filipinos begin. Thus, at the same time that individuals are spared the painful experiences which have moulded and hardened the individual units of other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are continually overlooked or excused.

Both civilization, as acquired in the three hundred years of Spanish occupation, and self-government have descended upon the Filipino very much as the telephone and the music box have done—as complete mechanisms which certain superficial touches will set in motion, the benefits of which are to certain classes and individuals quite obvious, and the basic principles of which they have memorized but have not felt. At present there are not, in the emotional being of the Filipinos, the convictions about liberty and government which are the heritage of a people whose ancestors have achieved liberty and enlightenment by centuries of unaided effort, and who are willing to die—die one and all—rather than lose them; and yet there is a sincere, a passionate desire for political independence. The Filipino leaders, however, have no intention of dying for political independence, nor do they desire to sacrifice even their personal pleasures or their effects. They talk a great deal about independence, they write editorials about it, it fills a great part of their thoughts; and no reasonable person can doubt their sincerity. But most of the political talk in the Philippines is on a par with certain socialistic thought in the United States—the socialistic talk of modern writers and speakers, of idealists and dreamers. It seems as great a perversion of abstract justice, to a Filipino, that an alien nation should administer his Government, as it seems to a hard-working American woman that she should toil all her life, contributing her utmost to the world’s progress and the common burden of humanity, while her more fortunate sisters, by the mere accident of birth, spend their lives in idleness and frivolity, enriched by the toil of a really useful element in society. But to most Filipinos, as to most American women, the contemplation of the elemental injustice of life does not bring pangs sufficient to drive them into overt action to right the injustice. There are a few Filipinos upon whom the American administration in the Philippines presses with a sense of personal obstruction and weight heavy enough to make them desire overt action; but upon the majority of the race the fact of an alien occupation sits very lightly. No man, American or Filipino, wants to risk his life for the abstract principles of human justice until the circumstances of life growing out of the violation of those principles are well-nigh unendurable to him. The actual condition of the Philippines is such that the violation of abstract justice—that is, alien occupation—does not bear heavily upon the mass of the people. For the entire race alien occupation is, for the time being, an actual material benefit. Personal liberty in the Philippines is as absolute as personal liberty in the United States or England. Far from making any attempt to keep the native in a condition of ignorance, the alien occupiers are trying to coax or prod him, by all the short cuts known to humanity, into the semblance of a modern educated progressive man. There is no prescription which they have tried and found good for themselves which they are not importing for the Philippines, to be distributed like tracts. And to the quick criticism which Filipinos of the restless kind are prone to make, that what is good for an American is not necessarily good for a Filipino, the alien occupiers may reply that, until the body of the Filipino people shows more interest in developing itself, any prescription, whether it originate with Americans or with those who look upon themselves as the natural guides and rulers of this people, is an experiment to be tried at the ordinary experimental risk.

The common people of the Philippine Islands enjoy a personal liberty never previously obtained by a class so rudimentary in its education and in its industrial development. They would fight blindly, at the command of their betters, but not because they are more patriotic than the educated classes. The aristocrats, who would certainly hesitate to fight for their convictions, really think a great deal more about their country and love it a great deal more than do the common people, who would, under very little urging, cheerfully risk their lives. But the poorer people live under conditions that seem hard and unjust to them. The country is economically in a wretched state, and the working-classes have neither the knowledge nor the ambition to apply themselves to its development. Unable to discover the real cause of their misery (which is simply their own sloth), they have heard just enough political talk to make them fancy that the form of government is responsible for their unhappy condition. With them the causes which drive men into dying for an abstract idea do exist; and it is easy for a demagogue to convince them that the alien occupation is the root of all evil, and that a political change would make them all rich.

Among the extremely poor of the Filipinos there exists a certain amount of bitterness against Americans, because they think that our strong bodies, our undoubtedly superior health and vitality, our manner of life, which seems to them luxurious past human dreams, and our personal courage are attributes which we enjoy at their expense. The slow centuries which have gone to our building up, mental and physical, are causes too remote for their limited thinking powers to take into consideration. Moreover, though we say that we have come to teach them to work and to make their country great, we ourselves do not work; at least, they do not call what we do work. A poor Filipino’s conception of work is of something that takes him into the sun or that soils his clothing. Filipinos hate and fear the sun just as they hate the visible tokens of toil on their persons. Where they know the genteel trades such as hat weaving, dressmaking, embroidering, tailoring, and silversmithing, there is relatively a fair industrial willingness. Men are willing to be cooks and house servants, but they do not want to learn carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening, all of which mean soiled clothes and hot work; and women are unwilling to work in the kitchen. From the poor Filipinos’ standpoint, the Americans do not work—they rule. It would be difficult to make a Filipino of the laboring class believe that a teacher or a provincial treasurer had done a day’s work. Loving, as all Filipinos do, to give orders to others, ignorant as they are of the responsibilities which press upon those who direct, they see merely that we do not soil our hands, and they envy us without giving us credit for the really hard work that we do.

Meanwhile there pours in upon the country a stream of modern mechanism and of modern formulated thought, and the laborer has just as little real interest in knowing what is inside the machine as his slightly more intelligent neighbor has in examining the thought and in accepting or rejecting it on its merits. Some accept all that we offer them, doing so in a spirit of real loyalty, on the assumption that we know more than they do, and that our advice is to be accepted. Others reject everything with a blind resentment because it comes from our hands. They feel that, in accepting or rejecting, they are demonstrating their capacity to do their own thinking, when in reality they are only asserting their right to do their own feeling. A sense of discrimination in what they accept or reject in our thought has not yet appeared, to any great extent, in those classes of Filipinos with whom I have come in contact; nor as yet have I ever beheld in the laboring classes a desire to understand the mechanisms to which they are constantly introduced, which will be the first symptoms of growth.

A few weeks ago a Filipino workman was making an electric light installation in my house. He handled the wires very carelessly, and I asked him if he was not afraid of a shock. On his replying that the current was very light, I put the inevitable American query, How did the company manage to get a light current on one street, and at the same time to keep up the current in other parts of the city? His reply was, “There is a box on Calle San Andres, and the current goes in strong on one side and comes out light on the other,” On my asking if he knew how the box was able to produce such a result, he replied blithely that he did not know; and to a third question, why he did not try to find out, he asked me why he should want to know. He was a very ignorant man, but his attitude was not uncharacteristic of much wiser men than he. I discovered one morning, in talking to the most advanced class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, that not one of them knew what steam is, or had any idea of how it is applied to manufacture; and yet they were working every day, and had been working, most of them for two or three years, in the machine-shops and the wood-working shops where a petroleum engine was in constant operation. The boys had shown such a courteous interest in what was pointed out to them, and had so little real interest and curiosity in what they were working with, that their shop teachers had never guessed that they did not know the elementary principles of mechanics.

If a flying machine should suddenly descend in an American village with no sign of steam gear, electric motor, compressed air, or any other motive power with which we are familiar, can you imagine that eighty per cent of the population of the village would stand around, begging the inventor to make it fly and alight again, exhibiting all the delight of children in a strange toy, but giving it not one close glance, one touch to determine how it is made, and not even wondering anything about it? Can you imagine all those people placidly accepting the fact that there are other nations interested in making strange machines, and receiving the strange toy as an example of foreign energy with which, at that or at any other time, they had no concern? Yet such is the actual condition of affairs in the Philippine Islands, and I am not sure that my estimate of eighty per cent is not too low. Filipinos of the educated classes, gentlemen who can talk about