The old world and its ways

by William Jennings Bryan

Not only must the salaries of Americans be high, but Americans must be surrounded with comforts to which the average Filipino is not accustomed. No one can remain in the Philippines long without hearing of the Benguet road and the enormous amount expended in its construction. There is a mountain resort in Benguet Province, in north central Luzon, which the commission thought might be developed into a summer capital or a place to which the families of the officials, if not the officials themselves, might retreat during the heated term. The railroad running from Manila to Dagupan would carry the health-seeker to within thirty or forty miles of Benguet, and an engineer estimated that a wagon road could be constructed the rest of the way for $75,000. It seemed worth while to the commission to appropriate that much for a purpose which promised so much for the health and comfort of those engaged in the benevolent work of establishing a stable government. The commission could hardly be blamed for relying upon the opinion of the engineer, and the engineer doubtless meant well. But the first appropriation scarcely made an impression, and the second engineer estimated that the cost would be a little greater. Having invested $75,000, the commission did not like to abandon the plan and so further appropriations were made until more than two millions and a half dollars, gold, have been drained from the Insular treasury, and the Benguet road is not yet completed. If it is ever completed, it will require a constant outlay of a large sum annually to keep it in repair.

Having met the members of the commission and other Americans residing in the Philippines, I am glad to testify that they are, as a rule, men of character, ability and standing. The personnel of Philippine official life is not likely to be improved, and so long as we occupy the islands under a colonial policy, the Benguet experiment is liable to be repeated in various forms, and yet the Filipinos point to the Benguet folly to show that the Americans are both ignorant of local conditions and partial toward the foreign population.

The third question, are the Filipinos competent to govern themselves? is the one upon which the decision must finally turn. Americans will not long deny the fundamental principles upon which our own government rests, nor will they upon mature reflection assert that foreigners can sympathize as fully with the Filipino as representatives chosen by the Filipinos themselves. The expensiveness of a foreign government and its proneness to misunderstand local needs will be admitted by those who give the subject any thought, but well-meaning persons may still delude themselves with the belief that Spanish rule has incapacitated the present generation for wisely exercising the franchise, or that special conditions may unfit the Filipinos for the establishment and maintenance of as good a government as can be imposed upon them from without.

DR. G. APACIBLE.

Before visiting the Philippines, I advocated independence on the broad ground that all people are capable of self-government—not that all people, if left to themselves, would maintain governments equally good, or that all people are capable of participating upon equal terms in the maintenance of the same government, but that all people are endowed by their Creator with capacity to establish and maintain a government suited to their own needs and sufficient for their own requirements. To deny this proposition would, as Henry Clay suggested more than half a century ago, be to impeach the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator. I advocated independence for another reason, viz., because a refusal to admit the Filipinos capable of self-government would tend to impair the strength of the doctrine of self-government when applied to our own people. Since becoming acquainted with the Filipinos I can argue from observation as well as from theory, and I insist that the Filipinos are capable of maintaining a stable government without supervision from without. I do not mean to say that they could maintain their independence, if attacked by some great land-grabbing power (it would be easier to protect them from aggression if they were independent, for then they would be interested with us against the attacking party), but that so far as their own internal affairs are concerned, they do not need to be subject to any alien government. There is a wide difference, it is true, between the general intelligence of the educated Filipino and the intelligence of the laborer on the street and in the field, but this is not a barrier to self-government. Intelligence controls in every government, except where it is suppressed by military force. Where all the people vote, the intelligent man has more influence than the unintelligent one, and where there is an obvious inequality, a suffrage qualification usually excludes the more ignorant.

Take the case of the Japanese for instance, no one is disposed to question their ability to govern themselves, and yet the suffrage qualifications are such that less than one-tenth of the adult males are permitted to vote. Nine-tenths of the Japanese have no part in the law making, either directly or through representatives, and still Japan is the marvel of the present generation. In Mexico the gap between the educated classes and the peons is fully as great, if not greater, than the gap between the extremes of Filipino society, and yet Mexico is maintaining a stable government, and no party in the United States advocates our making a colony of Mexico on the theory that she cannot govern herself.

Those who question the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government overlook the stimulating influence of self-government upon the people; they forget that responsibility is an educating influence and that patriotism raises up persons fitted for the work that needs to be done. Those who speak contemptuously of the capacity of the Filipinos, ignore the fact that they were fighting for self-government before the majority of our people knew where the Philippine islands were. Two years before our war with Spain, Rizal was put to death because of his advocacy of larger liberty for his people, and after witnessing the celebration of the ninth anniversary of his death, I cannot doubt that his martyrdom would be potent to stir the hearts of coming generations whenever any government, foreign or domestic, disregarded the rights of the people.

A year before our war with Spain the Filipino people were in insurrection against that country, and they demanded among other things "parliamentary representation, freedom of the press, toleration of all religious sects, laws common with hers, and administrative and economic autonomy."