When Governor Forbes assumed the duties of Governor-General of the Philippines, some ten years after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris whereby we bought the Islands, he was the ninth supreme representative of American authority we had had there since the American occupation began. The following is the list:

No one of these distinguished gentlemen has ever had any authority to tell the Filipinos what we expect ultimately to do with them. They have not known themselves. Is not this distinctly unfair both to governors and governed?

Before Governor Forbes went to the Philippines he had been a largely successful business man. He is a man of the very highest personal character, and an indefatigable worker. He has done as well as the conditions of the problem permit. But he is always between Scylla and Charybdis. American capital in or contemplating investment in the Islands is continually pressing to be permitted to go ahead and develop the resources of the Islands. To keep the Islands from being exploited Congress early limited grants of land to a maximum too small to attract capital. So those who desire to build up the country, knowing they cannot get the law changed, are forever seeking to invent ways to get around the law. And, being firm in the orthodox Administration belief that discussion of ultimate independence is purely academic, i.e., a matter of no concern to anybody now living, Governor Forbes is of course in sympathy with Americans who wish to develop the resources of the Islands. On the other hand, he knows that such a course will daily and hourly make ultimate independence more certain never to come. So do the Filipinos know this. Therefore they clamor ever louder and louder against all American attempts to repeal the anti-exploiting Acts of Congress by “liberal” interpretation. Many an American just here is sure to ask himself, “Why all this ‘clamor’? Do we not give them good government? What just ground have they for complaint?” Yes, we do give them very good government, so far as the Manila end of the business is concerned, except that it is a far more expensive government than any people on the earth would be willing to impose on themselves. But their main staples are hemp, sugar, and tobacco, and we raise the last two in this country. Their sugar and tobacco were allowed free entry into the United States by the Paine Law of 1909 up to amounts limited in the law, but the Philippine people know very well that American sugar and tobacco interests will either dwarf the growth of their sugar and tobacco industries by refusing to allow the limit raised—the limit of amounts admitted free of duty—or else that our Sugar Trust and our Tobacco Trust will simply ultimately eliminate them by absorption, just as the Standard Oil Company used to do with small competitors. In this sort of prospect certainly even the dullest intellect must recognize just ground for fearing—nay for plainly foreseeing—practical industrial slavery through control by foreign2 corporations of economic conditions. So much for the two staples in which the Philippines may some day become competitors of ours. It took Mr. Taft nine years to persuade American sugar and tobacco that they would not be in any immediate danger by letting in a little Philippine sugar and tobacco free of duty. Then they consented. Not until then did they promise not to shout “Down with cheap Asiatic labor. We will not consent to compete with it.” Their mental reservation was, of course, and is, “if the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries get too prosperous, we will either buy them, or cripple them by defeating their next attempt to get legislation increasing the amounts of Philippine sugar and tobacco admitted into the United States free of duty.” And the Filipinos know that this is the fate that awaits two out of the three main sources of the wealth of their country. Their third source of wealth, their main staple, is the world-famous Manila hemp. This represents more than half the value of their total annual exports. And as to it, “practical industrial slavery through control by foreign corporations of economic conditions” is to-day not a fear, but a fact. The International Harvester Company has its agents at Manila. The said company or allied interests, or both, are large importers of Manila hemp. The reports of all the governors-general of the Philippines who have preceded Governor Forbes tell, year after year, of the millions “handed over” to American hemp importers through “the hemp joker” of the Act of Congress of 1902, hereinafter explained, in the chapter on Congressional Legislation (Chapter XXVI.). Why did these complaints—made with annual regularity up to Governor Forbes’s accession—cease thereafter? You will find these complaints of his predecessors transcribed in the chapter mentioned, because if I had re-stated them you might suspect exaggeration. The “rake-off” of the American importers of Manila hemp for 1910 was nearly $750,000, as fully explained in Chapter XXVI.

Governor Forbes will be in this country when this book is issued. I think he owes it to the American people to explain why he does not continue the efforts of his predecessors to halt the depredations of the Hemp Trust. Why does he content himself in his last annual report with a mild allusion to the fact that the condition of the hemp industry is “not satisfactory”? I have said that Governor Forbes is a man of high character, and take pleasure in repeating that statement in this connection. The truth is we are running a political kindergarten for adults in the Philippines, and those responsible for the original blunder of taking them, and all their political heirs and assigns since, have sought to evade admitting and setting to work to rectify the blunder. Unmasked, this is what the policy of Benevolent Assimilation now is. They allege an end, and so justify all the ways and means. Benevolent Assimilation needs the support of the International Harvester Company and of all other Big Business interested directly or indirectly in Manila hemp. The end justifies the means. Hence the silence. Philippine gubernatorial reticence is always most reticent about that particular subject on which at the time the American people are most peculiarly entitled to information. As long as public order was the most pressing question, Philippine gubernatorial reticence selected that branch of our colonial problem either for especial silence or for superlatively casual allusion, as we have already seen. So now with the economic distresses. Frankness would obviously furnish too much good argument for winding up this Oriental receivership of ours. The Philippine Government will never tell its main current troubles until after they are over. But as the present trouble—the economic depredations of powerful special interests—must necessarily be fruitful of discontent which will crop out some day to remind us that as we sow so shall we reap, any one who helps expose the root of the trouble is doing a public service. No Congressman who in silence would permit Big Business to prey upon his constituents as Governor Forbes has, could long remain in office. Taxation without representation may amount to depredation, and yet never be corrected, when the powers that prey have the ear of the court, and the victims cannot get the ear of the American people. So the Hemp Trust continues to rob the Filipinos under the forms of law, and the Mohonk Conference continues to kiss Benevolent Assimilation on both cheeks. And Dr. Lyman Abbott periodically says Amen. I am not speaking disrespectfully of Dr. Abbott. I am deploring the lack of information of our people at home as to conditions in the Philippines.

It is a relief to turn from such matters to some of the real substantial good we have done out there to which Governor Forbes has heretofore publicly pointed with just pride. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909, Governor Forbes (then Vice-Governor) said, among other things:

This statement I cannot too cordially endorse. It would be grossly unfair not to accord full measure of acclaim to Governor Taft for the way he worked out the problem of the Friar Lands. He has been attacked in some quarters in this regard, and most unjustly. Not being a Catholic, and all my people being Protestants, I have no fear of being suspected of special pleading in the matter. The working out of the Friar Land problem by Governor Taft in the Philippines was a splendid piece of constructive statesmanship. He was at his greatest and best in that very transaction. The Treaty of Paris had guaranteed that all vested rights should be respected, including those of ecclesiastical bodies. The friars had long owned the lands in question. There can be no particle of doubt on this point. The tenants on the land had all long ago attorned to them, father and son, from time out of mind, paying rent regularly. But by claiming jurisdiction over their tenants’ souls also, and getting that jurisdiction effectively recognized, the thrifty friars used to raise the rent regularly, quieting incipient protest with threats of eternal punishment, or protracted stay in purgatory. The advent of our government let loose a revolt against the authority of the friars generally, and, their spiritual hold once loosened, this led the tenants to dispute the land titles of their spiritual shepherds, who were also their temporal landlords. Of course the titles had all been long recorded, and looked after by the best legal talent the country afforded. As long as you control the future of your tenant’s soul, you can make him pay his last copeck for rent. But as soon as that control is lost, the man on whom the governing of the country thereafter devolves has a certain prospect of a great agrarian revolution on his hands, having in it many elements of substantial righteousness. Governor Taft’s capacious mind, prompted by his strongest instinct, love of justice, conceived the idea of having the Philippine Government raise the money to buy the Friar Lands, by issuing bonds, and then buying the Friars out and re-selling the land to the tenants on long time, on the instalment plan, the instalments to be so graduated as to be equal to a moderate rental. Each tenant stayed right where he had been all the time, in possession of the tract he had always tilled, he and his father before him. To arrange all this it took an Act of Congress authorizing the bond issue, and a visit to Rome to arrange the bargain with the Pope. Some say His Holiness drove a hard bargain with Governor Taft, or to put it another way, that Governor Taft paid the Church people too much for the land. He did not. He may not have counted pennies with them, but the lands were worth what he paid for them. And the purchase protected the faith and honor of our government, as pledged by the Treaty of Paris, and at the same time prevented an agrarian revolution—which would have had a lot of elemental justice on its side.

Another of the good works we have done in the Philippines, to which Governor Forbes points in his magazine article above mentioned, is thus noted by him:

To this also I say Amen. The Forbes article then goes on to say that the government of the Islands is self-supporting. This is true, except the $14,000,000 a year it costs us to keep out there a garrison of 12,000 American troops (supplemented by certain native scouts—see chapter on “Cost of the Philippines,” hereafter). This garrison is conceded to be a mere handful, sufficient merely, and intended merely—as a witty English woman has put it in a book on the Philippines—“to knock the Filipino on the head in case he wants his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it.” In other words, we only attempt to keep force enough there to quell any outbreak that might occur. So far as possible invasion by any foreign power is concerned, our $14,000,000 per annum is an absolutely dead loss. Brigadier-General Clarence Edwards, U. S. A., commanding the Bureau of Insular Affairs, said recently3 before the Finance Committee of the Senate:

What a shameful admission for a great nation to subscribe to, relatively to people it pretends to be protecting! The programme of the War Department is to abandon the Islands to their fate, for the time being at least, in our next war, letting them remain a football until the end of such war, when, as an independent republic they could, and would, rally as one man to the defence of their country against invasion, and would, with a little help from us, make life unbearable for an invading force. As things stand, we are just as impotent as Spain was out there in 1898, and it is utter folly to forget what happened then.

But to return to Governor Forbes’s article and to a pleasanter feature of the situation. He says:

This also is true, and greatly to our credit. But as the American hemp trust mulcts the Philippine hemp output about a half million dollars a year (as above suggested, and later, in another chapter, more fully explained), it follows that each Filipino child pays the hemp trust a dollar a year for the privilege of going to school.

And now let us consider the most supremely important part of Governor Forbes’s magazine article above quoted. The burden of the song of the adverse minority report on the pending Jones bill (looking to Philippine independence in 1921)4 is that because there are certain “wild tribes” scattered throughout the archipelago, in the mountain fastnesses, therefore we should cling to the present policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention until the wild tribes get civilized. Governor Forbes’s article is an absolute, complete, and final answer to the misinformed nonsense of the minority report aforesaid. He says, apropos of public order:

The foregoing unmasks, in all its contemptible falsehood, the pretence that the presence of a few wild tribes in the Philippines is a reason for withholding independence from 7,000,000 of Christian people in order that a greedy little set of American importers of Manila hemp may fatten thereon. True, hemp is not edible, but it is convertible into edibles—and also into campaign funds. That the existence of these wild tribes—the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903–4—constitute infinitely less reason for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American Indian constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123):5

I think the above table makes clear the enormity of the injustice I am now trying to crucify. Without stopping to use your pencil, you can see that Mindanao, the island where the “intractable Moros” Governor Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million people. Half of these are civilized Christians, and the other half are the wild, crudely Mohammedan Moro tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list, you behold what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except Mindanao), viz., Luzon and the six main Visayan Islands. If you will turn back to pages 225 et seq., especially to page 228, where the student of world politics was furnished with all he needs or will ever care to know about the geography of the Philippine Islands, you will there find all the rocks sticking out of the water and all the little daubs you see on the map eliminated from the equation as wholly unessential to a clear understanding of the problem of governing the Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzon and the six main Visayan Islands above, as constituting, for all practical governmental purposes all the Philippine archipelago except the Moro country, Mindanao (i.e., parts of it), and its adjacent islets; Luzon and the Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people, and of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at the above table, constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled in the pockets of their various mountain regions. Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame, peaceable, and tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they “might possibly mistake the object of a visit.” The half million “intractable Moros” of Mindanao, plus those in the adjacent islets, make up another 300,000. These last, it is true, will need policing for some time to come, but whether we do that policing by retaining Mindanao, or whether we let the Filipinos do it, is a detail that has no standing in court as a reason for continuing to deny independence to the 7,000,000 of people of Luzon and the Visayan Islands because they have some 300,000 backward people in the backwoods of their mountains. Yet see how the ingenuity of inspired ignorance states the case, by adding the 300,000 tame tribes of Luzon and the Visayas to the 300,000 fierce Moro savages away down in Mindanao, near Borneo, so as to get 600,000 “wild” people, and then alluding to the fact that so far only 200,000 Filipinos are qualified to vote. Says the report of the minority of the Committee on Insular Affairs on the pending Jones bill (proposing independence in 1921):

You see the minority report is counting women and children, when it talks about the wild tribes, but not when it talks about voters. According to universally accepted general averages, among 7,500,000 people you should find 1,500,000 adult males. No one doubts that of these, by 1921, 500,000 will have become qualified voters. No one can deny that any such country having 500,000 qualified voters, the bulk of whom are good farmers, and the cream of whom are high-minded educated gentlemen, and all of whom are intensely patriotic, will be in good shape for promotion to independence. What wearies me about this whole matter is that the minority report above mentioned is permitted to get off such “rot,” and the New York Times, the Army and Navy Journal, and others, to applaud it, while the Administration sits by, silent, and reaps the benefit of such stale, though not intentional, falsehoods, without attempting to correct them, so that our people may get at the real merits of the question. You see this silence inures to the benefit of the interests that have cornered the Manila hemp industry.

In the campaign of 1912 for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, there was much mutual recrimination between Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Taft about which of them had been kindest to the International Harvester Company. It seems to me it is “up to” Governor Forbes, who in the Philippines has served under the present President and his predecessor also, to explain why he has abandoned the fight, so long waged by previous governors-general, to get what former Governor-General James F. Smith calls “the [hemp] joker” of the Act of Congress of 1902 concerning the Philippines, wiped from the statute books of this country.

In the year 1911, the editor of one of the great metropolitan papers told me that President Taft told him that the Honorable Dean C. Worcester, the Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Government, was “the most valuable man we have on the Philippine Commission.” Certainly, reproduction of such an indorsement from so exalted a source shows a wish to be fair, in one who considers Professor Worcester the direst calamity that has befallen the Filipinos since the American occupation, neither war, pestilence, famine, reconcentration, nor tariff-wrought poverty excepted. During all my stay in the Philippines I never did have any official relations of any sort with the Professor, and only met him, casually, once, in 1901. The personal impression left from the meeting was distinctly that of an overbearing bully of the beggar-on-horseback type. Conscious of liability to error, and preferring that the reader should judge for himself, I give the main circumstances upon which this impression is based. Soon after the central insular government was set up, in 1901, Judge Taft and certain other members of the Philippine Commission, the Professor among the number, came into my judicial district to organize provincial governments. Their coming to each town where they stopped was telegraphed in advance, and before they reached the town where I then was holding court each one of the American colony of the town was designated by common consent to look after a fraction of the Taft party during their stay. The Professor fell to my lot. I always was unlucky. However, their stay was only a few hours. While they were there, I had occasion to observe that the Professor spoke Spanish quite well and so remarked to him. The well-bred reply was: “You’ll find that I know a great many things you might not think I knew.” Whether this was merely “The insolence of office” cropping out in a previously obscure young man suddenly elevated to high station, or whether it was an evidence of the Commissioner’s idea of the relation of the Executive Department of a government to its Judiciary, is a question.1 At all events I think the incident gives an insight into the man not irrelevant to what is hereinafter submitted. I have met a number of other Americans since who had received impressions similar to my own. And the Professor’s whole subsequent course in the Islands corroborates those impressions. I have never talked to any American in the Philippines who had a good word for him. Of course, Power, like Property, will always have friends. So that even Professor Worcester may have some friends, among his fellow-countrymen in those far-away Islands. But it has already been made clear in a former chapter how entirely possible it is for a man occupying high position in the government out there to be very generally and cordially disliked by his own countrymen there and actually not know it. Whether this is true of Professor Worcester, or not, as a general proposition it is quite possible. One thing is certain, namely, that he is very generally and very cordially detested by the Filipinos. That this detestation is perfectly natural under the circumstances, and entirely justifiable, and that it is a cruel injustice to those people, as well as a monumental piece of folly, to keep the Professor saddled upon them, it is now in order to show.

In Chapter VI (ante), we made the acquaintance of two young naval officers. Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and Naval Cadet L. R. Sargent, who, in the fall of 1898, while the fate of the Philippines hung in the balance at Paris, and peace still reigned in the Islands between us and the Filipinos, made a trip through the interior of Luzon, covering some six hundred miles, and afterwards furnished Admiral Dewey with a written report of their trip, which was later published as a Senate document. Professor Worcester’s greatest value to President Taft, and also the thing out of which has grown, most unfortunately, what seems to be a very cordial mutual hatred between him and the Filipinos, is his activities in the matter of discovering, getting acquainted with, classifying, tabulating, enumerating, and otherwise preparing for salvation, the various non-Christian tribes. These tribes have already been briefly dealt with in Chapter XXI. (ante), apropos of that part of the Great Peace Certificate of 1907 which related to the “Moros and other non-Christian tribes”—uncivilized tribes which, being as distinct from the great mass of the Filipino people as islets from the sea, had had no more to do with the insurrection against us, than the Pawnees, Apaches, and Sioux Indians had to do with our Civil War of 1861–5. They were also dealt with, somewhat, in the chapter preceding this. Long before Professor Worcester was permanently inflicted upon the Filipino people, one of the young naval officers above mentioned, Mr. Sargent, published an article in the Outlook for September 2, 1899,2 based on this trip through the interior of Luzon, made by authority of Admiral Dewey the year before. In the course of his article Mr. Sargent says:

He adds:

Professor Worcester was originally a professor of zoölogy, or something of that sort, in a western university. In the early nineties he had made a trip to the Philippines, confining himself then mostly to creeping things and quadrupeds—lizards, alligators, pythons, unusual wild beasts, and other forms of animal life of the kind much coveted as specimens by museums and universities. In 1899, just after the Spanish War, he got out a book on the Philippines, and as an American who had been in the Philippines was then a rara avis, it came to pass that the reptile-finder ultimately became a statesman. He was brought, possibly by conscious worth, to the notice of President McKinley, accompanied the Schurman Commission to the Islands, in 1899, and the Taft Commission in 1900, and finally evolved into his present eminence as Secretary of the Interior and official chief finder of non-Christian tribes for the Philippine Government.

The best known of the wild tribes in the Philippines are the Igorrotes, the dog-eating savages you saw at the St. Louis Exposition in 1903–4, the same Mr. Sargent speaks of in his article in the Outlook. Of course it was not a desire to misrepresent the situation, but only the enthusiasm of a zoölogist, anthropologically inclined, and accustomed to carry a kodak, which started the Professor to photographing the dog-eating Igorrotes and specimens of other non-Christian tribes soon after the Taft Commission reached the Philippines. But you cannot get far in the earlier reports of the Taft Commission, which was supposed to have been sent out to report back on the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government, without crossing the trail of the Professor’s kodak—pictures of naked Igorrotes and the like. This, however innocent, must have been of distinct political value in 1900 and 1904 in causing the heart of the missionary vote in the United States to bleed for those “sixty different tribes having sixty different languages” of which Secretary Root’s campaign speeches made so much. It must also have greatly awakened the philanthropic interest of exporters of cotton goods to learn of those poor “savage millions” wearing only a loin cloth, when they could be wearing yards of cotton cloth. By the time the St. Louis Exposition came off, in 1903–4, it was decided to have the various tribes represented there. So specimens were sent of the Igorrote tribe, the Tagalos, the Visayans, the Negrito tribe, and various other tribes. The Tagalos, the Visayans, etc., being ordinary Filipinos, did not prove money-makers. But it was great sport to watch the Igorrotes preparing their morning dog. So it was the “non-Christian tribes” that paid. It was they that were most advertised. It was the recollection of them that lingered longest with the visitor to the Exposition, and there was always in his mind thereafter an association of ideas between the Igorrotes and Filipino capacity for self-government generally. Many representative Filipinos visited the St. Louis Exposition, saw all this, and came home and told about it. One very excellent Filipino gentleman, a friend of mine, who was Governor of Samar during my administration of the district which included that island, sent me one day in October, 1904, a satirical note, enclosing a pamphlet he had just received called Catalogue of Philippine Views at the St. Louis Exposition. He knew I would understand, so he said in the note, that the pamphlet was sent “in order that you may learn something of certain tribes still extant in this country.” Concerning all this, I can say of my own knowledge exactly what Naval Cadet Sargent said concerning the lesser like indignity of the one Igorrote couple exhibited at Barcelona while the Filipinos were asking representation in the Spanish Cortes, viz.:

You see our Census of 1903 gave the population of the Philippines at about 7,600,000 of which 7,000,000 are put down as civilized Christians; and of the remaining 600,000, about half are the savage, or semi-civilized, crudely Mohammedan Moros, in Mindanao, and the adjacent islets down near Borneo. The other 300,000 or so uncivilized people scattered throughout the rest of the archipelago, the “non-Christian tribes,” which dwell in the mountain fastnesses, remote from “the madding crowd,” cut little more figure, if any, in the general political equation, than the American Indian does with us to-day. Take for instance the province of Nueva Vizcaya, in the heart of north central Luzon. That was one of the provinces of the First Judicial District I presided over in the Islands. I think Nueva Vizcaya is Professor Worcester’s “brag” province, in the matter of non-Christian anthropological specimens, both regarding their number and their variety. Yet while I was there, though we knew those people were up in the hills, and that there were a good many of them, the civilized people all told us that the hill-tribes never bothered them. And on their advice I have ridden in safety, unarmed, at night, accompanied only by the court stenographer, over the main high-road running through the central plateau that constitutes the bulk of Nueva Vizcaya province, said plateau being surrounded by a great amphitheatre of hills, the habitat of the Worcester pets.

The non-Christian tribes in the Philippines have been more widely advertised in America than anything else connected with the Islands. That advertisement has done more harm to the cause of Philippine independence by depreciating American conceptions concerning Filipino capacity for self-government, than anything that could be devised even by the cruel ingenuity of studied mendacity. And Professor Worcester is the P. T. Barnum of the “non-Christian tribe” industry. The Filipinos, though unacquainted with the career of the famous menagerie proprietor last named, and his famous remark: “The American people love to be humbugged,” understand the malign and far-reaching influence upon their future destiny of the work of Professor Worcester, and his services to the present Philippine policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention, through humbugging the American people into the belief that the Islands must be retained until the three hundred thousand or so Negritos, Igorrotes, and other primitive wild peoples sprinkled throughout the archipelago are “reconstructed.” Is it any wonder that the Filipinos do not love the Professor? To keep him saddled upon them as one of their rulers is as tactful as it would be to send Senator Tillman on a diplomatic mission to Liberia or Haiti.

Not long ago the famous magazine publisher Mr. S. S. McClure, who, I think, is trying to make his life one of large and genuine usefulness for good, said to me that if we gave the Filipinos self-government we would shortly have another Haiti or Santo Domingo on our hands. He must have seen some of Professor Worcester’s pictures of Igorrotes and Negritos scattered through public documents related to the question of Filipino capacity for self-government. Mr. McClure has never, I believe, been in the Islands; and the cruelly unjust impression he had innocently received was precisely the impression systematically developed all these years through the Worcester kodak.

In February, 1911, there appeared an article in the Sunset magazine for that month entitled “The Philippines as I Saw them.” The contributor of the article is no less a personage than the Honorable James F. Smith, former Governor-General of the Islands. At the top of the article one reads the legend “Illustrated by Photographs through the Courtesy of the Bureau of Insular Affairs.” If you read this legend understandingly, you can, in so doing, hear the click of the Worcester kodak. General Smith’s article is smeared all over with such pictures. One is merrily entitled “Eighteen Igorrot Fledglings Hatched by the American Bird of Freedom.” Another is entitled “Subano Man and woman, Mindanao.” Another is a picture of an Ifugao home in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, hereinabove mentioned. Ifugao is the name of one of the wild tribes, one of the results of Professor Worcester’s anthropological excavations of the last few years. In front of the Ifugao home stands the master of the house, clothed in a breech-clout. Next in the menagerie in the article under consideration you find a group of Ifugao children, then a Bagobo of Mindanao, then some other specimen with a curious name, in which there is a woman naked from the waist up and a man in a loin-cloth. Then follows a picture of a Tingyan girl from Abra province. And, to cap the climax, among the last of these pictures you find a Filipino couple pounding rice. The rice pounders are ordinary Filipinos. The woman is decently dressed; the man is clothed only from the waist down, having divested himself of his upper garment, as is customary in order to work at hard labor more comfortably in hot weather. I do not so much blame General Smith for this libellous panorama of pictures, scattered though they are through an article by him on “The Philippines as I Saw them.” He probably illustrated his article with what the Bureau of Insular Affairs sent him, without giving much thought to the matter. But the Bureau of Insular Affairs appears to neglect no occasion to parade the Philippine archipelago’s sprinkling of non-Christian tribes before the American public, fully knowing that the hopes of the Filipinos for independence must depend upon impressions received by the American people concerning the degree of civilization they have reached.

For all these wanton indignities offered their pride and self-respect, the Filipinos well know they are primarily indebted to Professor Worcester and his non-Christian tribe bureau. The feud between the Professor and the Filipino people—the bad blood has been growing so long that the incident hereinafter related justifies its being called a feud—has been peculiarly embittered by the missionary aspect of the non-Christian industry. The great body of the Filipino people, the whole six or seven millions of them, are Catholics—most of them devout Catholics. Presumably, their desire for salvation by the method handed down by their forefathers would not be affected by a change from American political supervision to independence. Yet the darkest thing ahead of Philippine independence prospects is the Protestant missionary vote in the United States. Bishop Brent, Episcopal Bishop of the Philippines, one of the noblest and most saintly characters that ever lived, has devoted his life apparently to missionary work in the Philippines, having twice declined a nomination as Bishop of Washington (D.C.). The only field of endeavor open to Bishop Brent and his devoted little band of co-workers is the non-Christian tribes. It seems that the Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical authorities in the Islands get along harmoniously, a kind of modus vivendi having been arranged between them, by which the Protestants are not to do any proselyting among the seven millions of Catholic Christians. So this field of endeavor is the one Professor Worcester has been industriously preparing during the last twelve years. Obviously, every time Professor Worcester digs up a new non-Christian tribe he increases the prospective harvest of the Protestants, thus corralling more missionary vote at home for permanent retention of the Philippines. Professor Worcester is quoted in a Manila paper as saying, “I am under no delusion as to what may be accomplished for the primitive wild people. It takes time to reconstruct them.” This remark is supposed to have been made in a speech before the Young Men’s Christian Association of Manila. Neither is Mr. Taft under any delusion as to how valuable is religious support for the idea of retaining the Philippines as a missionary field. The nature of the above allusion to Bishop Brent should certainly be sufficient to show that the writer yields to no one in affectionate reverence and respect for that rare and noble character. But neither Bishop Brent nor any one else can persuade him that it is wise to abandon the principle that Church and State should be separate, in order that our government may go into the missionary business. Since it has become apparent that the Philippines will not pay, the Administration has relied solely on missionary sentiment. In one of his public utterances Mr. Taft has said in effect, “The programme of the Republican party with regard to the Philippines is one which will make greatly for the spread of Christian civilization throughout the Orient.”

The foregoing reflections are not intended to raise an issue as to the wisdom of foreign missions. They are simply intended to illustrate how it is possible and natural for President Taft to consider Professor Worcester “the most valuable man we have on the Philippine Commission.” The Professor’s menagerie is a vote-getter. Also, President Taft’s whole Philippine policy being founded upon the theory that “the great majority” of the Filipino people are in favor of alien thraldom in lieu of independence, he tolerantly permits their editors to “let off steam” through clamor for independence. This privilege they do not fail to exercise to the limit. The attitude of the Insular Government permits the native press much latitude of “sauciness,” in deference to the American idea about liberty of the press. In the exercise of this privilege during the last few years the native press has gone the limit. However, there was no way to stop them, on the principle to which we had committed ourselves. The thing was very mischievous, and became utterly intolerable. There was a native paper called Renacimiento (Renaissance). This paper was long permitted to say things more or less seditious in character which no self-respecting government should have tolerated. This was done pursuant to the original theory, obstinately adhered to up to date, that there was no real substantial unwillingness to American rule. Of course, if this were true, newspaper noise could do no harm. Therefore it was permitted to continue. Finally, however, like a boy “taking a dare,” the Renacimiento published an article on Professor Worcester which intimately and sympathetically voiced the general yearning of the Filipino people to be rid of the Professor. In so doing, however, the hapless editor overstepped the limits of American license, and got into the toils of the law, by saying things about the Professor that rendered the editor liable to prosecution for criminal libel. The Professor promptly took advantage of this misstep, to the great joy of the authorities, who had been previously much goaded by independence clamor. The result was that the paper was put out of business and the editor was put in jail. No doubt the editor ought to have been put in jail, but his incarceration incidentally served to tone down Filipino clamor for independence. Subsequent to this coup d’état, the Professor did a little venting of feelings in his turn. He made a speech at the Y. M. C. A. on October 10, 1910, which was a highly unchristian speech to be gotten off in an edifice dedicated to the service of Christ. The Manila papers give only extracts from the speech, and I have never seen a copy of it. From the newspaper accounts, it seems that the Professor was determined to, and did, relieve his feelings about the Filipinos. The Manila Cable-News of October 11, 1910, quotes the Professor as referring to his pets, the non-Christian tribes, as “ancestral enemies of the Christians.” Thus for the first time is developed an attitude of being champion of the uncivilized pagan remnant, left from prehistoric times, against the Christians of the Islands. The Cable-News also says that Professor Worcester “laughed at the idea that the Islands belonged to the so-called civilized people and held that if the archipelago belonged to any one it certainly belonged to its original owners the Negritos.” This remark about the “so-called civilized people” was as tactful as if President Taft should address a meeting of colored people in a doubtful state and call them “niggers.” Another of the Manila papers gives an account of the speech from which it appears that the burly Professor succeeded in amusing himself at least, if not his audience, by suggestions as to the superior fighting qualities of the Moros over the Filipinos, which suggestions were on the idea that the Moros would lick the Filipinos if we should leave the country. (The Moros number 300,000, the Filipinos nearly 7,000,000.) The Professor’s remarks in this regard, according to the paper, were a distinct reflection upon the courage of the Filipinos generally as a people. The effect of Professor Worcester’s speech before the Y. M. C. A. may be well imagined. However the facts of history do not leave the imagination unaided. The Philippine Assembly, representing the whole Filipino people, and desiring to express the unanimous feeling of those people with regard to the Worcester speech, unanimously passed, soon after the speech was delivered, a set of resolutions whereof the following is a translation:

Presumably these resolutions were forwarded “to the President of the United States through the Governor of the Philippines and the Secretary of War.” But apparently they were pigeonholed when they reached Washington. I stumbled on them in the Insular Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives whither they had landed through Mr. Slayden of Texas. The distinguished veteran Congressman from Texas, being known as an enemy of all wrong things, was appealed to by certain persons in the United States to bring the matter to the attention of Congress. He did so by presenting to the House of Representatives an American petition which embodied a copy of the resolutions of the Philippine Assembly.

It thus becomes apparent that one of Professor Worcester’s principal elements of value is in bullying the Filipinos, and thereby smothering manifestations of a desire for independence, the existence of which desire is denied by President Taft’s Administration. The more the Filipinos cry for independence the greater seems the sin of holding them in subjection. So that Professor Worcester is very valuable in silencing independence clamor and thereby creating an appearance of consent of the governed, when there is no consent of the governed whatsoever.

In describing the discontent in distant provinces under brutal pro-consuls, which contributed largely to the final disintegration of the Roman Empire, Gibbon says:

The total failure of the above temperate, dignified, and vibrant protest of the Philippine Assembly to reach the ears of the American people is but another reminder that history repeats itself.