American occupation of the Philippines

“ Give the Americans out there a square deal. Let them know whether we are going to keep the islands or whether we are not. Honesty is a far better policy than the present policy. The Americans in the islands, Mr. Taft’s agents in the Philippines, talk no uncandid and misleading stuff about the Philippines being exclusively for the Filipinos. ”

“ I really believe that the southern men in the Philippines have always gotten along better with the Filipinos than any other Americans out there, and for the reasons just suggested. Not only is the universal American willingness to treat the educated Asiatic as a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights going to redeem him from the down-trodden condition into which British and other European contempt for him has kept him, but the American from the South out there is a guarantee that he shall never be treated as if he were an African. ”

“ It is certainly a shame that the fate and future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. ”

“ There is not an American who has known the Filipinos since the beginning of the American occupation who doubts for a moment that but for our intervention a Republic would have been established out there under the lead of Aguinaldo, Mabini, and their associates, which would have compared well with the republican governments between the United States and Cape Horn. ”

“ The Americans give out and write in their papers that the Philippine Islands are completely pacified, and that the Filipinos love Americans and their rule. This, doubtless with good motives, is complete and utter humbug, for the country is honeycombed with insurrection and plots; the fighting has never ceased; and the natives loathe the Americans and their theories, saying so openly in their native press and showing their dislike in every possible fashion. ”

“ There is hardly a single island in the group from which you cannot shoot across to one or more of the others—scarcely another archipelago in the world in which the islands are crowded so closely together and so interdependent.
This explains also why the Filipino people are a people. Whenever the American people understand that, they will give them their independence, unless they get an idea that government of their people by their people for their people would be distasteful to them. ”

“ Because you are so far-sighted, you cannot fail to realize that if you are enabled to satisfactorily settle a dispute that has been raging for three centuries, and give America the Philippines to exploit, you will have distinguished yourself in a way that is sure to bring reward. ”

“ Nowhere in any American state paper connected with the Philippines is there any reference to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The sin of our Philippine policy is that it is a denial of the right of a people to pursue happiness in their own way instead of in somebody else’s way. It is a denial of the very principles in maintenance of which we went to war against Spain to free Cuba, as we had previously gone to war against England to free ourselves. ”

“ Suggests the hypocrisy of boasting about “the good we are doing” the Filipinos when predatory special interests are all the while preying upon the Philippine people even more shamelessly than they do upon the American people, and by the same methods, viz.: legislation placed or kept on the statute-books of the United States for their special benefit, the difference being that the American people can help themselves if they will, but the Philippine people cannot. ”

“ Well they might. Fourteen years have elapsed since then, and the law-making power of the United States has never yet declared whether the American occupation of the Philippine Islands is to be temporary, like our occupation of Cuba was, or permanent, like the British occupation of Egypt is. True, Dr. Phelan said “military” occupation, but the smile was provoked by the suggestion of temporariness. After the committee smiled, they remarked:
We have fought for independence and feel that we have the power of governing and need no assistance. ”

“ General Aguinaldo’s policy embraces the independence of the Philippines. * * * American protection would be desirable temporarily, on the same lines as that which might be instituted hereafter in Cuba.
Mr. Pratt also forwards a proclamation gotten up by the Filipino insurgent leaders at Hong Kong and sent over to the Philippines in advance of Admiral Dewey’s coming, calling upon the Filipinos not to heed any appeals of the Spaniards to oppose the Americans, but to rally to the support of the latter. ”

“ The heavy guns of the battleships have been mounted at Corregidor and Caney, and the 160,000 Spanish troops in the city laugh at the idea of America ever being able to take it.”
“Yet America will take it. The American fleet will be here and will win, and then they will give us freedom. Within a few months the Filipinos will be free, and then Ambrosia Lonzello will become Ambrosia de Saguanaldo.” ”

“ In fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one homogeneous political unit. In a most charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in the Philippines,20 we can see our attempts to fit government by two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a squirrel. In one passage the British sister describes our programme as one “to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American methods ”

“ Root—who had not then and has not since been in the Philippines—had said in Chicago, in a speech at a dinner of the Marquette Club:
Well, against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting the Philippine nation? No. There is none. There are hundreds of islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes, speaking more than sixty different languages, and all but one are ready to accept American sovereignty. ”

“ Men of English stock have changed but little in the matter of race instinct since 1776. If we had a definite policy, declared by Congress, promising independence, the American attitude in the Philippines toward the Filipinos would at once change, from the present impossible one, to our ordinary natural attitude of courtesy toward all foreigners, regardless of their color. ”

“ But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous position with the government may be very [442] generally detested and actually not know it.3 The American in the Philippines, with all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or speech,—even supposing any paper would publish it—which, copied by the papers back in the United States, would embarrass the National Administration’s Philippine policy in any way. ”

“ It is the language alike of business and of diplomacy. The Filipino people, so eager to participate in all the busy life of eastern Asia, so ambitious to make their influence felt and their counsels regarded, will be debarred from all this unless they master this mighty English tongue.
The Filipino Assembly.—Thus, after four and a half years of American occupation, the sovereignty of the United States has been established in the archipelago, and a form of government, unique in the history of colonial administration, inaugurated. ”

“ Advantages of American Control.—Surely, a people is economically far more privileged if, like the Philippines under the American government, or Australia under the British, they are compelled to sustain no portion of the burden of exterior defense. The navies of the United States to-day protect the integrity of the Philippine archipelago. ”

“ This bitterness grew naturally out of what seemed to the Filipinos an evident purpose of the United States to take and keep the Islands and an accompanying unwillingness to acknowledge that purpose, as shown by the conspicuous discrepancies between the original text of the proclamation as published at Iloilo by General Miller, on January 1st, and the modified version of it given out by General Otis at Manila on January 4th. ”

“ There was no strategic reason that demanded the Philippines unless the United States desired to have an operating base near to the vast resources and the developing markets of China. As a vantage point from which to wage commercial and military aggression in the Far East, the Philippines may possess certain advantages. ”

“ The question of the Philippines is different and much less clear. It is undoubtedly a question of accepting the responsibilities, trials, and complications of far-distant foreign possessions in the nature of colonies. An American State in the Philippines is now impracticable, and will perhaps always be so. The islands we take we must administer and develop, and we must defend them against internal disorder or foreign aggression. ”

“ When they speak of independence, they invariably assume that America is going to protect them against China, Japan, or any of the great colony-holding nations of Europe.
Such are the peculiar governmental conceptions of the middle-class Filipino—a class holding the ballot by the grace of God and the assistance of the American Government. Their inverted ideas come from real inexperience in highly organized industrial society, and from perfectly natural deductions from books. ”

“ Nor can the American Government, if it remain here, do any more than it is now doing to urge the Filipino into real industrial and mental activity. Until the Filipino takes more interest in things than he takes in himself; until he learns to approach life from some other standpoint than the social one, and with some other object than seeing how large a figure he can cut in it, it makes no difference what flag flies over his head, his national existence is an artificial one, a semblance of living nourished by the selfishness of those with whom he has commercial relations. ”

“ The American system is in reality not foreign to the Philippines, but it is the highest development, perfected by experience, of the original plan under which the Philippines had prospered and progressed until its benefits were wrongfully withheld from them. Filipino leaders had been vainly asking Spain for the restoration of their rights and the return to the system of the Laws of the Indies. ”

“ No policy ever entered into by the American people has vindicated itself in more signal manner than the policy of holding the Philippines. The triumph of our arms, above all the triumph of our laws and principles, has come sooner than we had any right to expect. Too much praise can not be given to the Army for what it has done in the Philippines both in warfare and from an administrative standpoint in preparing the way for civil government ”

“ These and others urged that the Filipinos had inalienable right to life and to liberty; that our policy in the Philippines was in derogation of those rights; that Japan, left to herself, had stridden farther in a generation than England’s crown colony of India in a century; that the Filipinos could be trusted to do likewise; that our increments of territory hitherto had been adapted to complete incorporation in the American empire while the new were not; and that growth of any other character would mean weakness, not strength. ”

“ The Philippines is American Territory where our unsupported forces were destroyed by the enemy. Practically all of the 17,000,000 Filipinos remain loyal to the United States and are undergoing the greatest privation and suffering because we have not been able to support or succor them. ”

“ Many of the politicians want independence under a United States protectorate, by which they mean that their country shall be turned over to them to do with as they please, with a fleet of American warships lying conveniently near to see that they are not interfered with while thus engaged. It would be the height of folly for us to enter into any such arrangement.
We must help the Filipinos to attain for their country commercial prosperity, so that its revenues may be more adequate for the support of government. ”

“ And the indispensable need from the Filipino point of view of maintaining American sovereignty over the archipelago is recognized by all intelligent Filipinos and even by those insurgents who desire an American protectorate. The latter, it is true, would take the revenues and leave us the responsibilities. Nevertheless, they recognize the indubitable fact that the Filipinos cannot stand alone. Thus the welfare of the Filipinos coincides with the dictates of national honour in forbidding our abandonment of the archipelago. ”

“ The acquisition of the Philippines was not like the settlement of the white race in the United States. Whatever consideration may have been shown to the North American Indians, the dominant purpose of the whites in America was to occupy the land. It is obvious that, however stated, the reason for our taking over the Philippines was different. No one, we suppose, would deny that, so far as consistent with paramount necessities, our first object in the internal administration of the islands is to do justice to the natives, not to exploit their country for private gain. ”