The Philippine Islands

by Ramon Reyes Lala

In the depths of the forest, and along the streams, beautiful orchids abound; here clustered on stately trees so dense of growth that the sun’s rays scarcely penetrate their foliage; there giving life and color to the ground, and of such odd and amazing forms, that one often seems looking rather upon flowering birds and insects than upon plants. Here and there one finds oneself amid the spreading roots of the balete tree (Ficus Indica), from whose broad buttresses rises the mighty trunk, of such girth and even rotundity, that the natives make cart-wheels from sections of it. Down from the boughs, sixty feet in air, hang the rope-like lianes, descending, like nature’s cordage, to the ground, while to the limbs cling orchids and other foreign growths, until the entire great tree seems a botanical world in itself.

I have passed hours wandering spellbound in the forest, or gazing with eyes of wonder and delight into its silent depths. Yes, little of the poet as I have in my make-up, I, too, have been taken prisoner by a beauty and a grandeur that I found it difficult to tear myself away from.

And these scenes are not merely local. Indeed, wherever one goes into the rural regions of the islands he finds the same amazing prodigality of tropic growth. There are thousands of square miles of dense forest within which the foot of the white man has rarely ever set; thousands perhaps upon which none but the natives have ever gazed; costly woods, whose value can be reckoned only in millions of dollars. Valuable herbs, medicinal plants, and hot springs abound; and the naturalist and the economic botanist alike are sadly needed to open up this luxuriant land to the world.

The Promise of the Future.

Under new control I expect to see, in the twentieth century, a new destiny for this noble group of islands. Whether the people be given their freedom under the protection and influence of the United States, or the islands become a direct appanage of that or of some other enterprising nation of the West, a turn in the tide of Philippine affairs can hardly fail to set in, and the possibilities of the land be developed to an extent undreamed of under the effete rule of Spain.

I expect to see an invasion of this island-realm by three classes of modern enterprise. The scientist is sure to find his way there, and tell the world of the new and the strange in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. With him will come the engineer, opening up roads right and left, laying a network of iron rails, where now only the buffalo-cart drags along, introducing the latest machinery for mining and farming-industries, and starting a hum of activity in every quarter of the long-slumbering land. With these also will enter the practical economist, in search, not of the new, but of the useful, prospecting the forests for plants of economic value, seeking for new mines of coal and iron, tracing the gold placer-beds up to their mother-veins, seeking everywhere for what the Philippines have to add to the useful productions of the world.

These will be the twentieth century pioneers of this promising Archipelago, the results of their labors being exploited by the merchant and the manufacturer. The seas shall teem with ships carrying the products of the islands to foreign shores, and bringing back full cargoes to supply the demands of the islanders, commerce steadily growing in amount as civilization awakens the natives to the perception of new wants.

Examples of a similar rejuvenation could easily be pointed out, and there is no conceivable reason why the Philippines should not be added to the list. These islands have been lavishly dealt with by nature; they have an industrious population; yet they have been allowed to remain for centuries in a semi-savage industrial condition; they still await the touch of the magic hand of modern enterprise to arouse them from their state of decadence, and swing them into the tide of human progress. Under this influence prosperity and activity must come to them, as it has come to other lands, and those long-neglected and abused islands be made to “bud and blossom like the rose.”