MANILA AND THE PHILIPPINES
Just outside of Asia proper as in a proscenium box are these islands, half mystic, half savage, like the kings who sent men out to conquer the world, with sword in one hand and hostia in the other!
No place on earth has had possibly a more romantic experience, full as it has been, of the acts of primitive unchained manhood and the infinitely worse aspects of human nature, the avarice, intrigue political and ecclesiastical eccentricities of civilization. The whole story is written in the annals of these verdant radiant slopes, not all written yet! Then on pages brilliant as some illumined missal is inscribed the devotion of the chivalrous sainthood of Spain. The dramatic element is furnished by the Chinese invasions followed by the British and our own and as you pass along these streets, the walls and towers “cry out.”
Just outside then of Hongkong, the “superb” the Genoa of the East, her prows turned to every point of the compass, her flags the colors of human statehood, of petty kingdoms and massive empires, the gateway of Asia, the Asia of the North, destined like everything Northern to outrank the South, in virility if not in subtility and charm, we of the Philippines have a glance which takes in more than a piece of the oriental horizon it embraces. The chiaro-oscuro after leaving the islands at the end of a long sejour, when as at the close of life, the colors seem to blend into one dominant tone, is a sort of soft grey, enveloping the receding city, built so far away, at so much sacrifice; over all the blemishes the cruelties and crudities of a society hardly half formed, of a state hardly above the first foundations, one’s feeling is wonder and pity, wonder that men and women have had the courage to face it at all, pity for their heroic struggle against ignorance and all the human brood of evils under a tropic sun, which dries the blood in the veins and leaves the nerves tingling to every breath and thought.
But were this all, who would have the power to live out their story here! In the phantasmagoria of this tropical nature there is something ever new, ever fresh, ever upbuilding and upraising, the forces of this universe of which we are a part. There is a measure in this Oriental dawn, like the lines of Omar Khayyam, which swings in the rhythm of the hours. Every day we feel we can, every day we do! Then in the embrace of the transcendant peace of the Oriental night, we learn to watch and wait, knowing we shall be soon with “Yesterday’s seven thousand years.”
There is something in the atmosphere, a certain occult fluid, which takes the place of ozone and strange as it may seem these sunburnt, sunscorched lands have rushing over them the gales of ardor, of desire to run the race of manhood worthily, every nerve taut, every tendon stretched.
“Time cannot change, nor fortune stale her infinite variety,” would well describe Manila.
Gathered from the four corners of the earth a motley crowd is her citizen’s roll! Embryo politicians, incipient scholars and philanthropists, altruists of curious conflicting lives and creeds, every social curiosity in the gamut, from those who never saw a ship until they reached San Francisco, who were once a cordon bleu and are now posing as grande dames, (?) to those who have given up all the beauty of some castle height in Spain, or some equally refined home in America to spend their best of life and service as a tropical gift, lavish and unstinted, without thought of return.
We also find all the comical inconsistent forms of religionists of every shade of narrowness and Pharisaism, at once gallant defenders of their faith and guilty of inhuman barbarity to their fellows, intriguing clothed with piety, just as in the old, old days, but where is “the milk of human kindness” on the other hand sweeter to the palate, sated as it must become with all else, where do you see lips quiver more tenderly over a sorrow, or eyes light more divinely at noble word, or deed!