Filipinos

“ We have more at stake in this matter than have the Filipinos. They still have their national greatness to achieve; our position is already established. We have the greatest republic known to history; we are the foremost champion of the doctrine of self-government and one of the leading exponents of Christianity. We can afford, aye our honor requires us, to be candid with the Filipinos and to take them into our confidence. ”

“ The Filipinos are in many ways children, delightful ones, with charming manners, but needing a firm and even rule till they come of age and take over their own affairs. Most Filipinos of intelligence realize this. In fact, they have of late been rushing in petitions signed by their best and most influential citizens urging the retention of the Islands in their present standing.
What the Filipino wishes for himself depends upon the man. Only one in ten, among the civilized tribes, knows anything about the discussion of independence. ”

“ But in the no less noble pursuits of science, literature, and art, we may in this very generation see Filipinos achieving more than notable success and distinction, not only for themselves but for their land. ”

“ On moonlight nights the Filipinos make the best of their beautiful world. The aristocrats stroll about in groups of twenty, or even thirty, the young people snatching at the opportunity to slip into private conversation and enjoy a little solitude à deux while their elders are engrossed in more serious topics. The common [283] people enjoy a wholesome romp in a game which seems to be a combination of “tag” and “prisoner’s base.” Groups of serenaders stroll about with guitars and mandolins, and altogether a most sweet and wholesome domesticity pervades the village. ”

“ The truth is, the Filipinos, in the mass, are, as regards the purposes of any real education, virgin material to work upon. Not only has their national and social life not been cast over in Latin molds, but Spanish influence was just sufficient, added to their undeveloped state at the time of the conquest, so that there are no ‘Filipino molds’ of civilization. ”

“ It has, gentlemen, sprung from the hearts of the people, who alone are the real strength of nations, the sovereign king of races, the producers of the arts, of science, of commerce, of wealth, of agriculture, of civilization, of progress, and of all the productions of human labor and intelligence, in all of which the people of the Philippine Islands had made great progress. The Filipinos were not sunk in lethargy, as some untruthfully assert. They suffered, but the hour to break their chains came to them in August, 1896, and they proclaimed to the world their emancipation. ”

“ Here it is in the teeth of the plausible assertions of prejudice and the selfish interests that depreciate the natives:
Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic, but not a hereditary malady.
The Filipinos have not always been what they are. Witnesses to this statement are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the islands.8
Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. ”

“ If we consider further that the Filipinos with whom the whites had dealings belong, for the most part, to the lower strata of society, the opinions of them given by the whites have about the same value as that of an educated Tagal would have who should travel to Europe and judge all Germans and French by the dairy-maids, porters, waiters, and cab-drivers he might meet.
5. The misfortune of the Filipinos is in the color of their skin and in that alone. In Europe there are a great many persons that have risen from the lowest dregs of the populace to the highest offices and honors. ”

“ They have laid down in the beginning a premise for which no inductive process can be found as justification,—that the Filipino people is capable of doing anything which any other nation has done; and that, given time and opportunity—especially the opportunity of managing their own process of development—they will demonstrate their capacity. The flat contradiction of this position which is not infrequently taken by Americans in discussing Filipinos is, of course, as extreme as the Filipino position itself, and, as an observer, I have little to do with either. ”

“ A Typical Spanish Mestiza.
Without going further into the differences which separate the several civilized peoples, I will say emphatically that the great mass of Filipinos do not constitute “a people” in the sense in which that word is understood in the United States. They are not comparable in any way with the American people or the English people. They cannot be reached as a whole, and they do not respond as a whole. ”

“ Filipinos of aught like cosmopolitan intelligence numbered less than 100,000. Below them were the half-breeds, perhaps 500,000 strong, white, yellow, or brown, according to the special blend of blood. They were “intelligent but uneducated, active but not over industrious. They loved excitement, military display, and the bustle and pomp of government.” Farther down still were the vast toiling masses neither knowing nor caring much who governed them. Only in suffering were they experts, having learned of this under the iron heel of Spain all there was to be known. ”

“ Liberal Ideas among the Filipinos.—The release from Moro piracy, the opening of foreign commerce, and the development of agricultural production were rapidly bringing about a great change in the aspirations of the Filipino people themselves. Nearly up to the middle of the nineteenth century the Filipinos had felt the full effect of isolation from the life and thought of the modern world. But the revolutionary changes in Europe and the struggles for constitutional government in Spain had their influence, even in these far-away Spanish possessions. ”

“ Increase in the Number of Wealthy, Educated Filipinos.—The Filipino had now become embarked upon a new current of intellectual experience—a course of enlightenment which has been so full of unexpected development, and which has already carried him so far from his ancestor of one hundred years ago, that we can not say what advance another generation or two may bring. ”

“ Another unfathomable anomaly of American thought is that the “Equality,” Nobility of the Human Race—Rights as a human Being, and so on, are for the Filipinos, but all these grand schemes officially take no account of the fierce, naked savages; the Mahommedan tribes; the negritoes, and all the other wild natives of the Philippines; though how, or where, or when, or by whom the line is to be drawn and the distinction made is another unanswerable problem.
New Year’s Day being a holiday, we thought we would treat ourselves to a drive. ”

“ That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there can be little doubt. As to whether it is our business in that {172} case to manage for them is another question. The Filipinos are, like our negroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever they may be from the standpoint of the evolutionist. "I never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct my plans," an American of rank said to me, "for I look on them as children. ”

“ The Spaniards did not recognise the Filipinos as equals, but treated them with every courtesy, according to their degree, and I believe that whatever the political situation may have been [63] in those days, society went peaceably enough, for every man knew his place and kept it; a system admirably suited to an Oriental people. ”

“ I have been seriously considering what I, or any of us old anti-imperialists, might write for the Filipino paper in California that would be of any real use to the Filipinos themselves or to anybody else. Might we tell them to hold fast to the idea of independence? It has always been our contention that the Filipinos were unanimously for independence, and would remain so, without being confirmed in their faith by us. ”

“ One of the most aggravating characteristics of the Filipinos is the way they murmur, for they have naturally very soft voices, which become positively a whisper with shyness and awe. The English people here adopt the custom, which prevails throughout the East, of calling their servants “boys,” but the Americans use the Spanish word muchacho, and that is unfortunate, as they give all vowels the narrow, English value, making it this word muchaycho. ”

“ Filipinos, the convictions about liberty and government which are the heritage of a people whose ancestors have achieved liberty and enlightenment by centuries of unaided effort, and who are willing to die—die one and all—rather than lose them ”

“ Until an inept bureaucracy was substituted for the old paternal rule, and the revenue quadrupled by increased taxation, the Filipinos were as happy a community as could be found in any colony. The population greatly multiplied; they lived in competence, if not in affluence; cultivation was extended, and the exports steadily increased.—Let us be just; what British, French, or Dutch colony, populated by natives can compare with the Philippines as they were until 1895? ”

“ All the natural laws of development are turned around in the Philippines, and motives which should belong to the crowning years of a nation’s life seem to have become mixed in at the beginning—a condition, due, of course, to the fact that the Filipinos began the march of progress at a time when the telegraph and the cable and books and newspapers and globe-trotters submitted their early development to a harrowing comparison and observation. ”

“ The feeling between these poor Filipinos and their so-called employers is just what the feeling used to be between Southerners and their negroes. The lower-class man is proud of his connection with the great family. He guards its secrets and is loyal to it. He will fight for it, if ordered, and desist when ordered.
The second house I lived in in Capiz was smaller than the first, and had on the lower floor a Filipino family in one room. ”

“ Another reason for the mean opinion in which the Filipinos have been held by the whites is found in the circumstance that in the tropics all the servants are colored. They have the defects of their social class and of servants everywhere. ”

“ You see there are really three different types of savages in the Philippines, according to the census reports. The aboriginal tribes are the Negritos, perhaps as close to primitive man as any people on earth; those are the ones I have been telling you about, and they are a race all to themselves, as different from the rest of the Filipinos as the negro is from the white man. The true Filipinos are Malays. ”

“ Similarly, there is no objection to the term “Filipino” or “Filipinos,” so long as we understand it to mean merely an inhabitant or the inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago, more narrowly the Christianized inhabitant or inhabitants; but it is distinctly wrong to give to the term a political or national color. It may be remarked now that the divisions, both Christian and non-Christian, of which we have been speaking, determined as they are by natural conditions, are likely to survive for many generations to come. ”

“ They say that such a law is wise enough in a country like America, perhaps, which is teeming with a busy population of its own, but here it is quite different, and “Philippines for the Filipinos” would be all very well if these people wanted their country, which does not seem to be the case. ”

“ Serious consideration must be given to another group of facts in considering the fitness of the Filipinos for independence. It is undeniably true that they have progressed much further in civilization than has any other group of peoples of Malayan origin. ”

“ Thus, at the same time that individuals are spared the painful experiences which have moulded and hardened the individual units of other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are continually overlooked or excused. ”

“ One of these came out in March, 1889, in Hong-Kong, but widely circulated wherever there were Filipinos. It is a race that, like the others, has good men and bad, men that go erect and those that crawl. ”

“ Their fury seems to have been particularly directed against the petty tyrants of their own race, the caciques or principales.
The result of Spanish civilization in the Philippines had been to educate, and, to a certain degree, enrich a small class of Filipinos, usually known as principales or the gente ilustrada. It is this class which has absorbed the direction of municipal and local affairs, and which almost [256] alone of the Filipino population has shared in those benefits and opportunities which civilized life should bring. ”

“ Both have a genius for organization that is simply superb. Both are irrepressible about Home Rule. Countless generations ago the Filipinos were lifted by the Spanish priests out of the tribal state, and the educated people all speak Spanish. ”

“ Some argue that American rule in the Philippine Islands will result in the better education of the Filipinos. Be not deceived. If we expect to maintain 137a colonial policy, we shall not find it to our advantage to educate the people. The educated Filipinos are now in revolt against us, and the most ignorant ones have made the least resistance to our domination. ”

“ We insisted upon complete racial equality for the Filipinos, and from the beginning there were a great many of them among our callers and guests. Their manners are 126models of real courtesy, and, while their customs are not always like ours, wherever they are able they manifest a great willingness to be conforme,—to adapt themselves,—and their hospitality is unbounded. ”

“ 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.” ”