The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act, is entitled “An Act temporarily to provide” a government for the Philippine Islands. The young American who goes out to the Philippines to take a position with the Insular Government there has usually read his share of Kipling, and his imagination likes to analogize his prospective employment to the British Indian Civil Service. The latter, however, offers a career. But what does the former offer? Take the prospects of the rank and file, as set forth by Mr. J. R. Arnold, of the Executive Bureau of the Philippine Government, in an article published in the North American Review for February, 1912. Suppose a young man goes out to the Philippines at a salary of $1200. Mr. Arnold discusses fully and frankly the cost of living in the Islands, and how much higher board, lodging, etc., are out there than in the United States. He states that board and lodging will cost $15 to $20 a month more than here. So that, so far, a salary of $1200 in the Philippines would seem equivalent to a salary of say approximately $950 in the United States—say in Washington. Also he calls attention to the fact that the government will pay your way out, but you must get back the best way you can. He does not say so, but the walking is not good all the way from Manila to Washington. Seriously, according to the authority from whom we are quoting, it costs $225 to $300 to get back. So if you come back at the end of a three years’ stay—you must contract to stay at least that long—you must have laid by, taking his maximum return fare as the more prudent figure to reckon on, one hundred dollars a year to buy your return ticket. Mr. Arnold does not say so, but it is a fact, that various little expenses will creep in that are sure to amount, even with the most rigidly frugal, to $50 per annum that you would never have spent in the United States. You are hardly respectable in the Philippines if you do not have a muchacho. Muchacho, in Spanish, means the same as garçon in French, or valet in English. But muchachos are as thick as cigarettes in the Philippines. And you can hire one for about $5 a month. To resolve not to have a muchacho in the Philippines would be like resolving at home never to have your shoes shined, or your clothes pressed. It would be contrary to the universal custom of the country, and would therefore be “impossible.” You have not been long in the Philippines before you get tired of telling applicants for the position of muchacho that you do not want one, and, benumbed by the universal custom, you accept the last applicant. You must figure on a muchacho as one of your “fixed charges.” Count then an extra $50 annual necessary expense that you would not have at home. If you do not succumb to the muchacho custom, you will get rid of the $50 in other ways fairly classifiable as necessary current expenses. Thus, if you take from your $1200, worth $950 in Manila, as above stated, the $100 per annum necessary to be laid by against your home-coming, and the other $50 last suggested, your salary of $1200 per annum in Manila becomes equivalent to one of $800 at home, so far as regards what you are likely to save by strict habits of economy. In other words, to figure how you are going to come out in the long run, if you go out as a $1200 man, while your social position will be precisely that of a man commanding the same salary in a government position in Washington, you must knock off a third of the $1200. This is not the way Mr. Arnold states the case exactly. I am simply taking his facts, supplemented by what little I have added, and stating them in a way which will perhaps illustrate the case better to some people. Mr. Arnold says you are apt to get up as high as $1500 and finally even to $1800 in three to five years. Suppose you do have that luck. Still, if, as has been made plain above, you must consider $1200 in Manila as equal to only $800 in Washington (so far as regards what you are going to be able to save each year), by the same token you must consider $1500 in Manila as being equal to only $1000 in Washington, and $1800 as only $1200.

The utmost limit of achievement in the Philippine Government service, the only one of the higher positions not subject to political caprice, the only one regarded out there as a “life position”—and this excepts neither the Governorship of the Islands nor the Commissionerships—is the position of Justice of the Supreme Court. The salary is $10,000 per annum, American money. But there is not an American judge on that bench who would not be glad at any moment to accept a $5000 position as a United States District Judge at home. All of them whom I know are most happily married. But I believe their wives would quit them if they refused such an offer from the President of the United States, or else get so unhappy about it that they would accept and come home.

While we have now considered the case from bottom to top, we did not originally figure on the young American going out to the Philippines otherwise than single. In this behalf Mr. Arnold himself says:

Says the late Arthur W. Fergusson—who gave his life to the Philippine Civil Service—in his annual report for 1905, as Executive Secretary:

Then Mr. Fergusson comes to the obvious but apparently unattainable remedy, which he says is

You see, if a Washington Bureau, say the Coast and Geodetic Survey, or the Geological Survey, sends a man out to the Islands, he is never for a moment separated from the Federal Civil Service or the Federal Government’s pay-roll. The same is true of civilian employees of the army. But the man in the Insular Service, when he wants to get back home, is little better off than if he were in the employ of the Cuban Government, or the British Indian Government, or that of the Dutch East Indies. Mr. Fergusson also says:

How can you have “a permanent service” unless you have a definite declared policy? Why not declare the purpose of our Government with the regard to the Islands?

In his annual report for 19062 Mr. Fergusson says:

He then goes on to reiterate his annual plea for a law providing for transfer as a matter of right, not of influence, from the Philippine Civil Service to the Federal Civil Service in the United States, and tells of a very capable official of his bureau who got a chance during the year just closed to transfer from the Philippines to a $1400 government position in the United States, and was glad to get it, although $1400 was “considerably less than half what he received here.” Mr. Fergusson quickly gives the key to all this in what he calls “the haunting fear of having to return to the States in debilitated health and out of touch with existent conditions, only to face the necessity of seeking a new position.” He adds:

In 1907, Mr. Fergusson reports on the same subject3: “Matters do not seem to be improving,” and that the Director of the Insular Civil Service informs him that “during the fiscal year there were five hundred voluntary separations from the service by Americans, of whom one hundred were college graduates.” He adds: “When the expense of getting and bringing out new men, and of training them to their new work is considered, the wastefulness of the present system is evident.”

You do not find any quotations from any of the Fergusson disclosures in Mr. Arnold’s North American Review article. He would probably have lost his job, if he had quoted them. Yet the evils pointed out by Mr. Fergusson come from one permanent source, the uncertainty of the future of every American out there, due to the failure of Congress to declare the purpose of the Government.

On January 30, 1908, Arthur W. Fergusson died in the service of the Philippine Government. No general law putting that service on the basis he pleaded for to the day of his death has ever yet been passed. Since his death, his tactful successor appears to have abandoned further pleading, and concluded to worry along with the permanently lame conditions inherent in the uncertainty as to whether we are to keep the Islands permanently or not, rather than embarrass President Taft by discouraging young Americans from going to the Islands.

The report of the Governor-General of the Philippines for 1907, Governor Smith, says4:

If Congress should ever care to do anything to improve the Philippine Civil Service and the status of Americans entering the same, certainly the one supremely obvious thing to do is to make transfer back to the civil service in the United States after a term of duty in the Islands a matter of right.

General Otis’s annual report for 1899,1 dated August 31st, gives the number of Americans killed in battle in the Philippines, from the beginning of the American occupation to that date, as 380. This includes those wounded who afterwards died of such wounds. His report for 1900,2 covering the period from his 1899 report to May 5, 1900, gives the number of Americans killed in battle from August 31, 1899, to May 1, 1900, as 258. General MacArthur succeeded General Otis in command of the American forces in the Philippines on May 5, 1900. General MacArthur’s annual report for 1901,3 gives the number of Americans killed in battle between May 5, 1900, and June 30, 1901, as 245. Thus the total number of Americans killed in battle up to the time the Civil Government was set up in 1901, was 883. The military reports do not always give the insurgents killed during the periods they cover. But on June 4, 1900, as we saw in a previous chapter, General MacArthur reported the number of Filipinos killed up to that time, so far as our records showed, to be something over 10,000. General MacArthur’s report, above quoted, giving our killed for the period it covers (May 5, 1900, to June 30, 1901), at 245, gives the insurgent killed for the same period as 3854. If we add this 3854 to the 10,000 killed up to about where May merged into June in 1900, we have 13,854 Filipinos killed up to the time Judge Taft was inaugurated as Governor, in 1901. There was no record, of course, obtainable or attempted, by the Eighth Army Corps, of Filipinos who were wounded and not captured and who subsequently died. It is quite safe to assume that such fatalities must have swelled the enemy’s list up to the time of the setting up of the Civil Government far above 16,000 killed. Thus, as has heretofore been stated, the ratio of the enemy’s loss to our loss was, literally, at least 16 to 1, up to the time the civil government was set up. General MacArthur’s report for 19004 would seem to bear out the above ratio. He there gives the number of our killed, from November 1, 1899, to September 1, 1900, including the wounded who afterwards died of such wounds, at 268, and the Filipinos killed, “as far as of record,” 3227. While these last figures make our killed for the period they relate to, considerably over 200, and the enemy’s killed but a very small figure over 3200, still, making allowances for the enemy’s wounded that died afterwards, of which of course we have no record, the 16 to 1 ratio would seem to give a fairly accurate probable estimate of the relative loss of life.

These figures are explained by the facts, already noticed hereinbefore, that most of our people knew how to shoot and the Filipinos did not. The great part of their army were raw recruits who did not understand the use of two sights on a rifle, and frequently relied solely on the one at the muzzle, not even lifting up the sight near the lock which when not in use lies flat along the gun-barrel, with the result that they almost invariably got the range too high and shot over our heads.

Because the military reports overlap each other in many instances, it is not possible to state accurately how many men the Eighth Army Corps lost by disease, but our loss chargeable to this account was not far from our fatalities on the battlefield.5

It is not possible to even approximate the enemy’s loss other than on the battlefield. The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Philippine Atlas gives the table estimating the population of the various provinces of the Philippine archipelago prior to the American occupation. This estimate gives the population of Batangas province at 312,192. The American Census of the Philippines of 1903 gives the population of Batangas province at 257,715.6 This would present a difference in the population of Batangas prior to 1898 and its population after the war of 54,477. The provincial secretary of Batangas province made a report to Governor Taft on December 18, 19017 on the condition of the province generally. This report, as it appears in the Senate Document, is a translation from the Spanish. The portion which relates to the reduction of the population of Batangas province reads as follows:

Of course these appalling figures8 must be taken with a grain of salt. In the first place, the man who furnished them was merely reproducing the general impression of his neighbors as to the diminution of the population of the province. He does not pretend to be dealing with official statistics. On the other hand, all of the yearly reports of the various native provincial officers are, as a general rule, pathetically optimistic. They all seem to think it their duty to present a hopeful view of the situation. In fact if you read these reports one after the other, the various signers seem to vie with one another in optimism as if their tenure of office depended upon it. So that, balancing probabilities, it would seem unlikely that the provincial secretary of Batangas would have stated more than what he at least believed to represent actual conditions, and the results of the war. A comparison of the Atlas population tables above mentioned with the census tables of 1903 shows no very startling difference in the population of any of the other provinces of the archipelago before and after the war except Batangas. It is also notorious that Batangas suffered by the war more than any other province in the Philippine Islands. However, a glance at the table of population of the various provinces of the Census of 19039 shows you fifty provinces with a total of 7,635,426 people. While we will never know whether Batangas did or did not lose one hundred thousand as a result of the war and its consequences, still, if it did, the other forty-nine provinces above mentioned must have lost as many more, that is to say, must have lost another hundred thousand. So that while it is all a matter of surmise, with nothing more certain to go on than the foregoing, it would really seem by no means absurd to assume the Filipino loss of life, other than on the battlefield, caused by the war, and the famine, pestilence, and other disease consequent thereon, at not far from 200,000 people. In more than one province, the people died like flies, especially the women and children, as a result of conditions incident to and consequent upon the war. This will not seem an over-statement to men who have lived much among people that do not know much about how to take care of themselves in the midst of great calamities, people who will eat meat of animals carried off by disease, in time of famine; who will drink water contaminated by what may for euphony be called sewage; and who are unprovided with any save traditional home remedies against cholera, small-pox, etc.

As to the cost of the Philippines in money, it used to be said in the early days that we paid $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection. Just what the Islands have cost us up to date in money it is utterly impossible to figure out with any degree of certainty, except that a safe minimum may be arrived at. Said the distinguished Congressman from Texas, Honorable James L. Slayden, in a speech which appears in the Congressional Record of February 25, 1908 (pp. 2532 et seq.):

Nor, be it noted, does it count the $20,000,000 we paid Spain for the Islands, which item, is, however included in another part of Mr. Slayden’s speech.

The only other estimate of what the Islands have cost, made in the last few years, which seems to be specially worthy of consideration, is one which appeared in the New York Evening Post of March 6, 1907. This estimate was prepared by one of the best trained and most conservative newspaper men in the United States, Mr. Edward G. Lowry, then Washington correspondent of the Evening Post, and since 1911, its managing editor. The total which Mr. Lowry arrives at is $308,369,155, up to that time. There have been various absurd estimates made recklessly without knowledge, but Mr. Lowry’s estimate is very carefully studied out, and presented in detail in the newspaper referred to. From the testimony of Mr. Slayden and Mr. Lowry, given as a result of their inquiries into the matter, it would thus seem that the Islands must have cost us by the end of 1907 something like $300,000,000. The Insular Government is now self-sustaining, except as to military affairs.

The cost per annum of the Philippine (native) scouts, of which there are 4000, is paid out of the United States Treasury, and amounts to $2,000,000 per annum.10 The number of American troops in the islands for the last few years has been about 12,000. Those who are wedded to the present Philippine policy of indefinite retention with undeclared intention, insist that our military expenses in the Philippines, in respect to the regular army out there, are not fairly chargeable as a part of the current expenses of the Philippine occupation. This argument must be admitted to have some force as far as the navy is concerned, but as to the army it is clearly without merit. Under the Act of Congress reorganizing the army of the United States after the Spanish War, provision was made for a skeleton army of about 60,000 men capable of expansion to something like 100,000 in time of war. The method of expansion thus contemplated was to have companies of, say, for illustration, sixty men, in time of peace, which companies could be recruited up to a war footing of one hundred men, in time of war. The suggestion that the cost of the part of the regular army which we have to keep in the Philippines is not chargeable to the Philippines because those same troops would have to be somewhere in the United States if they were not where they are, is not well taken. If we did not need 12,000 men continually in the Philippines, the army could be at once reduced by that much without affecting its present organization. If we had no troops in the Philippines this would not mean the absolute elimination from the army of enough regiments to represent twelve thousand men. It would not eliminate any existing organization. It would simply mean contraction of the number of men in the several companies of the several regiments of the army toward a peace basis to the extent of a total of twelve thousand men, more or less. The War Department has long figured on the cost of an American soldier in the Philippines per annum including his pay, allowances, and transportation out and back, at $1000 per annum. The cost of 12,000 soldiers at $1000 per annum is $12,000,000, per annum. The conclusion would, therefore, seem inevitable that the extra military current expense chargeable to our occupation of the Philippines is $12,000,000, per annum, outside the Philippine scouts, or, a total of $14,000,000. Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, that is no reason why we should continue to run a kindergarten for adults out there, and let the Monroe Doctrine run to seed. “Something” is not “bound to turn up.” The Philippine Islands will not prove a blessing in disguise. In every war with a nation having discontented colonial subjects, the enemy will always strike the colony first, and hope for aid from the inhabitants thereof.

Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, we are a nation of nearly 100,000,000 people. So they have cost us, all told, in the neighborhood of only about $3 a piece. And we subjugated them by mistake, after freeing a less capable people, the Cubans.

The Panama Canal is to be finished in 1913. This means a splendid, but free-for-all contest, for the trade of South America. In South America we will meet a tremendous pro-German sentiment, and a by no means inconsiderable anti-“Yankee” sentiment. The bigger Germany’s army and navy grows, the more she will loom up as the one great menace to the peace of the world, and the one avowed enemy of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit de corps, based on the instinct of self-defence. We must win the good will of South America, and we cannot do it so long as we insist, in another part of the world, upon the righteousness of the principle of one Christian people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly to keep them from having revolutions, and really in the hope of ultimate profit. To free the Filipinos should be the first step we take after the Panama Canal is completed toward getting ourselves foot-loose entirely, with a view of getting everything from the Canadian border to the Argentine wheat fields and beyond, solidly and sincerely for the Monroe Doctrine. In that direction lies our only sensible and reasonable hope that the canal will get for us the trade and friendship of South America. With such tremendous issues at stake, what does it matter to the richest nation on earth what the Philippines cost? What does it matter, anyhow, how much it costs to do right?

As a colony of Spain the Philippines enjoyed certain special privileges in the way of trade with the “mother country.” When at the beginning of our military occupation in 1898 General Otis detailed an army officer to take charge of the Customs House, he continued for the time being the Spanish tariff laws concerning imports and exports. On September 17, 1901, the Philippine Commission passed a tariff act1 fixing the duties on imports into the Islands and also continuing to a considerable extent the system of duties on Philippine exports inherited from the Spanish régime. Among the products of the Philippine Islands on which the Act of September 17, 1901, imposed an export tax were the following:

On March 8, 1902, the United States Congress passed an Act, “temporarily to provide revenue for the Philippine Islands and for other purposes.” The Act of 1902 re-enacted the Commission’s tariff law for the Philippines of September 17, 1901, with one change, hereinafter to be discussed, as to its export tax features. As to the tariffs to be collected at our custom-houses on Philippine products shipped to the United States, the Act of 1902 reduced the rates fixed by the Dingley tariff to seventy-five per cent. of said rates. That was all Congress did in the way of lowering our tariff wall to Philippine products until 1909, when the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill became a law. This twenty-five per cent. reduction was no better than no reduction whatever would have been.

Governor Taft pleaded very earnestly with Congress, at the time of the passage of the Philippine Tariff Act of March 8, 1902, for a substantial reduction of the Dingley tariff rate on sugar and tobacco, so as to give his “constituents”—his Filipinos—something in lieu of the markets they had had under Spain. But our sugar and tobacco interests defeated his efforts, because they feared what they termed “competition with cheap Asiatic labor.”

The Act of Congress of March 8, 1902, repealed the export duties imposed by the Act of the Philippine Commission of September 17, 1901, as to exports to the United States, leaving unrepealed, however, the export duty on Philippine products shipped to foreign countries. Section 2 of said Act of 1902 provided, as to exports from the Philippines to the United States, that the rates of duty upon products of the Philippine Archipelago coming into the United States, should be less any duty or tax levied, collected, and paid thereon (under the Act of the Philippine Commission of September 17, 1901, aforesaid) upon the shipment thereof from the Philippine Archipelago. This sounds liberal enough. It is, as far as it goes. But what those familiar with the hemp infamy of the Act of 1902 call “the joker” in it, is as follows:

This also sounds liberal, on first reading, but its object was, and its effect has been, to enable the American Hemp Trust to corner and control the Manila hemp industry. There is but one article of Philippine export which any one in the United States is interested in, that was admitted into the United States free of duty under the Dingley Act.4 That article is hemp. The object of the law was to favor Americans interested in exporting hemp from Manila to the United States as against Europeans exporting it to England and other foreign countries. This does not look, on its face, either unpatriotic or un-Christian. It is not unpatriotic or un-Christian, ordinarily, to favor your own people, as against their foreign competitors. The moral quality of such favoritism, however, must depend on who is to pay for it. Under the Act of 1902, the Manila authorities have always collected an export tax on hemp coming to the United States, just as they do on hemp going from Manila to foreign countries, exactly as if the law abolishing the export tax on hemp coming to the United States had never been passed. Later, on proof that the hemp was in fact carried to the United States and used and consumed therein, they refund the export tax. This is on the idea that they cannot tell where the hemp is going to until they know where it went to, nor where it is going to be “used and consumed” until they know where it was in fact finally “used and consumed.” Of course the small farmer is in no position to follow his bale of hemp into the markets of the world and show, if it happens to go to the United States, that it did in fact go there and that it was there “used and consumed,” and, finally obtaining the proof of this, submit it to the Manila Government and get his little export tax on his bale of hemp refunded. Only the big buyer’s agents at Manila are in a position to do this. So the hemp crop is bought and moved under conditions which are the same as if all hemp were subject to an export tax. And only the big fish get the benefit. For instance, the International Harvester Company has its hemp buyers at Manila. And as to the part of the Philippine hemp crop it handles, it can, of course, follow the hemp to its ultimate consumption in the United States, make the proof, and get the refund.

The wealth of the Philippines is practically entirely agricultural. Neither mining nor manufactures cut any appreciable figure. Hemp, sugar, tobacco, and copra5 are the chief staples and main exports, and of the first of these Secretary of War Taft says in one of his reports:6

Let us see just how far, according to the annual reports of our own agents in the Philippines—those charged by us with governing them,—this piece of legislation gotten through by “special privilege” has depressed the Manila hemp industry, the chief source of wealth of the Islands. And before we even get to the main trouble, let us permit the Insular Government to “place on the screen,” as a preliminary “view,” a glance at what the instinct of self-preservation of American sugar and tobacco interests, fearing competition from “cheap Asiatic labor,” have deemed it necessary to do to the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries, through the Dingley tariff. The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1904, before it gets to the subject of hemp, draws a most gloomy picture of how we killed the markets for sugar and tobacco the Islands had under Spain, and gave them none instead. They speak of “the languishing state of these industries” (p. 26), and describe a state of affairs that sounds more like Egypt under Pharaoh than anything else, including a cattle disease that carried off ninety per cent. of the beasts of burden of the country, and wholesale destruction of crops by locusts.7 What they have to say of the annual tribute levied by the American Hemp Trust, through Congress, on the Manila hemp industry, should not be re-stated, but quoted. They say:8

They add:

The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1905, after the usual complaint about being made a political football by Benevolent Assimilation on the one side, and Louisiana and our sugar-beet States on the other, and the usual annual and true description of the consequent poverty, says concerning hemp:

By the end of the fiscal year 1905 (June 30), the American importers of Manila hemp—of whom the International Harvester Company and its allied interests are the most influential—had, under the operation of the rebate system based on the Act of 1902, milked the Philippine people to the tune of about $1,000,000. Says the Philippine Commission’s annual report for 1905, immediately after the passage last above quoted:

Said the Manila Chamber of Commerce to the Taft Congressional party in August, 1905: “The country is in a state of financial collapse.”10

Says the Philippine Commission’s report for 1906 (pt. 1, p. 68):

You also find in the Commission’s report for 1906 the usual annual protests against the Dingley tariff on Philippine sugar and tobacco. Said the Honorable Henry C. Ide in an article in the New York Independent for November 22, 1906, written shortly after he retired from the office of Governor-General of the Philippines and returned to the United States: “By annexation we killed the Spanish market for Philippine sugar and tobacco, and our tariff shuts these products from the United States market, and to-day both these [industries] are practically prostrated.” In their annual report for 1907, the Philippine Commission say with regard to the American corner on Philippine hemp:11 “The price of hemp has fallen from an average of twenty pesos ($10 American money) per picul12 to thirteen pesos per picul.” It thus appears that by judicious manipulation of the hemp market at Manila, through the leverage of the refund system, based on collection and subsequent refunding of the export tax on hemp coming to the United States, the Manila agents of the American hemp manufacturers had, as early as 1907, beat the price of hemp down to not far above half of what it had been formerly. To-day (1912) the Filipino hemp farmer gets for his hemp just one half what he got just ten years ago. During all this period of economic depression, the public utterances and State papers both of President Roosevelt and Mr. Taft are full of such preposterous stuff as the following:

This is what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft were publicly pretending to believe. But at practically the same time, during as dark a year, economically, as the American occupation has seen, 1907, let us see what they were privately admitting to their intimate friends.

In the North American Review for January 18, 1907, in an article contributed to that Review by the author of this volume, our treatment of the Philippine people, through our Congress, was briefly discussed. The article chanced to attract the attention of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who gave a considerable sum of money to have it reprinted and distributed. Some correspondence followed between us, in the course of which Mr. Carnegie stated that he had been at the White House shortly before writing me, and described what happened as follows:

In another letter Mr. Carnegie described this same incident, this other letter’s version of President Roosevelt’s supper-table remark being:

Now why all this public boasting about our “disinterestedness,” when, if he had been a Filipino, Colonel Roosevelt would probably have hunted up all the American speeches of 1776 about taxation without representation, and played hide-and-seek with the public prosecutor at Manila, to see how far he could violate the sedition statute without getting in jail? And why this private admission to his friend Mr. Carnegie, which neither he nor Mr. Taft has ever publicly made? Why did he not send a message to Congress showing up the hemp rebate system? Simply because to do so would lose support for the Administration, would alienate powerful interests from the fatuous policy of Benevolent Assimilation bequeathed to Mr. Roosevelt by Mr. McKinley. His party was irrevocably committed to indefinite retention of the Islands. It was like Lot’s wife. It could not turn back. So the protected and subsidized interests were permitted to continue to prey upon the Philippine people. Tariff evils were never President Roosevelt’s specialty. Nor has war against intrenched privilege of any sort ever been Mr. Taft’s specialty. Mr. Taft went out to the Philippines in 1907 to open the Philippine Assembly. In 1908 he came back and made a report to President Roosevelt which is as bland as his Winona declaration that the Payne-Aldrich bill is “the best tariff bill the Republican party ever passed.” It makes the American reader’s heart swell with pious pride at what he is doing for his “little brown brother,” in the matter of vaccination, sewers, school-books, and the like. President Roosevelt sent this report to Congress, accompanied by a message, from which we have already quoted. In that same message he said:

Apparently, Messrs. Roosevelt and Taft thought, in 1907, that granting the Filipinos a little debating society solemnly called a legislative body, but wholly without any real power, was ample compensation for deserted tobacco and cane plantations and for the price of hemp being beat down below the cost of production by manipulation through an Act of Congress passed for the benefit of American hemp manufacturers. If we had had a Cleveland in the White House about that time, he would have written an essay on taxation without representation, with the hemp infamy of this Philippine Tariff Act of 1902 as a text, and sent it to Congress as a message demanding the repeal of the Act. But the good-will of the Hemp Trust is an asset for the policy of Benevolent Assimilation. The Filipino cannot vote, and the cordage manufacturer in the United States can. No conceivable state of economic desolation to which we might reduce the people of the Philippine Islands being other than a blessing in disguise compared with permitting them to attend to their own affairs after their own quaint and mutually considerate fashion, the Hemp Trust’s rope, tied into a slip-knot by the Act of 1902, must not be removed from their throats. By judicious manipulation of sufficient hemp rope, you can corral much support for Benevolent Assimilation. Therefore, to this good hour, the substance of the hemp part of the Philippine Tariff Act of March 8, 1902, remains upon the statute books of the United States, to the shame of the nation.

At last, under the Payne tariff law of 1909, Mr. Taft’s long and patient quiet work with Congressional committees prevailed upon Congress and the interests to admit Philippine sugar and tobacco to this country free of duty, up to amounts limited in the Act.15 Since then you find the reports of our American officials in the Philippines palpitating with gratitude to Congress. As a matter of fact all Congress had said to the Filipinos by its action may be summed up about thus: “The sugar and tobacco interests of this country have at last realized that such little of the sugar and tobacco you raise as may stray over to this side of the world will not be in the least likely to hurt them. Therefore they have graciously decided, in their benignity, to permit you to live, provided you do not get too prosperous.” But this very same Payne bill continued the export tax features of the Act of 1902. Section 13 of the Payne bill is as follows:

Let us briefly glance at the net results of this law, and its predecessor, the Act of 1902, the export features of which it re-enacted. It is important that every fair-minded American who can possibly spare the time should take such a glance at what Congress has done to the Philippine hemp industry, because of the obvious bearing that such taxation without representation will probably have on the attitude of the Philippine people whenever we get into a war with a foreign power. Certainly the legislation Congress has perpetrated upon them, at the behest of special interests in the United States, has not soothed the original desire of those people to be free and independent.

At page 27 of the report of the Philippine Collector of Customs for 1910, a table is given showing the export duties subject to refund collected under the Act of Congress of March 8, 1902, and deposited in the Philippine treasury to the credit of the Insular Government at the end of each fiscal year (June 30), as follows:

The following table, taken from this same annual report of the Collector of Customs of the Philippines for 1910 (p. 22) shows the size (weight in kilograms), and value, of the annual Philippine hemp crop from 1899 to 1910, both inclusive. It gives in one set of columns the total exported to all countries, and in the other the part which comes to the United States:

If you have the time and inclination, you can easily figure out the annual “rake-off” of the American hemp importers from the above table. For instance, take the last year, 1910: 99,305,102 kilos at 75 cents per 100 kilos is $744,788.26, which is more than 4% of $17,404,922, the total value of the hemp crop of the archipelago for that year. Add this $744,788.26 to the $3,384,183.60 shown by the above table of refundable duties collected from 1902 to 1909 inclusive, and you have over $4,000,000 rebates accruing to American importers of Manila hemp from 1902 to 1910 inclusive.

In his remarks on Section 13 of the Payne Law of 1909 (above set forth), in the House of Representatives, May 13, 1909,16 Hon. Oscar W. Underwood said, in part:

But the hemp interests won out and the section was adopted. In an argument for the repeal of the export tax, delivered in the House of Representatives August 19, 1911, the Philippine delegate, Hon. Manuel L. Quezon, said:

Of course the earnestness with which Mr. Quezon pleaded his cause may be imagined from the circumstance that, as he says, he is continually advised by letters from his people, and verily believes that if the export tax is not taken off soon the Philippine hemp industry will be entirely destroyed, and the hemp farmers will have to take to raising something else in lieu of hemp, because the present prices hardly permit them to live. In the course of his speech Mr. Quezon offered the following truly eloquent and absolutely unanswerable argument:

It is through the courtesy of Mr. Quezon that such light as I may have been able to throw on the subject has been obtained. He has shown me letters from the Philippine Chamber of Commerce at Manila and other commercial organizations prophesying ruin to the Manila hemp industry in the event the export tax should continue. One of these letters is addressed to the two Philippine Commissioners in Congress, Mr. Legarda and Mr. Quezon. It informs them of the hopes of the Filipinos at Manila that they, Messrs. Legarda and Quezon, may be successful in their campaign to get the law repealed and that many of them (the Filipinos at Manila) feel hopeful of results in that regard. Speaking for their fellow countrymen at Manila, they say, “The optimists are of the opinion that the matter being in such good hands as yours will be carried to a successful conclusion.” Then they give the darker side of the picture thus:

Mr. Quezon has also shown me a letter written to him, March 30, 1911, by his and my warm personal friend, Hon. James F. Smith, formerly Governor-General of the Philippines, now (1912) Judge of the Court of Customs Appeals at Washington, D. C., in which letter General Smith says, concerning the operation of that part of the export tax act of March 8, 1902 (continued by the Payne Tariff Law of 1909) by which American manufacturers are relieved from the payment of the export tax on Manila hemp:

It seems to me that the American people had better look to their own liberties, when they remember that in the campaign for the Republican nomination in 1912, the Roosevelt Headquarters gave out that pending the Roosevelt dictation of Mr. Taft’s nomination in 1908, the International Harvester Company furnished a floor of its Chicago building to the Taft people, this interesting fact being part of the leakage from the Roosevelt-Taft quarrel caused by the Roosevelt charge that Mr. Taft was unfit for re-election because he “meant well feebly”; and when it is recalled, on the other hand, that in the Roosevelt campaign of 1912 for the presidential nomination for a third term, Mr. George W. Perkins,17 the very personification of undue corporation influence with the Government, assumed the rôle of Warwick for an ex-President who, when President, had repudiated the advice of his counsel, Governor Harmon, that a railroad company18 be prosecuted for taking rebates because the vice-president of the company was his personal friend.19 But let us return to the Philippine rebates, and their corner-stone, the export tax, Section 13 of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff.

In the case of Fairbanks vs. United States, 181 U. S. Supreme Court Reports, page 290, a case in which the court was asked to declare a certain Act of Congress unconstitutional and void, because it imposed what was virtually an export tax, the opinion of the court cites the absolute inhibition against such a tax imposed by our Federal Constitution, and says concerning the wise theory on which this fundamental tenet of our government rests:

The decision then goes on to elaborate on what it terms “that freedom from governmental burden in the matter of exports which it was the intention of our Constitution to protect and preserve.” Finally, the court uses an expression which is certainly a stinging rebuke to any law-making power that permits the selfish greed of a little set of importers to get a law passed imposing for their special benefit a paralyzing export tax on the chief staple of a helpless colony:

But Mr. Quezon has no vote in Congress and his voice was not heard, at least not heeded.

The summation of the whole matter is this: Both the Philippine people and the American people are, and long have been, suffering from unjust taxation through laws for which special selfish financial interests in the United States, exercising grossly undue influence on governmental action, are responsible. Neither will ever get relief until the government of this nation is wrested from the control of the money-hogs and restored to the people. Until that is done, selfish greed will continue to sow sedition in the Philippines, and socialism in the United States.