HARVESTING SUGAR CANE.
It is worth while also to remember that foreign service is more or less demoralizing to our troops. Our soldiers are good, average men, but all men are more or less influenced by environment, and our soldiers cannot be expected to maintain as high a standard of morality when far away from home and the influences of home, as when their good purposes are strengthened by the presence of mothers, sisters and friends. The hospital records show the extent to which our soldiers yield to the temptations which surround the post, and the saloons that follow our army speak forcibly of the dangers which attend foreign service. Can we afford to subject the morals of our young men to such severe tests unless there is some national gain commensurate with the loss?
If our nation would at once declare its intention to treat the Filipinos living north of Mindanao as it treated the Cubans, and then proceed, first, to establish a stable government, patterned after our own; second, to convert that government into a native government by the substitution of Filipino for American officials as rapidly as possible; third, to grant independence to the Filipinos, reserving such harbors and naval stations as may be thought necessary; and, fourth, to announce its purpose to protect the Filipinos from outside interferences while they work out their destiny—if our nation would do this, it would save a large annual expense, protect its trade interests, gratify the just ambition of the Filipinos for national existence and repeat the moral victory won in Cuba.
THE RICE HARVEST.
In return for protection from without, the Filipinos would agree, as the Cubans did, that in their dealings with other nations they would not embarrass us.
The reservations retained could be converted into centers for the extension of American influence and American ideals, and our nation would increase its importance as a real world power. Unless our religion and our philosophy are entirely wrong, moral forces are more permanent and, in the end, more potent than physical force, and our nation has an opportunity to prove that a nation's greatness, like the greatness of an individual, is measured by service. It also has an opportunity to prove that the Oriental can be led by advice and improved by example and does not need to be coerced by military power.
Our reservations ought to contain model schools, with a central college, experimental farms and institutions in which the people could be trained in the arts and industries most suited to the natural resources of the country. Our nation is unfitted by history and by tradition to exploit the tropical countries according to the methods employed by the monarchies of Europe. To hold people in subjection requires a large military expenditure; if we were to attempt to make our own people bear such a burden, they would soon protest; if we were to make the Filipinos bear it, it would crush them. The Filipinos would resist such a policy, if employed by us, more bitterly than if it were employed by a European country, because they have learned from us the lessons of liberty. Subject peoples are not willing laborers, and our country would not endorse a system of compulsory labor. Education, too, is inconsistent with a permanent colonial system and cannot be carried far without danger to the ruling power.