A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

The land-owning aristocracy, though it must have been in possession of its advantages for several generations, seems deficient in jealous exclusiveness on the score of birth. I do not remember to have heard once here the expression “of good family,” as we hear it in America, and especially in the South. But I have heard “He is a rich man” so used as to indicate that this good fortune carried with it unquestioned social prerogative. Yet there must be some clannishness based upon birth, for your true Filipino never repudiates his poor relations or apologizes for them. At every social function there is a crowd of them in all stages of modest apparel, and with manners born of social obscurity, asserting their right to be considered among the elect. I am inclined to think that Filipinos concern themselves with the present rather than the past, and that the parvenu finds it even easier to win his way with them than with us. Even under Spanish rule poor men had a chance, and sometimes rose to the top. I remember the case, in particular, of one family which claimed and held social leadership in Capiz. Its head was a long-headed, cautious, shrewd old fellow, with so many Yankee traits that I sometimes almost forgot, and addressed him in English. My landlady, who was an heiress in her own right, and the last of a family of former repute, told me that the old financier came to Capiz “poor as wood.” She did not use that homely simile, however, but the typical Filipino statement that his pantaloons were torn. She took me behind a door to tell me, and imparted the information in a whisper, as if she were afraid of condign punishment if overheard.

“Money talks” in the Philippines just as blatantly as it does in the United States. In addition to the social halo imparted by its possession, there is a condition grown out of it, known locally as “caciquism.” Caciquism is the social and political prestige exercised by a local man or family. There are examples in America, where every village owns its leading citizen’s and its leading citizen’s wife’s influence. Booth Tarkington has pictured an American cacique in “The Conquest of Canaan.” Judge Pike is a cacique. His power, however, is vested in his capacity to deceive his fellowmen, in the American’s natural love for what he regards as an eminent personality, and his clinging to an ideal.

A Filipino cacique is quite a different being. He owes his prestige to fear—material fear of the consequences which his wealth and power can bring down on those that cross him. He does not have to play a hypocritical role. He need neither assume to be, nor be, a saint in his private or public life. He must simply be in control of enough resources to attach to him a large body of relatives and friends whose financial interests are tied up with his. Under the Spanish regime he had to stand in by bribery with the local governor. Under the American regime, with its illusions of democracy, he simply points to his clientèle and puts forward the plea that he is the natural voice of the people. The American Government, helpless in its great ignorance of people, language, and customs, is eager to find the people’s voice, and probably takes him at his word. Fortified by Government backing, he starts in to run his province independently of law or justice, and succeeds in doing so. There are no newspapers, there is no real knowledge among the people of what popular rights consist in, and no idea with which to combat his usurpations. The men whom he squeezes howl, but not over the principle. They simply wait the day of revolution. Even where there is a real public sentiment which condemns the tyrant, it is half the time afraid to assert itself, for the tyrant’s first defence is that they oppose him because he is a friend of the American Government. Local justice of the peace courts are simply farcical, and most of the cacique’s violations of right keep him clear at least of the courts of first instance, where the judiciary, Filipino or American, is reliable. Thus our Government, in its first attempts to introduce democratic institutions, finds itself struggling with the very worst evil of democracy long before it can make the virtues apparent.

The poor people among the Filipinos live in a poverty, a misery, and a happiness inconceivable to our people who have not seen it. Their poverty is real—not only relative. Their houses are barely a covering from rain or sun. A single rude bamboo bedstead and a stool or two constitute their furniture. There is an earthen water jar, another earthen pot for cooking rice, a bolo for cutting, one or two wooden spoons, and a cup made of cocoanut shells. The stove consists of three stones laid under the house, or back of it, where a rice-pot may be balanced over the fire laid between. There are no tables, no linen, no dishes, no towels. The family eat with their fingers while sitting about on the ground with some broken banana leaves for plates. Coffee, tea, and chocolate are unknown luxuries to them. Fish and rice, with lumps of salt and sometimes a bit of fruit, constitute their only diet. In the babies this mass of undigested half-cooked rice remains in the abdomen and produces what is called “rice belly.” In the adults it brings beriberi, from which they die quickly. They suffer from boils and impure blood and many skin diseases. Consumption is rife, and rheumatism attacks old and young alike. They are tormented by gnats and mosquitoes, and frequently to rid themselves of the pests build fires under the house and sleep away the hot tropical night in the smoke. While the upper classes are abstemious, the lower orders drink much of the native vino, which is made from the sap of cocoanut and nipa trees, and the men are often brutal to women and children.

I think the most hopeful person must admit that this is an enumeration of real and not fancied evils, that the old saw about happiness and prosperity being relative terms is not applicable. The Filipino laborer is still far below even the lowest step of the relative degree of prosperity and happiness. Yet in spite of these ills he is happy because he has not developed enough to achieve either self-pity or self-analysis. He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes. When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in spite of his Catholicism.

Of course this poverty-stricken condition is largely his own fault. He has apparently an ineradicable repugnance to continued labor. He does not look forward to the future. Fathers and mothers will sit the whole day playing the guitar and singing or talking, after the fashion of the country, with not a bite of food in the house. When their own desires begin to reinforce the clamors of the children, they will start out at the eleventh hour to find an errand or an odd bit of work. There may be a single squash on the roof vine waiting to be plucked and to yield its few centavos, or they can go out to the beach and dig a few cents’ worth of clams.

The more intelligent of the laboring class attach themselves as cliente to the rich land-holding families. They are by no means slaves in law, but they are in fact; and they like it. The men are agricultural laborers; the women, seamstresses, house servants, and wet nurses, and they also do the beautiful embroideries, the hat-plaiting, the weaving of piña, sinamay, and jusi, and the other local industries which are carried on by the upper class. The poor themselves have nothing to do with commerce; that is in the hands of the well-to-do.

As the children of the clientèle grow up, they are scattered out among the different branches of the ruling family as maids and valets. In a well-to-do Filipino family of ten or twelve children, there will be a child servant for every child in the house. The little servants are ill-fed creatures (for the Filipinos themselves are merciless in what they exact and parsimonious in what they give), trained at seven or eight years of age to look after the room, the clothing, and to be at the beck and call of another child, usually a little older, but ofttimes younger than themselves. They go to school with their little masters and mistresses, carry their books, and play with them. For this they receive the scantiest dole of food on which they can live, a few cast-off garments, and a stipend of a medio-peso (twenty-five cents cents U.S. currency) per annum, which their parents collect and spend. Parents and child are satisfied, because, little as they get, it is certain. Parents especially are satisfied, because thus do they evade the duties and responsibilities of parenthood.

It was at first a source of wonder to me how the rich man came out even on his scores of retainers, owing to their idleness and the demands for fiestas which he is compelled to grant. But he does succeed in getting enough out of them to pay for the unhulled rice he gives them, and he more than evens up on the children. If ever there was a land where legislation on the subject of child labor is needed, it is here. Children are overworked from infancy. They do much of the work of the Islands, and the last drop of energy and vitality is gone before they reach manhood or womanhood. Indeed, the first privilege of manhood to them is to quit work.

The feeling between these poor Filipinos and their so-called employers is just what the feeling used to be between Southerners and their negroes. The lower-class man is proud of his connection with the great family. He guards its secrets and is loyal to it. He will fight for it, if ordered, and desist when ordered.