Here is a short essay written by a twelve-year-old boy, in response to an order to write a composition about what he had done the previous day.

"Yesterday I called upon all my young lady friends. None but the fathers appeared. We must all be judged according to our works."

The child wrote this by constructing the first sentence himself, and by picking the other two out of phrase-books, which from some source or other are scattered all over the Philippine Islands. What he meant to convey in the carefully pieced mosaic was that he was a dangerous fellow, and that when he came around the fathers kept a close eye on their daughters. That is dubious wit in a man of thirty. In a child of twelve it is loathsome.

Engagements are usually announced at once and are seldom long—from three weeks to three or four months. If the marriage is really for love, as is not infrequently the case, the lovers must have a hard time of it; for they never see each other alone, and "spooning" before others would seem to them in the last degree scandalous. They have marvellous self-control. I have watched many a pair of Filipino lovers for the stolen glances, the shyness, the ever-present consciousness of each other which are characteristic of our lovers, and I have never beheld the faintest evidence of interest in any engaged or newly married couple. They manage to preserve an absolutely wooden appearance at a time when one would expect a race so volatile to display its emotions freely.

Elopements sometimes take place and are called the boda Americana, or American marriage. However, they have the advantage of us in one kind of elopement—that of the widow. Runaway marriages between widows and old bachelors are not a common feature of American life, but they seem to constitute the most frequent form of elopement here. Forced marriages occur in spite of the restrictions put around young girls. They cause a ten days' hubbub, winks, nods, and much giggling behind fans. But no social punishment and ostracism of the girl follows as in our own country. So long as the marriage is accomplished, the Filipinos seem to feel that the fact of its being a little late need disturb no one. But if, as sometimes happens, a girl is led astray by a married man, then disgrace and punishment are her lot. I recall a circumstance where a young girl under a cloud left her native town, never to appear there again. But less than three months after her banishment, her seducer was an honored guest, sitting at the right hand of her brother, in the brother's own house. Apparently the best of feeling prevailed over a matter that with us could never have been forgiven, though bloodshed might perhaps have been averted.

In my eight years in those Islands I have met among the upper classes but one young girl whose conduct offered reason to men to take her lightly. In a pretty, childish way, Filipino girls are coquettes, but they are not flirts. Their conception of marriage and of their duty to their own husbands and their children is a high and noble one. Nevertheless, with innately good and pure instincts, they cannot take half as good care of themselves as can the American girl who is more indiscreet, who knows much less of the matters pertaining to love and sex. The latter has an infinite advantage over her dusky sister in the prudery of speech which is the outwork in a line of fortifications in which a girl's tenacity to her own ideal of chastity must be the final bulwark, A frankness of speech prevails in the Philippines with regard to matters about which we are frank under necessity, but which, as far as possible, we slide into the background. Stories are told in the presence of young girls, and jokes are interchanged, of more than questionable nature according to our standards. Our prudery of speech is the natural result of the liberty permitted to women. When the protection of an older woman or of a male relative is done away with, and a girl is permitted to go about quite unattended, the best and the surest protection that she can have is the kind of modesty that takes fright at even a bare mention, a bare allusion, to certain ordinarily ignored facts of life.

The result of general freedom of speech and the process of safeguarding a girl from its results is to make a Filipino girl regard her virtue as something foreign to herself, a property to be guarded by her relatives. If, through negligence or ignorance on the part of her proper guardians, she is exposed to temptation, she feels herself free from responsibility in succumbing. Such a view of life puts a young girl at a great disadvantage with men, especially with men so generally unscrupulous as Filipinos,

Among the lower classes there is no idea that a young girl can respect herself or take care of herself. Girls are watched like prisoners, and are never allowed to stray out of the sight of some old woman. It is almost impossible for an American woman to obtain a young girl to train as a servant, because, as they say, we do not watch them properly. This jealous watching of a child's virtue is not, however, always inspired by the love of purity. Too frequently the motive is that the girl may bring a higher price when she reaches a marriageable age, or when she enters into one of those unsanctified alliances with some one who will support her. Filipino men are merciless in their attitude toward young lower-class girls, not hesitating to insult or annoy them in the most shameless way. I once forced a little maid of mine to wear the regular maid's dress of black, with muslin cap and apron, and she was certainly a joy to the eye; but one day I sent her out on an errand, and she came back almost hysterical under the torrent of ribald admiration which my thoughtlessness had brought upon her. A seamstress will not remain alone in your house while you run into a neighbor's on an errand without bolting herself in the room; and, if you are to be gone any length of time, she will not stay there at all, simply because she is afraid of your men servants—and justly so.

However, in respect to such matters, things are changing fast. The Filipinos who love us least, high or low, rich or poor, admit that the American idea of treating every self-respecting woman with respect is a good thing. They remark frequently the difference between now and former times, and say, with admiration, that a woman can go past the cuartels or the fire stations, without encountering insult in the form of galanteria; and the electric street-car line, suspected at first, has gained the confidence of nearly all. Many Filipino families of the upper class permit their daughters to go to and from the American schools on the trolley car, and it is no uncommon thing to see three or four youngsters, all under ten, climbing on and off with their books, asking for transfers, and enjoying their liberty, who ten years ago would have been huddled into a quilez and guarded by an elderly woman servant.

Lastly, a bill for female suffrage was introduced into the Philippine Assembly a few weeks ago. It is one of those "best" things which Filipinos all want for their land. The young man who introduced it had probably been reading about the female suffragist movement in England, and he said to himself that it would be a fine idea to show this dull old world how progressive and modern are the Philippine Islands; and so he drafted his bill. Nothing seems to have been heard of it, and it was probably tabled, with much other progressive legislation, in the hurry of the last days of the session. Another bill was one to put an annual license of one thousand pesos (five hundred gold dollars) on every minister of the gospel, Protestant or Catholic. I suspect its parent of having been coached up on modern French thought. However, that is not pertinent to the woman question. What I desire to do is to give a correct impression of a country where real conditions are such as I have described them, and ideal conditions have advanced to the point of a bill for female suffrage.



CHAPTER XI

Social and Industrial Condition of the Filipinos

American and Tagalog Invaders of Visaya Compared—Doubt As to the Aptitude of Filipinos for Self-Government—Their Civilization Not Achieved by Themselves But Inherited from Spain—Their Present Personal Liberty—Belief of the Poor That Alien Occupation is the Root of Their Misery—How the Filipinos View Labor—Their Apathy Toward Machinery—Their Interest Centred Not in Industry But in Themselves—Their Hazy Conceptions of Government—Their Need of a Remodelled Social System—Their Jealousy Lest Others Make Large Profits in Dealing with Them—Zeal of the Aristocrats to Preserve Their Prerogatives—A New Aristocracy Likely to Be Raised by the American Public Schools.

Capiz was occupied by a company of the Tenth Cavalry and one of the Sixth Infantry. The relations between Americans and Filipinos seemed most cordial. There had never been any fighting in the immediate neighborhood of the town. The Visayans are a peaceful race; even in the insurrection against Spain the Capizenos felt a decided pro-Spanish sentiment. Early in the rebellion a few boat-loads of Tagalog soldiers came down from Luzon, and landed on the open north coast two miles from the town. The valiant Capizenos had dug some trenches on the beach and had thrown up a breastwork there, and they went out to fight for Spain and Visaya. They fired two rounds without disconcerting the Tagalogs very much, and then, having no more ammunition, they "all ran home again," as my informant naively described it. The Tagalogs took possession of the town, and the Visayans lived in fear and trembling. Nearly all women, both wives and young girls, carried daggers in fear of assault from Tagalog soldiers. Some declared to me that they would have used the daggers upon an assailant, others told me that the weapons were intended as a last resort for themselves. The Spanish wife of our Governor said that during the time of Tagalog occupation she seldom ventured out of her home; that she discarded her European dress, affected the native costume, wore her hair hanging down her back, and tried in every way to keep from attracting the attention of the invaders. Nevertheless, several young girls were seized in spite of their parents' efforts to protect them. Many families fled from the town and took refuge in the mountain villages inland. Others lived in boats, lurking about the rivers and the innumerable waterways which criss-cross the swampy coast plain. When the Tagalogs withdrew, the wanderers returned to their homes, only to make a fresh exodus when the Americans came.

The Americans did not land on the north coast, but entered the town from the south, having marched and fought their way up the full length of the island from Iloilo. Horrid rumors preceded them concerning their gigantic size and their bloodthirsty habits. It was reported that they had burned hundreds of women and children alive at Iloilo. The timid Capizenos had no idea of resistance, but, for the most part, closed their houses, leaving some old servant in charge, and took once more to the hills and the swamps. A few sage heads had their own reasons for doubting the alleged American ferocity, and decided to stay at home and risk it.

One of my pupils, a very intelligent young girl, described to me the American entry. She said that the houses of the rich were closed, shell windows were drawn to, and the iron-sheathed outer doors were locked and barred. But most shell windows have in the centre a little pane of glass to permit the occupants of the house to look out without being seen. My young friend told me how her family were all "peeking," breathless, at their window pane, and how the first view of the marching columns struck fear to their hearts, so tall and powerful seemed the well-clad, well-armed men. A halt was called, and after the proper formalities at the provoste, or town hall, the municipality was handed over to American rule, and the Stars and Stripes floated from the local flagstaff. The soldiers were permitted to break ranks, and they began buying fruits and bottles of beer and of native wine in the tiendas, or shops. The soldiers overpaid, of course, joked, picked up the single-shirted pickaninnies, tossed them, kissed them, and otherwise displayed their content. Then, said my informant, her father (who is an astute old fellow) decided that the story of American ferocity was a lie. He ordered his house opened, and the shell windows slid back, revealing his pretty daughters in their best raiment, smiling and bowing. The officers raised their caps and gave back smiles and bows; a few natives cried, "Viva los Americanos," and behold, the terrible event was all over.

Acquaintance was at once struck up. The officers came to pay their respects, drank beer and muscatel, consumed sweets, and paid florid compliments in Spanish. They began to take possession of those houses whose owners were out of town, and the news went out. Then there was as great a scramble to get back as there had been to get away. In a few days everything was running smoothly, and, as my interlocutor remarked, all the American officers were much in love with the charming Filipino girls.

Almost the first act of the military was to open the schools. The schoolhouses had been used as barracks by the Tagalogs. The chaplain of the Eighteenth Infantry, the children told me, was their first teacher. The opening of the schools was a great surprise to the Filipinos, who were clever enough to appreciate the national standards which the act implied.

At the time of my arrival the foregoing facts were, in the rush of events, almost ancient history. Two years had passed. American women, wives of officers, had come and gone. Peace had been declared and the machinery of civil government had been put in action.

It would be foolish for me to spend time discussing the Filipino's aptitude for self-government. Wiser heads than mine have already arrived at a hopeless impasse of opinion on that point. There are peculiarities of temperament in the Filipino people which are seldom discussed in detail, but which offer premises for statements and denials, not infrequently acrimonious, and rarely approached in a desire to make those judging from a distance take into consideration all that makes opinions reliable. Such peculiarities of character seem to me pertinent to a book which deals with impressions.

Whatever their capacity for achieving the Anglo-Saxon ideal of self-government, it ought to be recognized that the Filipinos are both aided and handicapped by receiving not only their government but their civilization ready made. Their newly aroused sense of nationality is asserting itself at a period in the world's development when the mechanical aids to industry and the conscience of a humane and civilized world relieve Filipino development from the birth throes by which other nations have struggled to the place at which the Filipinos begin. 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.

Both civilization, as acquired in the three hundred years of Spanish occupation, and self-government have descended upon the Filipino very much as the telephone and the music box have done—as complete mechanisms which certain superficial touches will set in motion, the benefits of which are to certain classes and individuals quite obvious, and the basic principles of which they have memorized but have not felt. At present there are not, in the emotional being of the 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; and yet there is a sincere, a passionate desire for political independence. The Filipino leaders, however, have no intention of dying for political independence, nor do they desire to sacrifice even their personal pleasures or their effects. They talk a great deal about independence, they write editorials about it, it fills a great part of their thoughts; and no reasonable person can doubt their sincerity. But most of the political talk in the Philippines is on a par with certain socialistic thought in the United States—the socialistic talk of modern writers and speakers, of idealists and dreamers. It seems as great a perversion of abstract justice, to a Filipino, that an alien nation should administer his Government, as it seems to a hard-working American woman that she should toil all her life, contributing her utmost to the world's progress and the common burden of humanity, while her more fortunate sisters, by the mere accident of birth, spend their lives in idleness and frivolity, enriched by the toil of a really useful element in society. But to most Filipinos, as to most American women, the contemplation of the elemental injustice of life does not bring pangs sufficient to drive them into overt action to right the injustice. There are a few Filipinos upon whom the American administration in the Philippines presses with a sense of personal obstruction and weight heavy enough to make them desire overt action; but upon the majority of the race the fact of an alien occupation sits very lightly. No man, American or Filipino, wants to risk his life for the abstract principles of human justice until the circumstances of life growing out of the violation of those principles are well-nigh unendurable to him. The actual condition of the Philippines is such that the violation of abstract justice—that is, alien occupation—does not bear heavily upon the mass of the people. For the entire race alien occupation is, for the time being, an actual material benefit. Personal liberty in the Philippines is as absolute as personal liberty in the United States or England. Far from making any attempt to keep the native in a condition of ignorance, the alien occupiers are trying to coax or prod him, by all the short cuts known to humanity, into the semblance of a modern educated progressive man. There is no prescription which they have tried and found good for themselves which they are not importing for the Philippines, to be distributed like tracts. And to the quick criticism which Filipinos of the restless kind are prone to make, that what is good for an American is not necessarily good for a Filipino, the alien occupiers may reply that, until the body of the Filipino people shows more interest in developing itself, any prescription, whether it originate with Americans or with those who look upon themselves as the natural guides and rulers of this people, is an experiment to be tried at the ordinary experimental risk.

The common people of the Philippine Islands enjoy a personal liberty never previously obtained by a class so rudimentary in its education and in its industrial development. They would fight blindly, at the command of their betters, but not because they are more patriotic than the educated classes. The aristocrats, who would certainly hesitate to fight for their convictions, really think a great deal more about their country and love it a great deal more than do the common people, who would, under very little urging, cheerfully risk their lives. But the poorer people live under conditions that seem hard and unjust to them. The country is economically in a wretched state, and the working-classes have neither the knowledge nor the ambition to apply themselves to its development. Unable to discover the real cause of their misery (which is simply their own sloth), they have heard just enough political talk to make them fancy that the form of government is responsible for their unhappy condition. With them the causes which drive men into dying for an abstract idea do exist; and it is easy for a demagogue to convince them that the alien occupation is the root of all evil, and that a political change would make them all rich.

Among the extremely poor of the Filipinos there exists a certain amount of bitterness against Americans, because they think that our strong bodies, our undoubtedly superior health and vitality, our manner of life, which seems to them luxurious past human dreams, and our personal courage are attributes which we enjoy at their expense. The slow centuries which have gone to our building up, mental and physical, are causes too remote for their limited thinking powers to take into consideration. Moreover, though we say that we have come to teach them to work and to make their country great, we ourselves do not work; at least, they do not call what we do work. A poor Filipino's conception of work is of something that takes him into the sun or that soils his clothing. Filipinos hate and fear the sun just as they hate the visible tokens of toil on their persons. Where they know the genteel trades such as hat weaving, dressmaking, embroidering, tailoring, and silversmithing, there is relatively a fair industrial willingness. Men are willing to be cooks and house servants, but they do not want to learn carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening, all of which mean soiled clothes and hot work; and women are unwilling to work in the kitchen. From the poor Filipinos' standpoint, the Americans do not work—they rule. It would be difficult to make a Filipino of the laboring class believe that a teacher or a provincial treasurer had done a day's work. Loving, as all Filipinos do, to give orders to others, ignorant as they are of the responsibilities which press upon those who direct, they see merely that we do not soil our hands, and they envy us without giving us credit for the really hard work that we do.

Meanwhile there pours in upon the country a stream of modern mechanism and of modern formulated thought, and the laborer has just as little real interest in knowing what is inside the machine as his slightly more intelligent neighbor has in examining the thought and in accepting or rejecting it on its merits. Some accept all that we offer them, doing so in a spirit of real loyalty, on the assumption that we know more than they do, and that our advice is to be accepted. Others reject everything with a blind resentment because it comes from our hands. They feel that, in accepting or rejecting, they are demonstrating their capacity to do their own thinking, when in reality they are only asserting their right to do their own feeling. A sense of discrimination in what they accept or reject in our thought has not yet appeared, to any great extent, in those classes of Filipinos with whom I have come in contact; nor as yet have I ever beheld in the laboring classes a desire to understand the mechanisms to which they are constantly introduced, which will be the first symptoms of growth.

A few weeks ago a Filipino workman was making an electric light installation in my house. He handled the wires very carelessly, and I asked him if he was not afraid of a shock. On his replying that the current was very light, I put the inevitable American query, How did the company manage to get a light current on one street, and at the same time to keep up the current in other parts of the city? His reply was, "There is a box on Calle San Andres, and the current goes in strong on one side and comes out light on the other," On my asking if he knew how the box was able to produce such a result, he replied blithely that he did not know; and to a third question, why he did not try to find out, he asked me why he should want to know. He was a very ignorant man, but his attitude was not uncharacteristic of much wiser men than he. I discovered one morning, in talking to the most advanced class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, that not one of them knew what steam is, or had any idea of how it is applied to manufacture; and yet they were working every day, and had been working, most of them for two or three years, in the machine-shops and the wood-working shops where a petroleum engine was in constant operation. The boys had shown such a courteous interest in what was pointed out to them, and had so little real interest and curiosity in what they were working with, that their shop teachers had never guessed that they did not know the elementary principles of mechanics.

If a flying machine should suddenly descend in an American village with no sign of steam gear, electric motor, compressed air, or any other motive power with which we are familiar, can you imagine that eighty per cent of the population of the village would stand around, begging the inventor to make it fly and alight again, exhibiting all the delight of children in a strange toy, but giving it not one close glance, one touch to determine how it is made, and not even wondering anything about it? Can you imagine all those people placidly accepting the fact that there are other nations interested in making strange machines, and receiving the strange toy as an example of foreign energy with which, at that or at any other time, they had no concern? Yet such is the actual condition of affairs in the Philippine Islands, and I am not sure that my estimate of eighty per cent is not too low. Filipinos of the educated classes, gentlemen who can talk about

"The grandeur that was Greece, And the glory that was Rome,"

or who can quote Tom Paine or Voltaire or Rousseau, or discuss the fisherman's ring of the Pope, or the possibilities of an Oriental race alliance, would give a glance at such a machine and dismiss it with such a remark as this: "Ah! a new flying machine. Very interesting. If it proves practical, it should be a great benefit to the Philippines. The Government should buy two or three and put them in operation to show the people how they can be used."

The great majority of the Filipino people are simply apathetic toward the material and spiritual appliances of their present status. (Please do not infer, however, that they are apathetic toward the status itself.) Fortune is continually thrusting upon them a ready-made article, be it of transportation, of furniture, of education, or even of creed. With no factories of its own, their land is deluged with cheap manufactured goods. With almost no authors, they have been inundated with literature and texts. With no experience in government, they have a complicated system presented to them, and are told to go ahead, to fulfil the requirements, to press the button, and to let the system do the rest. And they are, with few exceptions, making the mistake of assuming that their aptitude in learning to press the button is equivalent to the power of creating the system. They are like some daring young chauffeur who finds that he can run an automobile, and can turn it and twist it and guide it and control it with the same ease that its inventor does, and who feels that he is as fully its master—as indeed he is, till something goes wrong.

The intelligent Filipinos who are pressing for immediate self-government have no intentions of changing the "press-the-button" system if they get what they want. Nor can the American Government, if it remain here, do any more than it is now doing to urge the Filipino into real industrial and mental activity. Until the Filipino takes more interest in things than he takes in himself; until he learns to approach life from some other standpoint than the social one, and with some other object than seeing how large a figure he can cut in it, it makes no difference what flag flies over his head, his national existence is an artificial one, a semblance of living nourished by the selfishness of those with whom he has commercial relations.

The intelligent Filipinos (I speak of the ordinary middle classes of Manila and the provinces, not of the really eminent Filipinos who are associated with the Government, for with them I have little acquaintance) have had so little practical contact with the great world, so little conception of what a strong commercial and manufacturing nation is, that it is impossible to make them understand that no nation of the present day can achieve greatness except by industry. If you can get them to talk freely, you find them absorbed in a glorious dream of the Filipino people dazzling the world with pure intellectuality—a Philippines full of poets, artists, orators, authors, musicians, and, above all, of eloquent statesmen and generals. They do not reflect that a statesman is wasted who has nothing but a handful of underfed people to govern, and that it is commerce and agriculture which furnish the propelling power to the ship of state on which the statesman is a pilot. They want to be progressive, and their idea of progress is a constant stream of mechanical appliances flowing like water into the Philippines from other lands; but they do not even consider where the money is to come from to pay for all the things they want. They howl like victims over taxation, but they have a hazy idea that it is the duty of their Government to seek out every labor-saving machine in the world and to buy it and to put it in operation in the Philippines till the inhabitants have accustomed themselves to its use, and have obtained through its benefits the wherewithal to indulge in more of the same sort. They do not concern themselves with the problem of the Government's getting the money to do all this, other than they think that if we Americans were out of the way, and the six or eight million pesos of revenue which go annually into our pockets were going to Filipinos instead, there would be money in plenty for battleships, deep-water harbors, railroads, irrigation, agricultural banks, standing armies, extended primary and secondary education; and that the resources of the Government would even permit of the repeal of the land tax, of the abolition of internal revenue taxes, and of the lowering of the tariff. One of their favorite dreams of raising money is to put a tremendously high license upon all foreigners doing business in the Islands; and so high an opinion have they both of their value to the world at large and of their prowess, that they do not take into consideration the probability of the foreigner's either getting out of the country or appealing to his own Government to protect his invested capital. When they speak of independence, they invariably assume that America is going to protect them against China, Japan, or any of the great colony-holding nations of Europe.

Such are the peculiar governmental conceptions of the middle-class Filipino—a class holding the ballot by the grace of God and the assistance of the American Government. Their inverted ideas come from real inexperience in highly organized industrial society, and from perfectly natural deductions from books. When they study Roman and Greek history, they learn there the names of generals, poets, artists, sculptors, statesmen, and historians. Books do not dwell upon that long list of thriving colonies which filled the Grecian archipelago with traffic, and reached east and west to the shores of Asia and to the Pillars of Hercules. The Filipinos learn that Rome nourished her generals and her emperors upon the spoils of war, but they do not reflect that the predatory age—at least in the Roman sense—is past. Their imaginations seize upon the part played by the little island republic of Venice, and they gloat over the magnificence of the Venetian aristocracy, but they hardly give a thought to the thousands of glass-blowers, to the weavers of silken stuffs, to the shipbuilders and the artisans, and to the army of merchants that piled up the riches to make Venice a power on the Mediterranean.

Filipinos have come in contact, not with life but with books, and their immediate ambition is to produce the things which are talked of in books. Situated as these Islands are, remote from any great modern civilization, there is no criterion by which the inhabitants can arrive at a correct estimate of their condition. If here and there a single Filipino educated in Europe should dazzle society with novels or plays or happy speeches, most of his countrymen would be satisfied with his vindication of Filipino capacity.

There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the future development of the Philippines, whether they remain under our flag or become independent. One is a new aristocracy to be a new type of incentive to the laborer; the other is an increase in the laborer's wants which will keep him toiling long after he has discovered the futility of the hopes which urged him in the beginning. At present, the American Government is trying to remodel a social system which consists of a land-holding aristocracy and an ignorant peasantry, the latter not exactly willing to work for a pittance, but utterly helpless to extricate themselves from the necessity of doing so. To the aristocrat the Government says, "Come and aid us to help thy brother, that he may some day rob thee of thy prerogatives"; and to the peasant, "O thou cock-fighting, fiesta-harboring son of idleness and good-nature, wake up, struggle, toil, take thy share of what lies buried in thy soil and waves upon thy mountainsides, and be as thy brother, yonder." Nor is my picture complete if I do not add that, under his breath, both peasant and aristocrat reply, "Fool I for what? That I may pick thy chestnuts out of the fire."

There is a story which illustrates the Filipino's sensitiveness to picking somebody else's chestnuts out of the fire, not inappropriate to be told here. The agent of the Kelly Road Roller Company had made an agreement with a number of Filipinos in the Maraquina Valley to take up a rice thresher and to thresh their crops for one-twelfth of the output. As this was cheaper than the usual cost of rice-threshing, they accepted the offer, but they were anxious to compare the new machine with their own system. One way of threshing rice is to have a kind of stone table like an armchair, in which the seat is a bowl for the grain which drops down as the thresher strikes the laden stalks against the stone back. On the appointed day the American appeared with his thresher, and the Filipinos were on hand with their stone table and a confident expert who was reputed the best rice-thresher in the district. The American began to feed his machine, and the Filipino made his bundles cut the air. In a few seconds the Filipino had quite a little handful of grain collected in his stone bowl, but not a grain of rice had appeared from the thresher. The workman cast supercilious glances at the machine, when suddenly a stream of rice as thick as his wrist began to pour out, and continued to pour in startling disproportion to his tiny pile. He stood it half a minute and then laid down his bundle of stalks and strode away. The onlooking land-holders were at first amazed and delighted. Then suddenly a horrible thought struck them! They got out their pocket pads and pencils and began to figure. Then they held a consultation and declared that the deal was off—that for one-twelfth the amount of rice streaming out of the thresher, the American's profits would be highway robbery of the poor Filipino. In vain the agent pointed out to them that the one-twelfth was a ratio in which their gain would always be proportionate to his. They could see nothing except that he was going to make a large sum of money at their expense. The economy of the thresher over their own wasteful system made no impression against the fact that his commission would be a bulk sum which they were unwilling to see him gain. They could not afford to buy the machine, but they stopped the threshing then and there; and the agent learned that what is good advertising in America is not necessarily good in the Philippines.

The reader may fancy that he perceives in this chapter a direct contradiction of what I said in a preceding chapter about the Filipino aristocrat's desiring the best of everything for his country. But the Filipino is like the sinner who says with all sincerity that he desires to be saved, but who, when confronted with the necessity of giving up certain of his pleasures as the price of salvation, feels that salvation comes rather high, and begins to figure on how he can accomplish the desired result without personal inconvenience. The present land-holding aristocracy is jealous to the last degree of its prerogatives, and it has fought every attempt to equalize taxation and to make the rich bear their fair share in the national expense account. The land tax and the rentas internes, or internal revenue tax, are two governmental measures which the rich classes fought to the extreme of bitterness, and which they would revoke to-morrow if it lay in their power to do so.

An aristocracy represents a survival of the fittest—not necessarily the ideally fit, but the fittest to meet the conditions under which it must prove a survivor. The conditions which Spain created here to mould Filipino character were mediaeval, monarchical, and reactionary. The aristocracy is a land-holding one, untrained in the responsibilities of land-holders who grow up a legitimate part of the body politic of their country. Previous to American occupation the aristocracy was excluded from any share in the government, and the Spaniards were exceedingly jealous of any pretensions to knowledge or culture on its part. The aristocracy which could survive such conditions had to do so by indirectness and courtier-like flattery, by blandishment and deceit. The aristocrats learned to despise the poor and the weak; for the more extravagant the alms-giving, the more arrogant the secret attitude of the giver. They trusted less to their own strength than to others' weakness. They relied less on their own knowledge than on others' ignorance. Whatever solidarity the aristocracy had and has to-day is of a class nature rather than of a racial. In the insurrection against Spain it allied itself with its lower-class brethren simply because Spain forced it to do so. Had the friars made concessions to the aristocracy as a class, and permitted them a voice in Filipino affairs, there would have been no insurrection against Spain, nor would the entrance of a Filipino governing class have made large changes in the conditions of the great mass of the Filipino people.

Under a democratic Government the present aristocracy cannot retain its present place and prestige, and a portion of its eagerness for independence comes from a recognition of that fact. The American Government has practically opened the way for the creation of a new aristocracy in establishing the public schools. In the provinces the primary schools are patronized by rich and poor alike, though it has required considerable effort to make the poor people understand that their children have as much right to the enjoyment of school privileges as have the children of the rich. The secondary schools of the provinces are patronized chiefly by the middle and upper classes, and in the city of Manila the children of the really wealthy hardly ever attend the public schools. The wealthy citizens of Manila prefer to send their sons to the religious schools, and their daughters to the colegios, or sisterhood schools, of which there are many. While English is taught in all these schools, general instruction is in Spanish; the courses of study include the usual amount of catechism, expurgated history, and the question-and-answer method of "philosophy" of the old Spanish system. If the American Government remain here, a new aristocracy, the result of her public school system, is inevitable. If it should not remain here, the Spanish-reared product will continue to hold its present place.



CHAPTER XII

Progress in Politics and Improvement of the Currency

Our First Election of a Governor—More Feeling in Our Next Election—We Organize a Self-Governing Society in the School—Improvement in Parliamentary Procedure—The Boys Imitate the Oratory of a Real Politician—A Much-mixed Currency in the Philippines—Losses to the Teachers Through Fluctuations in Exchange—The Conant System Brings Stability—The New Copper Coins Astonish the Natives.

We had been in Capiz but a short time when talk of the coming election began to occupy both Americans and Filipinos. The Governor of the province at that time held his position by appointment from Mr. Taft, but provisions had been made by the Commission for an election at a specified time, which was then at hand. In view of the fact that it was the first election ever held in the province, we Americans expected to encounter much rejoicing over the newly acquired right, and a general outbreak of gratification. It made a barely perceptible ripple. The Filipinos had not gathered momentum enough under the new system to approach an election by the well-recognized channels. There were no speeches, no public gatherings, no processions, and, so far as the mass of the population were concerned, no interest whatsoever. There is not universal suffrage in the Philippines. The electors for the occasion were the concejales, or town councillors, of the towns in the province. On a given day they would assemble to cast their votes.

Our appointed Governor was a candidate to succeed himself, and the only opponent of any importance was a local lawyer, named D——. D—— was on very good terms with most of the Americans, who regarded him as something of an Americanista, but he was greatly hated by the prominent Filipino families in town, not only on the score of his suspected pro-American sentiment, but on account of certain meddlings of his in past time with cacique power.

A short time before the election the American community were thunderstruck on hearing that D—— had been arrested on a charge of murder. Our Supervisor—and, I believe, the Treasurer—offered to go on his bail. Then came a telegram from Judge Bates at Iloilo, denying bail. For a day or two telegrams flew back and forth, the Americans trying to secure the temporary release of the unfortunate lawyer but accomplishing nothing. D—— was kept practically incomunicado in the local calabozo. He insisted that there was a plot on foot to destroy him, and either he was much distressed or he pretended to be so. Then came an order to take him out to a small town in the interior whence the charge came. D—— declared that he should be killed on the way. The Americans finally prevailed upon an American inspector of constabulary to accompany the prisoner's escort. The rainy season was in full force, and prisoner and escort had a bad time getting out to Maayon, the town aforementioned. Once there the charge broke down at once. It was based upon a statement made by an old woman that a spirit had appeared to her in a dream, and had accused D—— of being the cause of its immaterial existence. The prisoner was almost immediately set at liberty. For reasons best known to himself, he found it inconvenient to return to Capiz and to renew his campaign for the governorship.

By the fortuitous circumstance of the charge against D——, our Governor, who professed a smiling ignorance of all the circumstances of the case, had been relieved of his only formidable rival, and he prepared to do the honors of Capiz to the concejales. He lived in the old palace of the Spanish governors, which had since come to serve as provincial capitol and gubernatorial residence. There was plenty of room in the fine old place, and the concejales found everything to their satisfaction. They had but to step out of their bedrooms to find themselves at the polls. Our Governor was elected almost unanimously, to succeed himself for two years.

That was doing pretty well for a set of tyros at politics; but by the time the next election swung round, political feeling had awakened, there were wheels within wheels, and feeling was running explosively high. Political parties had crystallized into two bodies, known as Progresistas and Federalistas. The Progresistas were the anti-American party, pledged to every effort for immediate independence. The Federalistas were those who stood by the Taft administration, and talked of compromise in the present, and of independence at some distant day. Our Governor, who was again a candidate to succeed himself, was the Federalista head. The Federalistas accused the Progresistas of being "Aglipianos"—that is, schismatics from the Roman Church—and they hinted that Aglipianoism was more a political movement than it was a religious one.

Each party professed itself sceptical of the good intentions of the other. Each was certain that the other would come to the polls with firearms and bolos. I began to worry about my desks, having promised to loan twenty-five nice new oak ones of the latest American pattern for the use of the concejales in making out their votes.

The officer commanding the constabulary at that time was a huge, black-browed, black-whiskered Irish-man, who, among the American men, went by the name of "Paddy" L——. Both parties ran to Captain L——, clamoring for a military guard at the election. Captain L—— pooh-poohed the notion that any serious trouble could grow out of the election, declined to consider a guard, except the two soldiers to guard the ballot box, who were more for function than for protection, and smilingly added that his trust in the Filipino sense of law and order was so great that he intended to go to the election and see it all himself.

By this time the Governor's family had removed from the government building, and a suite of apartments at the rear which had served for kitchen, dining-room, store-rooms and servants' quarters, had been cleaned up, painted, and handed over to the Provincial Intermediate School, of which I was principal. One of our school-rooms was connected by an uncurtained glass door with the great central hall of the building, which was usually given over to the Court of the First Instance, but which was, that day, a sort of anteroom to the voting precinct located in the former sala of the palace. My school-room would, therefore, command a full view of the polls. For several days I lived in dread of hearing that election day would be declared a school holiday, but no order came to that effect, and on election day I went to school with my mind bent on taking notes of all that went on, also wondering a little if in case the non-expected riot came off, I should not have to vacate a little hurriedly.

By nine o'clock the court-room was packed with electors and lobbyists, or whatever the interested outsiders may be called. Through the glass doors we could see them in groups, some laughing and chatting in ordinary social converse, others dark and gloomy, others gathered in whispering knots with fingers on lips, much mysterious nodding and shrugging of shoulders, and all the innocent evidences of conspiracy. Beyond, through double doors, the voting precinct was in full view, my twenty-five desks occupied by meditative concejales, sucking the ends of their pencils. There were the judges and the ballot boxes, symbols of progress and modernity, and there, too, as a concession to dignity which fills the Filipino with joy, were two dear little constabulary soldiers with guns about as long as themselves. Their khaki suits were spick and span from the laundry, their red shoulder straps blazed, their gilt braid glittered, and their white gloves were as snowy as pipe clay could make them. Their little brown faces were stolid enough to delight the most ambitious commander. The whole was a sight to cheer the heart of rampant democracy.

In the midst of the throng in the court-room, jovial, lusty, bright of eye, loitered our easy-going chief of constabulary. His was no common girth at any time, but belted with a particularly large-sized and vicious-looking revolver, he seemed to be at least sixty inches around the waist. There was something casual about that revolver, and at the same time something very significant. But nothing could have been more blandly unconscious than the Captain's manner. He had what is commonly described as "a kind word and a sweet smile for everybody." There were constabulary reserves a block away, but the Captain's appearance was an assurance that there would be no need for the reserves. He loafed about, chatting first with one group and then with another. The conspirator looks gave way to laughter and clappings on the back, but when he turned away, more than one eye followed the time-worn holster and its bulky contents.

That election went off as calmly as a county fair—much more calmly, indeed, though there was a reclama afterwards, and a long struggle about it which had to be decided by the Court of First Instance. The quarrel over the election was not related, however, to the Captain's presence there.

Apparently the Church was interested in the election, for every shovel-hatted padre in the district seemed to have come in for it. They and the provincial dignitaries from towns which had not then risen to the dignity of an American public school, wandered into the school in groups of three and sometimes of twenty. It was their first contact with coeducation, and they were highly amused at the sight of a class of boys and girls working together in the reduction of compound fractions. They were also delighted with the choral music, especially with "The Watch on the Rhine" which the pupils sang with great enthusiasm.

Not very long after that election we began our first work with self-governing societies. The school had been long enough established to have an advanced class capable of speaking English, and our Division Superintendent suggested that I give them a little practical experience in the "machinery of politics." I assented with outward respect, and then retired to smile, for the "machinery of politics" is the last thing in which the Filipino has need of instruction from us. He is a born politician, and we compare to him in that respect as babes to a philosopher. But I recognized that my pupils did need the experience of a self-governing society, and practice in parliamentary usages, and so we organized our society from the three most advanced classes in the school.

In the beginning I organized the society, acting as temporary chairman. I called for an election by informal ballot of short-term officers to serve until a time of regular elections could be set. Our first ballot polled seventy-three votes, although there were only fifty-five persons in the room. I threw that out and called for a roll call vote. In due time a regular election took place, and officers for three months were elected. As the vote was open, the aristocratic element came off best, as was to be expected. The children of one prominent family, together with some of their friends, held every office. Practically the result was not bad. The officers, four out of five of whom were girls, represented considerable ability. The girls were elected chiefly out of the galanteria of certain of the boy aristocrats, who had very little conception of what a self-governing society means, but who wished to pay their fair innamoratas a compliment.

Our society was a pronounced success. The pupils took to parliamentary practice very much as they would to a new game. Visitors thronged our Friday afternoon meetings. We teachers had to put in six or eight hours every week, drilling the pupils on duty, helping to get up music, and meeting with committees. A teacher was parliamentary "coach," and sat at the side of Madame President, giving her directions in an undertone. All the teachers were elected honorary members, and one was critic. Peace reigned and Joy flapped her wings.

About this time, however, the gentlemen who were running that province engaged in the real game which we were imitating, and became involved in a quarrel which threatened to strain the relations between Americans and Filipinos to the breaking point. Governor Taft came down in person to look into the affair. There was a banquet and there were speeches. The Filipino Governor prefaced his oratorical flight by the statement that three times only in his life had he trembled. Time has clouded my memory, but I think he said the first of these was when he took his Bachelor's degree from the University of Spain; the second was when he led his fair partner to the matrimonial altar; and the third was that present occasion when he stood up before that illustrious assembly, seeking words in which to welcome the distinguished guest.

He did not look as if he were suffering from nervousness, and his words flowed with sufficient ease to indicate that he was not having much trouble in the search. Sitting at the far end of the festal board, contemplating my glass of tinto (I am unable to say whether I drank tinto because the champagne ran short or because, being feminine and educational, I was deemed unworthy of the best), I reflected somewhat cynically that if he was telling the strict truth, his childhood must have been singularly barren of the penalties which follow real childish joy, or else his was a remarkable personality.

But that is neither here nor there. The utterance wafted me a gentle amusement at the time. But from that time on, the boys of my literary society began to tremble—always twice anteriorly, and for the third time when they stood up before that intellectual and critical assemblage. Every boy for weeks to come used that worn-out preface for his remarks. The pupils gave no signs either of amusement or scorn. Apparently they received it seriously as an eminently becoming preface of oratory, just as they do the "Do-minus vobiscum" of the mass. But one day I spoke of it in one of the classes—intentionally not in the society. When they saw our viewpoint, they shrieked with delight, and from that time on, the budding orators ceased to tremble.

At last we arrived at the point of an open session, and the event was what is described in society papers as one of the social events of the season. We had really a good programme, we transacted quite a little business in accordance with parliamentary usage: we elected the Governor, the Presidente, and several prominent citizens honorary members, and they acknowledged the compliment with appropriate remarks.

About a week after our open session I was about to retire one night, when I heard the sound of music and saw lights approaching. Transparencies were waving about in the warm air. As there was no cholera, and therefore no occasion for a San Roque procession, I hung out of the window, local fashion, to find out what it was all about. It was a newly organized parliamentary society parading. In less than a month three new societies had blossomed among the youths and old men of the town. American teachers were engaged as parliamentarians, although the societies were conducted in Spanish, not English. The societies all died a natural death in a little while; but of course, the school society being compulsory could not die, and so far as I know is still going on. Every public school of the secondary class has its school societies, and they must form the ideals of the new generation.

One of the most irritating features of life in those early days, and one which offered a problem rather difficult for the Government to solve, was the matter of currency. The money in use was silver, with a small paper circulation of Banco Espagnol-Filipino notes. The notes were printed on a kind of pink blotting paper which looked as if it would be easy to counterfeit. The silver was what we called at first "Mex" and later "Dobie." There were some pieces coined especially for the Philippines, but in general "Mex" was made up of coins of Spain, Mexico, Islas Filipinas, Hong-Kong, Singapore, Canton, and Amoy—only the experts of the Government could tell where it all came from. With the public at large, any coin that looked as if it contained the fair average of silver was accepted. Every month the paymasters of the United States Army and Navy issued thousands of dollars in American silver and paper, but this disappeared in a twinkling, swallowed up by the local agents who were buying gold with which China paid her indemnity. Each incoming steamer brought loads of "Dobie" from the Asiatic coast, but our good dollars and quarters went out of sight like falling stars.

The silver coins consisted of pesos, medio-pesos, pesetas (twenty-cent pieces), media-pesetas (ten-cent pieces), and it seems to me that I have a hazy recollection of a silver five-cent piece, though I cannot be certain. The copper coins were as mongrel as the silver.

There were English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese coins from the neighboring coasts, but the greater part of the copper coins consisted of roughly pounded discs with ragged edges, which were made, they said, by the Igorrotes. The coins had no inscriptions, but went with the natives by the name of "dacolds"—the native word for "big," The Americans renamed the dacolds "claquers," and used either name at pleasure. It required eighty dacolds to equal one peso, forty to a half-peso, sixteen to a peseta, eight to a media-peseta. Theoretically a peso was a hundred cents, as a peseta was twenty cents, but there was no cent with which to make change. You accepted the dacold at its value of eighty to a peso, or you transacted no business. The Filipinos also had a way of figuring a medio-peso as cuatro reales, thus giving the real a value of twelve and a half cents, though there was no coin called a real. Nevertheless, the real figured in all business transactions.

At the time we landed in Manila "Mex" stood with gold at an even ratio of two pesos "Mex" for one dollar gold. I innocently allowed a bank to transfer a gold balance on a letter of credit to an account in local currency at that ratio. A few weeks later, when I wanted to change back and carry my account in gold, they wrote me courteously but firmly that I would have to buy back that account at the ratio of 2.27, and by the time that the transfer was finally effected, gold had jumped to 2.66. We had been told by a circular from the War Department, at the time our appointments were made, that we should be paid in gold. I drew just one cheque in U.S. currency after reaching the Islands. My second cheque was drawn in local currency at a ratio of 2.27, but, by the time it had reached me at Capiz, gold had gone to 2.46. We had to endure the evils of a fluctuating currency for over two years. On all money sent to the States we lost heavily. So far as our daily expenses were concerned we in the provinces had very little inconvenience to suffer on account of "Mex"; but in Manila all merchants fixed their prices in gold and took occasion to put them up mercilessly. I remember trying to buy some Japanese matting which could have been bought for twenty-five cents a yard in the States, but which was priced at seventy-five cents in Manila. The merchant wanted me to pay him in "Mex" at a ratio of 2.66, or at the rate of two pesos a yard for matting which he bought in Japan at probably less than twenty sen a yard.

There was a tremendous protest against the fluctuating currency and the extortion which grew out of it, and we were all relieved when we learned that Congress had adopted the so-called "Conant" system of currency for the Islands. Mr. Conant was the expert who investigated conditions for the Government and devised the system.

The Conant system followed the old Spanish values for coins, the new coins being pesos, medio-pesos, pesetas, media-pesetas, nickels, and copper cents. There was also a copped half-cent, but neither Congress nor Mr. Conant read the Filipino aright. In two years we had taught him to sniff at any value less than a cent. The new system is held at a ratio of two to one by the Government's redeeming it in the Philippine treasury at a ratio of two pesos Conant to one dollar U.S. The importation of "Mex" is no longer permitted, and we rejoice in a stable currency once more.

We provincials followed the newspaper talk about the new system with no small interest. When our treasurer informed us that he had received a consignment of the new currency, and that our next salary cheques would be paid in "Conant," we were delighted. My cheque, by some accident, got in ahead of those of the other employees, and was the first presented for payment.

The beautifully made, bright new silver coins had an engaging appearance after the tarnished mongrel coins to which we were accustomed. When the Treasurer had counted out all my hard-earned money except ten pesos, he produced two bags of pennies, and announced that I should have to take that sum in small coin in order to get the pennies into circulation. They were of beautiful workmanship, yellow as gold and heavy as lead. I called in the aid of a small boy to help me lug home my three bags of coin.

I had been at home only a few minutes when in came the regular vender of eggs and chickens, who called at my house three times a week. He squatted on the floor and I sat in front of him in a rocking-chair, watching my little maid drop the eggs into water to test their freshness. After we had chaffered the usual time and had come to an agreement, I went into my room and brought out the bags of new coin. I had bought about seventy-five cents worth from him, and I first gave him three of the new silver pesetas, which he admired greatly. There were still fifteen cents due him; and when I reached my hand into the penny bag and hauled out a handful of gleaming copper, the maid said, "Jesus!" under her breath, and the man, "Dios mio!" He received his fifteen centavos with an attempt to conceal his satisfaction. The maid requested permission to look inside the bag, and when she had done so merely grinned up at me with a look that said, "My! You're rich, aren't you?"

It was Saturday morning, and I went on busying myself about things at home. Pretty soon there came a deprecatory cough from the stairway—the local method of announcing a visitor. Outside of Manila knocking or ringing does not seem to appeal to the Filipinos. In the provinces the educated classes come to the foot of the stairway and call "Permiso!" and the lower-class people come to the head of the stairway and cough to attact attention. My chicken man had returned. Was it possible that he had heard aright when he had understood the Senora to say that twenty of the new gold pieces went to one peseta? The Senora explained that he had made no mistake. Then, said the old rascal, with bows and smirks, since the lady had so many of them—bags full of them—had he not seen with his own eyes?—would she have the kindness to take back those gleaming new pesetas, which were indeed beautiful, and give him gold in their stead? The lady assured him that the new money was the same metal used in the old "dacold" and that in time it would become as dark and ugly, but his Filipino habit of relying on his own eyes was in full command of him. The man thought that I had got hold of gold without knowing it, and supposed that he was getting the best of me. I changed one peseta into coppers for him, and had difficulty in getting him to leave the house. Ten minutes after he had left, a woman came in to sell me some more chickens. I told her that I had just bought, but she put such a price on chickens as had never before come under my ken. Ten cents was acceptable for a full-grown laying hen, the ordinary value of which was forty or fifty cents. I suspected her of having had some information from the old man, and, in order to find out, I gave her the price of the five chickens, which I agreed to take, in the old "Mex" media-pesetas. Then there was an explosion. She reached for her precious chickens and broke that bargain then and there. Her chickens would sell for ten cents gold, but for no media-peseta. I asked her how she knew I had gold, and she said that did not matter—I had some "diutang-a-dacolds" (little dacolds), and she was willing to sell hens for ten "diutang-a-dacolds" gold, but not for media-pesetas. So I counted her out fifty new coppers and we both rejoiced in our bargain. I told her that the media-peseta was worth ten dacolds, but she wanted the bright new money.

For the next two hours I was persecuted with truck-sellers. Ordinarily the fishermen were unwilling to stop and sell in the streets or in private houses, preferring to do all their business in the market, but that morning, I could have had the pick of half the catch. Finally came a woman who had had a straight tale from the first woman. Woman number two had nothing to sell, but, after a minute, she pulled out a jagged old media-peseta and said that she had heard that I said that a media-peseta was worth ten of the new gold pieces. If I was as good as my word, why not change her media-peseta for gold? I said that I would do it if she would give me the new media-peseta, but that I could not do it for the old. When she wanted to know where she could get a new media-peseta, and I told her the Treasurer would redeem old silver at the government ratio, she went off to get a new media-peseta, but it was plain that she distrusted me. The people flocked to my house all day trying to get me to buy something and to pay them in the new coins.

It was remarkable how easily and quickly one circulating medium disappeared and another took its place. At first there was some trouble about getting the poor people to recognize the copper on a basis of a hundred to a peso. They were willing enough to receive change on that basis, but, in giving it, tried to treat the new centavo as a dacold, eighty to the peso. I had to have one Chinese baker arrested for persistently giving short change to my muchacha, and the Treasurer had a long line of delinquents before him each morning admonishing them that they could not play tricks with Uncle Sam's legal tender. But on the whole the change went off quickly and without much friction.

This morning I asked my maid, an elderly woman, if she remembered the old money we had four years ago. She struck her forehead with her hand, and thought a long time. Finally her face lit up. She remembered those Iggorote dacolds and a silver five-cent piece—"muy, muy chiquitin" (very, very small). She said that the Tagalogs called the dacolds "Christinas" after the mother of the Queen-mother. But the difference between a stable and a fluctuating medium meant nothing to her, and probably many of her countrymen have almost forgotten that there was ever any other than Conant in the land.



CHAPTER XIII

Typhoons and Earthquakes

How Typhoons Assert Themselves—Our First Typhoon—Six Weeks' Mail Brought by the General Blanco—Her Narrow Escape From Wreck:—A Weird Journey on a Still Smaller Steamer—Another Typhoon—Rescue of Captain B—— —Havoc Wrought by the Typhoon.

In the month of November two more American women teachers arrived at Capiz, one of whom joined me, and our society was still more increased by two army officers' wives, and the wives of the provincial Treasurer and the Supervisor. This made nine women in all, and we began to give dinners and card parties, and assume quite metropolitan airs.

Miss C—— and I, from our central positions on the plaza, saw and heard most of what was going on, and we heartily concurred in the gossip of the day that there was always something doing in Capiz. About the middle of the month there was a lively earthquake that shook up our old house most viciously; and just before Thanksgiving we met our first typhoon.

Typhoons have various ways of asserting themselves, but there is one predominating form of which this particular typhoon happens to be an example. The beginning of all things is usually a casual remark dropped by a caller that the first typhoon signal is up. Then the weather thickens, and a fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by, and you have no sort of opinion of typhoons. Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year. Again it stops, almost leads you to think it intends to clear. Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the rain is driven like spikes before them. It may keep this up twelve hours or fifty-six. It may increase to an absolute hurricane, levelling all before it with great loss of life, or it may content itself with an exhibition of what it could do if it really desired.

At the end of the first day of our typhoon I went to bed wondering how long the ant-eaten supports of our house could hold out against the violent wrenchings and shakings it was getting. I had poor rest, for the howling of the wind, the noise of boards torn loose, and the clatter of wrenched galvanized iron roofing made sleep almost impossible. When I went out into the kitchen next morning, my heart sank into my boots. The nipa roof had been torn away piece by piece. The whole place was soaked, the stove was rusted, and rivulets were running outside and inside of the pipe. Romoldo clucked his glee in this devastation, and opined that the outlook for breakfast was poor. It was certainly no poorer than breakfast when it came.

I dressed myself for the weather and went to school in a mackintosh and rubber boots. The costume seemed to afford no small excitement to the Filipinos who beheld. They had hitherto considered mackintoshes and rubber boots as the exclusive property of men. Had I appeared in a pair of pantaloons, I should not have created more sensation. Nobody came to school, of course, but I had to go through the form of reporting there twice anyway. We lunched on gingersnaps and water, and had a dinner composed chiefly of tinned things.

After dinner, to our immense surprise, we had callers in spite of the storm. Lieutenant and Mrs. C—— came over to ask us to Thanksgiving dinner, and a couple of men from the officers' mess dropped in. One of these, Captain R——, was in command of the launch kept at Capiz by the military Government. She was about sixty feet long, and having been built at Shanghai, rejoiced in a Chinese name—the Yuen Hung. But as something was the matter with her engines, which coughed and wheezed most disgracefully, the flippant Americans had rechristened her the One Lung, much to the chagrin of her skipper.

A barkentine, loaded with molave timber and carrying native passengers, had been driven ashore at the port that day, and the One Lung had gone to the rescue and taken off the passengers. Fortunately the little craft did not have to brave the full force of the sea, as the arms of the bay broke the fury. But even in the bay Captain R—— said the waves were frightful, and he thanked his stars that they had gotten back alive.

While we were still talking of the storm, there came a shout from the tribunal next door, and the noise and rattle of the four-horse escort wagon starting down to Libas. That could mean but one thing—States mail, the which, as we had seen none of it for six weeks, was particularly welcome. But we wondered what boat had come in in such a storm, and, the unexpected always happening, were not wholly unprepared to learn that that disreputable old tub the General Blanco had made harbor safe and sound. It took till nearly midnight to get the mail up and distributed, but we stayed up for it. There were actually eight sacks of mail for our little colony, and we went over to the tribunal and watched the mail sacks opened, and seized on our share with avidity, while we alternately blessed and despised the skipper of the Blanco for getting caught out in the tempest.

This was not the last feat the Blanco was destined to achieve during my stay in Capiz. She had a habit of dropping into port in weather that it seemed no boat could live in. Once she came in about two P.M. in a tremendous sea, bringing a single American passenger—a girl of twenty-one, a Baptist missionary. As the Blanco had no cabins, the captain was forced to lock his native passengers in the engine room, where no doubt they contributed much to the enjoyment of the engineer and his aids. He had the deck chair of this girl carried up on his bridge and lashed, and she was lashed to the chair. There they two rode out the storm. The captain said that from eleven o'clock till two, when he made the shelter of Batan Bay, he expected his boat to be swamped any instant, and he expressed his unqualified admiration for the way in which this girl faced her possible doom. He concluded with a favorite Filipino ejaculation, "Abao las Americanas," which in this case may be freely translated as "What women the Americans are!"

The Blanco is still skipping defiantly over the high seas between Iloilo and Capiz, though after all her hairbreadth escapes she came near ending herself in a typical way. She started out one night from Capiz for Iloilo, a heavenly calm night, bright moonlight, and a sea smooth as a floor. Two or three miles from the port, a large island called Olatayan lies off the coast—a single mountain rising out of the sea. Everybody on the Blanco, including the watch and the steersman, thought it a good night for sleep, and left the General to steer her own course. The General made straight for Olatayan, and ran her nose up on the beach. She stayed there two weeks, and was beaten up by bad weather, and assistance had to be sent to get her off. Then she had to be pretty well rebuilt, and repainted. At the time of all these happenings I was in Iloilo, whither I had gone for treatment of an abscess of the middle ear, and as I depended on the Blanco for getting back, felt personally injured by her antics. I went several times to the office of her agents, one of the big English trading firms, to inquire how the wreck was getting along, and what the prospect was for a return to Capiz before Christmas. The man at the desk did not look characteristically English, and on my first appearance I addressed him tentatively in Spanish. He answered in that language, and we continued to use it. On one of the later visits this gentleman was not visible, but in his place a red-headed, freckled youth, with the map of Scotland outlined on his rugged countenance, presided over the collection of inkstands and ledgers. Naturally, I accosted him in English, whereupon the shape of my former interlocutor rose up from behind a screen and remarked, "By Jove, I thought you were Spanish, don't you know? and have been talking to you all this time in Spanish. What a sell!"

Failing the Blanco, I took passage for Capiz on the Fritz, a craft one or two degrees smaller and rustier than the old General. Of all the weird experiences I ever had, that twenty-four hours was the weirdest. They cleared out a sort of pantry or lazaretto just back of the deck engine-house for me to use as a stateroom, and I slept on the pantry shelf. Some kind of steam pipes must have passed under it, for it grew so hot that several times I had to vacate and get down on the floor. Then we met a little wind as we rounded the north coast, and I was sick. A family of Filipino aristocrats came on board at Estancia, and the ladies elected to share my retreat. They had several servants and one or two babies and other necessaries of life, and they left me only a corner of the pantry shelf, against which I propped my weary and seasick frame. We made Capiz just at dusk, and never was a wanderer more eager to see home. There on the bank were two of my friends, who said they were invited out to dinner and were to bring me if I arrived in time. So we went to that cheery American home with its spotless linen, its silver and china. For six weeks I had been living on Spanish "chow," and the contrast made me serenely happy. It was almost worth enduring—the six weeks of chow and the Fritz, I mean—to enjoy the change.

But to return to typhoons. We had several more that year, and I began to feel that typhoons were terribly exaggerated in books. But in 1903 we had an object lesson that I do not care to repeat. We went through all the usual preliminaries of typhoon signals, drizzle and gust. It was, I believe, the tenth of June. I stayed up late that night, working, and noticed that the gusts were increasing. Just at midnight I laid down my pen and started to go to bed, when there came a blast that shook the house like an earthquake and made me decide to wait a while. For the next three hours the storm raged in a very orgy of gladness. It slapped over nipa shacks with a single roar. It ripped up iron roofing and sent it hurtling about the air. The nipa of my roof was torn off bit by bit, and the rain came in torrents. I used my mackintosh to cover up the books, and put a heavy woollen blanket over the piano. Then I held an umbrella over the lamp to keep the rain from breaking the chimney, and sat huddling my pet monkey, which was crazed with fear. The houses on either side were taller than mine, and for this little hollow it seemed as if all the iron roofing of the town had steered a direct course. The pieces came down, borne by the shrieking wind, and landed with rattle and bang. My house swayed at every gust. It seemed that the cross-beams in the roof moved at least a foot each way. The little lanterns that burn in front of the houses were blown out by the wind, and when I peered out there was nothing but the inky darkness, the howling of the wind, the thrashing of the cocoanut trees, and the thud of falling nuts. From my side window I could see the native family next door to me all on their knees in front of an image of the Virgin, and once, in a lull, caught the sound of their prayers.

The storm reached its greatest violence by half past one and subsided by about three, at which time I went to bed and slept till morning. In spite of my fear I could not help laughing at my two Filipino girl servants. They slept undisturbed through the earlier gusts, but when the roof went and the water came in, they awoke—disgusted. The oldest one said, "Mucho aguacero" (a heavy shower) and cast about for a dry spot. She didn't find any at first, but she finally concluded that the corner where my bed stood was highest; lifting the valence, they disappeared.

Next morning Capiz presented a pitiful sight. Many of the great almond trees on the plaza were uprooted and the others dismembered. The little nipa houses were flat on the ground or drunkenly sprawling at every slant and angle. Even the best houses had suffered. The constabulary cuartel was absolutely wrecked. The Supervisor's kitchen was gone, and his wife mourned for her dishes, which were scattered up and down the length of the street. The home of the scout officer was jruined. He and his wife had taken shelter under a stone wall, and been drenched for three or four hours. The young mangoes had been strewn on the ground, and there was no hope of that crop. Many of the cocoanut trees were broken off, and where this was not the case, the nuts had been whipped off. The banana trees were entirely destroyed. Altogether it was a sorry sight, and we all got out and walked about and viewed the ruins, just as we do for a cyclone at home.

The storm had an aftermath in the rescue of an Englishman, Captain B——, a pearl fisher. He was anchored under the lee of a small island in the sea between Panay and Masbate. He was in a small lorcha, or sailing vessel, with no barometer, his glass having been left on a lorcha of larger tonnage, which was at another point. The heavy wind caught them without warning almost, and its impact soon pressed the lorcha over. Captain B—— found himself struggling in the water—able to swim, but drowning, as he expressed it, with the spindrift which was hurtling into his face. He kept one arm going, and partially protected his face with the other. Then in the inky dark he touched a human body. It was the leg of one of his crew, four of whom were clinging to one of the lorcha's boats. It kept turning over and over, and they had to go with it each time. Captain B—— hung to the prow, so his circuit was not so wide as that of the others, but his body—arms, legs, and chest—was literally ploughed by the rough usage. Once he let go and lost the prow as it came up, and the fright of this was enough to strengthen his hold. They were in the water clinging to this all the rest of the night, the next day, and the next night. One man died of exhaustion, and one went mad and let go. On the second morning they succeeded in bailing it out by means of an undershirt, which Captain B—— had been wearing, and which, though torn to ribbons across the front, was whole in the back. They remained in the boat all day, beaten on by the tropical sun, having been thirty hours in the water without food or drink.

Captain B—— said they were all a little mad. They saw the Sam Shui—the boat of the commanding officer of the Visayas—in the distance, but were too low to be sighted by her. They wore their finger ends down, tearing a plank off the side to use for an oar. Meanwhile the current carried them down closer to the Panay coast, and on the third day they were close enough to fall in with one of the big fishing paraos. This carried them into Panay, a town five or six miles east of Capiz. Captain B—— had just strength to write a line or two and sign his name. This was brought down to Capiz, and the constabulary officer on duty there went out immediately with a launch and brought him in. He was in the military hospital a long time. His attending physician said that between salt water and sun he had been literally flayed, and the flesh torn into ribbons and gouged by the impact of the boat.

The storm did frightful havoc all through the Visayas, and many lives were lost and vessels wrecked. The Blanco as usual made harbor all right, but another little Capiz boat, the Josefina, went ashore, and her captain and several others were lost. The adventurous One Lung was at Iloilo, and it was reported that she started out of the river without consulting her pilot, creating thereby general consternation among her sister craft.

We accustomed ourselves at last to typhoons and earthquakes, and, on the whole, decided that they were less fearful than tornadoes at home. Meanwhile we rather luxuriated in the sensations of romance inspired by living in a town surrounded by a hostile population and protected by soldiery. It was very, very new, and we made the best of it.



CHAPTER XIV

War Alarms and the Suffering Poor

A Surprise Party of Bolo-Men—Forty Insurrectos Arrive in Our Neighborhood—Anecdotes of Encounters with Insurgents—Anxiety Because of Treachery of the Natives—A False Alarm—Five Hundred Starving Persons—Great Lack of Institutions for the Poor—Smallpox Patient in the School Building—The Newspaper a Creator of Hysteria.

As I said before, Capiz had never been a warlike province, and there had been comparatively little resistance to the American occupation. Antique province to the west of us had fought stubbornly and was still infested by ladrones, or guerilla troops. One engagement took place at Ibajay, a town on the north coast close to the western border of Capiz, quite worthy of description.

There was a small American garrison at Ibajay—about seventy-five or a hundred—and the Filipinos planned to surprise and massacre them just at day-break when the reveille was sounded. But the bugler was an astute youth, with an observing mind, and as he made his morning promenade, it seemed to him that there were far too many ladies squatting about on the plaza. So he got as close to quarters as he could, and instead of blowing reveille, blew the call to arms with all his soul, and then ran for his life. The American troops swarmed out in their underdrawers and cartridge belts, and that surprise party turned right about face. The squatting women on the plaza, who were bolo-men in disguise, left for the hills with the yelling undergarmented in pursuit. A Filipino girl who saw it all described the affair to me, and said, "Abao," as she recalled the shouts of enjoyment with which the Americans returned after the fray. They seemed to regard the episode as planned to relieve the monotony of life in quarters and to give them a hearty breakfast appetite.

I had been little more than a month in Capiz when the rumor went abroad that a parao with forty insurrectos from Samar had landed at Panay, just east of us, and the occupants had scattered themselves out between Panay and Pontevedra. Pontevedra was supposed to be an insurrecto town, thirsting for American gore.

As we at Capiz were protected by a company of the Sixth Infantry and one of the Tenth Cavalry, and the Islands were theoretically at peace, we were not very much alarmed by this. But it gave us something to talk about, and we enjoyed it just as we do telling ghost stories on winter nights, when the fire is low, and there is plenty of company in case the ghosts materialize. Shortly after, however, came the shocking details of the affair at Balangiga, and we—I speak of the feminine portion of our colony—did not feel so secure by any means. The Supervisor's wife insisted upon having a guard at her house, and when any two American women got together they discussed what they would do in case of a sudden alarm.

I am certain that there is no braver soldiery in all the world than ours. But I am equally certain that when war is a man's profession, on which all his chances of honor, pay, and promotion hinge directly or indirectly, the wish in his mind is father to the thought, and unconsciously he scents danger because he wants danger. Of an officer it may be said, as of Thisbe's lion, that his trade is blood, and "a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing," But nothing pleased me more than to hear the officers tell tales of the old campaign and speculate on the possibilities of a new one.

Our Supervisor had been a captain of volunteers in a Minnesota regiment. He was a thoroughly interesting talker, and an inimitable story-teller, a man who did not lose his sense of humor when the joke turned on himself. I heard him tell one or two stories well worth repeating.

Our valorous Supervisor was stationed in Antique province, while in Capiz was a detachment of the regular army. And in full sight of both on the top of a precipice, an insurrecto flag flaunted its impertinent message.

The Supervisor said he waited a decent length of time to give the regulars a chance to pull down the flag, as it lay in their province, but when they failed to act, he went out, full of hope and good United States commissary valor, to destroy the insurrecto stronghold and to give an object lesson in guerilla warfare to the regulars. His men hacked and hewed their way through the jungle and cogon grass, with never a shot from the insurrectos. Then at the last they came to a clear slope, and when they were about half-way up this, the insurrectos opened fire, not only with rifles but with great boulders. The Supervisor said it took them over two hours to get up, and they went down in less than twenty minutes. One little Dutch private was in so much of a hurry that he punched him (the officer) in the back with a gun butt and said, "Hurry up! get out of the way." Most of the shots flew high, however. The flag came down later, but it required four hundred men and a battery of artillery to bring it down.

On another occasion the Supervisor, his wife, a constabulary lieutenant, and I were out on the playa (beach) when we came to a little hollow almost hidden by grass, so that I stumbled in crossing it. This started the two men into retrospect of a day's fight over on the beach of the west coast. The insurrectos at last took to flight, and the Supervisor started after one whom he had noticed, on account of the beautiful kris, or fluted bolo, which he carried. As they ran, the Supervisor stumbled over such a grass-hidden hollow, and without his perceiving it, his revolver flew out of its holster. He kept on gaining slightly on his quarry, who glanced apprehensively over his shoulder now and then, expecting to see the big Colt come out. At last, when he thought the range was good, the officer reached for his revolver. He described the sort of desperate grin with which the Filipino glanced back expecting the end, and the rapid change to satisfaction and triumphant ferocity as pursuer and pursued realized what had happened. Then the race changed. It was the Supervisor who panted wearily back toward his scattered fellows, and it was the Filipino with a kris to whose muscles hope of victory lent fresh energy. Fortunately, this young constabulary lieutenant, who had been a non-commissioned officer of volunteers, saw what was going on, and picked off the Filipino with a long range shot from his rifle. The kris was secured, and its beautiful blade and tortoise-shell scabbard, inlaid with silver, went as a present to Mrs. Wright when she visited the province.

Somewhere in his "Rulers of the South" Marion Crawford speaks of the wonderful rapidity with which news flies among the native population in warfare, and he cites as an illustration that "when Sir Louis Cavagnari was murdered in Cabul, in 1879, the news was told in the bazaar at Allahabad before the English authorities received it by telegraph, which then covered more than half the whole distance between the two places." This same condition beset the American officers in the Philippines. Secretly as they might act, they found the news of their movements always in advance of them, and the crafty native hard to surprise.

Among the leaders in Panay a certain Quentin Salas who operated both in Antique and Iloilo provinces was noted for his daring and cruelty. The American troops spent much time in pursuit of him, and among others the doughty Captain of volunteers. The Captain said that Salas made his headquarters in a certain pueblo, and often word was brought that the insurrecto would be found there on a certain day. The Captain tried all devices, forced marches, and feints on other pueblos, but to no purpose. He always arrived to find his quarry gone, but breakfast waiting for him (the American) at the convento, or priest's house. The table was laid for just the right number of persons, and the priest was always affable and amused. The Captain grew desperate. He gave out false marching orders, and tried all the tricks he knew of. Finally, he let it be known that he intended to march on Salas's pueblo the next morning, and he did so, and actually arrived unexpectedly, or at least so nearly so that breakfast was not ready. The Filipinos had assumed that his announcement cloaked some other invention, and had expected him to branch off at the eleventh hour.

The Captain searched the town from garret to cellar, but no Quentin Salas. He unearthed, however, the usual score of paupers and invalids. One of these was a man humped up with rheumatism, as only a Filipino decrepit can be. The Americans finally departed, leaving this ruin staring after them from the window of a nipa shack. Months afterward, when peace had been declared, the officer heard his name called in the government building at Iloilo, and saw a keen-eyed Filipino holding out his hand. The Filipino introduced himself as Quentin Salas, and owned that he possessed a slight advantage in having viewed the officer in propria persona, while he, Salas, was in disguise. He confessed that the American had caught him napping on that day, and that he had been forced to assume hurriedly the garb and mien of an aged pauper. The American owned himself outwitted, and shakes his head to this day to think how near he came to victory.

We lived in a maze of war talk all that autumn. I doubt not that, to the officer commanding, much that was mere excitement to us was deadly reality and anxiety, for although peace was declared, the treachery of the natives had been demonstrated at Balangiga, and there was no certainty that the affair would not be repeated elsewhere. The American people have little conception of the burdens laid upon the army. These were to hold a people in subjection while denying that they were in subjection; to assume the belief of peace and yet momentarily to expect war; to rule without the semblance of rule; to accomplish when all the recognized tools of accomplishment were removed; to be feared and yet to be ready to bear cheerfully all blame if that fear expressed itself in complaint. I cannot but feel that the army had much to bear in those early days, and bore it well.

One little incident will serve to illustrate how lightly and yet how seriously the circumstances of life were viewed at that time. The open sea beach, or playa, two miles north of the town, was the favorite afternoon drive, and one day Miss C——, who lived with me, was invited by the wife of Dr. D—— to share her victoria. They left for the playa about half-past four, the Doctor accompanying them on his bicycle. He never permitted his wife to leave the borders of the town unaccompanied.

Mrs. D—— was in poor health and found long drives unendurable, so when seven o'clock came and Miss C—— had not returned, I concluded that she was going to dine at Dr. D——'s. However, before sitting down without her, I sent Romoldo up to the Doctor's to inquire if she was there. He came back saying that the D——s had not returned, and that their servants were quite upset, as such a thing had never happened before. I waited till eight and sent Romoldo again for news. Again he brought back word that the D——s had not appeared. I thereupon went over to Lieutenant C——'s house, who instantly picked up his hat and left to talk the matter over with the officer of the day. Thence it was reported to Captain M——, who ordered out searching parties for each of the three main roads leading out of Capiz. Just as the men were ready to start, the victoria and bicycle appeared. Our friends had stopped at a Filipino house where a saint's day celebration was in full swing, and had found it impossible to leave. The Filipino hosts had brought up ice all the way from Iloilo to make ice-cream, but as they were not adepts, it didn't freeze properly, and they would hear of no guest leaving until the ice-cream had been served. Miss C—— said they were worried and tried to get away, but I declined to believe her. Ice-cream, I insisted, might excuse four times the delay, and I flatly refused to be convinced that they had intended to turn their backs on it after a compulsory fast of seven months.

The troops bundled themselves back to quarters, and it all ended in a laugh. Only the commanding officer leaned out of his window to chuckle at me.

"Well, did you get your chicken?" and I went home and vowed that Miss C—— should perish four times over before I would stir up an excitement about her again.

If we lived in a slightly hysterical state as concerns the possibilities of war and bloodshed, we soon learned to be phlegmatic enough about disease and pestilence. Nearly five hundred starving people had gathered in Capiz, and their emaciated bodies and cavernous eyes mocked all talk of the brotherhood of man. This condition did not represent the normal one of the whole province,—but rather these people represented the aggregate of starvation. Of course, following the war, there was a short crop and no little distress. But a certain Capiz politician with his eyes on the future caused word to be sent out through the province that if the needy would come into Capiz he would see that they were fed. Of course he did no such thing. They came and starved to death; but meanwhile the report of his generosity was spread abroad, and nobody took any pains to tell the story of how the miserable wretches had been cheated. So the politician profited and the poor died.