A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

“The grandeur that was Greece,

And the glory that was Rome,”

or who can quote Tom Paine or Voltaire or Rousseau, or discuss the fisherman’s ring of the Pope, or the possibilities of an Oriental race alliance, would give a glance at such a machine and dismiss it with such a remark as this: “Ah! a new flying machine. Very interesting. If it proves practical, it should be a great benefit to the Philippines. The Government should buy two or three and put them in operation to show the people how they can be used.”

The great majority of the Filipino people are simply apathetic toward the material and spiritual appliances of their present status. (Please do not infer, however, that they are apathetic toward the status itself.) Fortune is continually thrusting upon them a ready-made article, be it of transportation, of furniture, of education, or even of creed. With no factories of its own, their land is deluged with cheap manufactured goods. With almost no authors, they have been inundated with literature and texts. With no experience in government, they have a complicated system presented to them, and are told to go ahead, to fulfil the requirements, to press the button, and to let the system do the rest. And they are, with few exceptions, making the mistake of assuming that their aptitude in learning to press the button is equivalent to the power of creating the system. They are like some daring young chauffeur who finds that he can run an automobile, and can turn it and twist it and guide it and control it with the same ease that its inventor does, and who feels that he is as fully its master—as indeed he is, till something goes wrong.

The intelligent Filipinos who are pressing for immediate self-government have no intentions of changing the “press-the-button” system if they get what they want. Nor can the American Government, if it remain here, do any more than it is now doing to urge the Filipino into real industrial and mental activity. Until the Filipino takes more interest in things than he takes in himself; until he learns to approach life from some other standpoint than the social one, and with some other object than seeing how large a figure he can cut in it, it makes no difference what flag flies over his head, his national existence is an artificial one, a semblance of living nourished by the selfishness of those with whom he has commercial relations.

Group of Officials in front of Presidente’s (Mayor’s) Residence

The intelligent Filipinos (I speak of the ordinary middle classes of Manila and the provinces, not of the really eminent Filipinos who are associated with the Government, for with them I have little acquaintance) have had so little practical contact with the great world, so little conception of what a strong commercial and manufacturing nation is, that it is impossible to make them understand that no nation of the present day can achieve greatness except by industry. If you can get them to talk freely, you find them absorbed in a glorious dream of the Filipino people dazzling the world with pure intellectuality—a Philippines full of poets, artists, orators, authors, musicians, and, above all, of eloquent statesmen and generals. They do not reflect that a statesman is wasted who has nothing but a handful of underfed people to govern, and that it is commerce and agriculture which furnish the propelling power to the ship of state on which the statesman is a pilot. They want to be progressive, and their idea of progress is a constant stream of mechanical appliances flowing like water into the Philippines from other lands; but they do not even consider where the money is to come from to pay for all the things they want. They howl like victims over taxation, but they have a hazy idea that it is the duty of their Government to seek out every labor-saving machine in the world and to buy it and to put it in operation in the Philippines till the inhabitants have accustomed themselves to its use, and have obtained through its benefits the wherewithal to indulge in more of the same sort. They do not concern themselves with the problem of the Government’s getting the money to do all this, other than they think that if we Americans were out of the way, and the six or eight million pesos of revenue which go annually into our pockets were going to Filipinos instead, there would be money in plenty for battleships, deep-water harbors, railroads, irrigation, agricultural banks, standing armies, extended primary and secondary education; and that the resources of the Government would even permit of the repeal of the land tax, of the abolition of internal revenue taxes, and of the lowering of the tariff. One of their favorite dreams of raising money is to put a tremendously high license upon all foreigners doing business in the Islands; and so high an opinion have they both of their value to the world at large and of their prowess, that they do not take into consideration the probability of the foreigner’s either getting out of the country or appealing to his own Government to protect his invested capital. When they speak of independence, they invariably assume that America is going to protect them against China, Japan, or any of the great colony-holding nations of Europe.

Such are the peculiar governmental conceptions of the middle-class Filipino—a class holding the ballot by the grace of God and the assistance of the American Government. Their inverted ideas come from real inexperience in highly organized industrial society, and from perfectly natural deductions from books. When they study Roman and Greek history, they learn there the names of generals, poets, artists, sculptors, statesmen, and historians. Books do not dwell upon that long list of thriving colonies which filled the Grecian archipelago with traffic, and reached east and west to the shores of Asia and to the Pillars of Hercules. The Filipinos learn that Rome nourished her generals and her emperors upon the spoils of war, but they do not reflect that the predatory age—at least in the Roman sense—is past. Their imaginations seize upon the part played by the little island republic of Venice, and they gloat over the magnificence of the Venetian aristocracy, but they hardly give a thought to the thousands of glass-blowers, to the weavers of silken stuffs, to the shipbuilders and the artisans, and to the army of merchants that piled up the riches to make Venice a power on the Mediterranean.