Many results of these stirring times still remain in the streets, for the top stories of the houses were knocked off and the stone foundations gutted, and when the people settled down peaceably again, there was no money to restore the buildings to their former state, so they just put rough rooms over the charred ruins, makeshift upper stories of Oregon pine with corrugated iron roofs, which arrangement makes the town look very shoddy and unfinished. In Jaro and Molo are to be seen many of the handsome old Spanish houses still standing, with carved wooden balconies and ornamented doorways, some of them still beautified by deep roofs of charming old red-brown hand-made tiles.
There is a café in the Plaza Libertad, in what was once a big, fine house, but now the thick concrete walls of the lower storey, with huge doorways and window-openings crossed by heavy bars, all blackened with smoke, end abruptly in a narrow-eaved corrugated roof, making a house like a misshapen little dwarf.
There are many buildings like that, and in the streets the jumble of different sorts of odds and ends is most curious, but not the least picturesque, for it is all grey and mean and squalid.
All the middle of the square, which, as I told you, is called the Plaza Libertad, is laid out as a pretty Alameda, with a low wall round it, and steps leading up on each side, the centre thickly planted with palms, bamboos, and various other trees of dark and light greens, intersected by four wide paths and a lot of little tracks, all bristling with seats. Some of the seats are of wood, broken and dilapidated, and others of iron painted to look like marble, which are quite warm to the touch hours after sunset. The first evening we were there, when I put my hand on one of the iron seats, thinking to touch cold stone, I got quite a shock on finding the surface warm.
This flowerless garden is a very pretty place, especially at night, when the big arc-lights shine on the very green trees, and throw lovely shadows of palm branches on the white paths, making quite a theatrical effect; but it is all overgrown, untidy, neglected, the steps broken, paths untrimmed—always reminding me of some place in a deserted city, or the garden of a house long uninhabited.
The Plaza Libertad has one resemblance to a real town park, however, in its rows of idle men; brown-faced, white-clad Filipinos in this case, who sit on the seats and low walls like rows of sea-birds, only, instead of making nests or catching food as birds would, they simply doze, and gamble, and talk, or, more often, sit about in the profound abstraction of the Oriental.
The “unemployed” has no grievance against society, however, in this country, if he ever tries to attempt one, for work is abundant and labour not to be had, even at the present scale of wages, which enables a man to work for one day and then keep himself and his family to the remotest scions, in idleness and cock-fighting for a week. You see in the Spanish days the Philipino labourers got from 10 to 20 cents a day wages but now the American Government, which sets the scale, gives a peso a day for unskilled labour, and that, of course, has altered the social conditions here, and, I believe, all over the Islands as well, for the same conditions prevail everywhere. A peso a day they get for loading and unloading vessels—just wharf-coolies; and as for carpenters and people like that who used to get 70 cents from the Spaniards and live well on it, they are now with difficulty to be caught for 2½ to 3 pesos a day. Of course this has enormously increased the cost of living without bringing any extra benefits, but that particular increase chiefly affects the white man, for I have asked servants and natives, who tell me the cost of their food, the eternal rice, fish, and bananas for them has very little altered, if at all.
The high rate of wages, far from bringing plenty, has caused great demoralisation and consequent poverty; and it does seem a pity that some one who understood Orientals and their ways could not have come and pointed out to the Americans how dark races differ from white men in body and mind. As it is, I should think that even if the well-meaning reformers do find out their mistakes, which is very doubtful, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the Americans to go back now.
On one side of the Plaza there stand a few specimens of the funny native trap called a quilez, which I have mentioned to you. It is very like the tartana of Spain, a sort of tiny wagonette on two wheels, and covered so that it is really a sort of miniature two-wheeled omnibus.
Such a cabstand! Such fearfully dilapidated old rattle-traps, with mangy ponies lashed in by odds and ends of straps and string, and the drivers dressed in dirty rags (the only dirty Filipinos I’ve ever seen) sprawling half-asleep on the boxes! This collection, as I have said, is by way of being a cab-rank, but there are always plenty of quilezes plying the streets for hire; their number indeed being at first astounding, till one becomes better acquainted with the laziness of the fares, coupled with the high rates of hire, which alone would make one job a day quite a good investment.