A great many natives bustle about American Manila in European or white linen suits, and it is a very exhausting place; but one can’t quite see the good of it all. I asked an American official (what they call “a prominent citizen”), whom I met at dinner the other night, how the Filipinos were to profit by all this bustle and book-learning.
“Why,” he said, “I guess they will learn to appreciate our civilisation and then want it, and want all the things that civilisation entails, so there will be a demand, and trade will come right along, and these islands will wake up and flourish.”
I wanted to argue, however, so I said: “But why should the Filipinos wake up? Why not give the poor creatures lots of cheap food. If they have a little rice, and a banana patch, and a nipa hut, and no priests to bother them, that is all they want, and there will always be an inexhaustible market for the produce of the islands. It seems such a pity to daze their poor brains, and hurry them about like this.” But he said it was no good trying to talk about this to me, as I evidently could not understand the American Ideal.
So I dropped the subject, for when it comes to the American Ideal, I am hopelessly at variance, and think it better to say no more. The Ideal is this, you see, that every people in the world should have self-government and equal rights. This means, when reduced from windy oratory to common-sense, that they consider these Malay half-breeds to be capable, after six years of school-teaching by the type of master I described to you (about which type, by-the-bye, experience has given me no reason to change my mind), of understanding the motives, and profiting by the institutions which it has taken the highest white races two or three thousand years to evolve. They are supposed to be so wonderful, these flat-faced little chaps, because they have shown a sudden aptitude for the gramophone and imitation European clothes, a free and abusive press, and unlimited talk—endless talk. But it seems to me that these are the traits one is accustomed to in the emancipated coloured person all the world over. In fact, when I come to think of it, America with this funny little possession of hers is like a mother with her first child, who has never noticed anyone else’s children, and thinks her own bantling something entirely without parallel or precedent; quotes it as a miracle when it shows the most elementary symptoms of existence, and tries to bring it up on some fad of her own because it is so much more precious and more wonderful than any other child any one else ever had.
March 7.
Yesterday we went to buy prison-made goods at Bilibid, which is the big jail of Manila, and of the whole Philippine Islands. When anyone has committed a serious crime, he is sent up to Bilibid to eke out the period that has to elapse before he is carted back to his original island to be executed. The prison is a mass of half-finished-looking grey stone buildings, where prisoners in yellow-striped jerseys, like gigantic wasps, were going about behind iron railings.
We went into a huge stone hall, where there were quantities of all sorts of basket-work furniture on show; a row of carriages, all prison-made; and at the farther end a white man standing behind some glass-covered tables containing little objects for sale. I wanted to get some small souvenirs to send home, and examined carefully all the little trifles and curios in black wood, bone, and silver, with which the cases were filled; but I could not see anything that was uncommon or characteristic, or even worth buying at all. All the things looked to me as if someone had been to Naples or Colombo, and come back and told the Filipinos what to make, for here were souvenir teaspoons, paper knives of black wood, bone hairpins, and so on, and not one of them of a pattern one has not seen prepared for the traveller in every city of the world. I hunted all through the cases, and amongst the furniture in the hall, but could find nothing distinctive—everything was well made, but utterly banal. However, this did not concern me much, as what I had really come for was ordinary furniture, and this I managed to get to my satisfaction, and a little cheaper than in the Chinamen’s shops in Iloilo, which is to say exactly double the prices of Hong Kong.
Amongst a great many things stored in a corresponding hall upstairs were some basket chairs of an uncommon pattern, with a back like a huge spreading peacock’s tail; but, though they were pretty, these chairs did not strike me as characteristic of a people living in nipa huts, but much more like the suggestion of a wandering admirer of l’art nouveau.
Besides the chairs, I noticed some small columns of hard Filipino woods, intended for flower stands, but the price asked for them was 10 pesos (one guinea) each, which I thought ridiculous for plain, flat, polished wood. It appeared that they were derelict from the St Louis Exhibition, or, as it is called, “Exposition,” and on each was resting, temporarily, a little figure carved in wood and painted in bright colours, representing a Filipino man or woman—the woman in red skirt (not sarong) and camisa, and the men with their shirts outside, and carrying a fighting cock under one arm. By-the-bye, there is fierce indignation and terrible offence taken by the Filipinos about that same “Exposition,” as the Philippine section was got up attractively barbarous, with too much of the savage element, wild-men-of-the-woods in fantastic hovels, and so forth, to please the educated and high-class natives and Mestizos, who want independence, and think they are more likely to get it than the prehistoric savage.
On the way out here I met a German who had been to St Louis, and who told me that the two chief exhibits were the Boer War and the Philippine section, and that the latter was nearly all savages in huts, with fish-corrals in artificial ponds, and all that sort of thing. I remember he was quite surprised to hear that there was any other town than Manila, or any civilisation in the Philippines except the marvellous dawn that rose with the Stars and Stripes. I believe that was very largely the impression produced in America, and not quite ingenuously—that the inhabitants of these islands were a race of naked cannibals and savages who were suddenly being transformed into the educated Mestizo, who goes to college in America and returns here to write seditious articles and talk his head off. Well, whatever the impression desired or produced, the way it was brought about has caused endless anger amongst those Islanders who would rather be thought civilised than picturesque.