Let me close this chapter by noting a remark made to me by Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most eminent religious and educational workers in the empire.

"Do you know what has brought about the change in China?" he asked me one day in Peking. "Well, I'll tell you: it is a comparative view of the world. Twenty years ago the Chinese did not know how their country ranked with other countries in the elements of national greatness. They had been told that they were the greatest, wisest, and most powerful people on earth, and they didn't care to know what other countries were doing. Since then, however, they have studied books, have sent their sons to foreign colleges and universities, and they have found out in what particulars China has fallen behind other nations. Now they have set out to remedy these defects. The comparative view of the world is what is bringing about the remaking of China."

In China, no doubt, the men who have brought the people this "comparative view of the word" were criticised sometimes for presuming to suggest that any other way might be better than China's way; but they kept to their work—and have won. Doctor Richard himself did much effective service by publishing a series of articles and diagrams showing how China compared with other countries in area, population, education, wealth, revenue, military strength, etc. Such comparisons are useful for America as a country, and for individual states and sections as well.

Hong Kong, China.



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XVI

WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES

Of the cruelty of Chinese punishments I have already had something to say, but there is at least one thing that should be said for the Chinese officials in this connection: No matter how heinous his crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to Manila in an Indo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon season.

Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again to the wrath and fury of mountain-like waves hurled thundering against it and over it. The crack where the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enough to flood my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could be opened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A bigger ship a few hours ahead of us found the sea in an even more furious mood. The captain stayed on the bridge practically without sleep three days and nights, going to bed, spent with fatigue and watching, as soon as he came at last into sight of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain of another ship came into port so much used up that he resigned and gave his first mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel has just limped into Manila disabled after buffeting the storm for a brief period.

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At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations, its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. But the moss-green walls about the old Spanish city remind us of days of romance and tragedy more fascinating than any of the events of our own generation. In the days when Spain made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, and the statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still stand here to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that for follies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individual must pay the price.

Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area and richer resources, think she may ignore the lessons the history of her predecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon Don Carlos in his royal robe that stands amid the perennial green of the Cathedral Park—it may well bring our American officers who look out daily upon it, and the other Americans who come here, a feeling not of pride but of profound and reverent humility:

"God of Our Fathers, known of old. Lord of our far-flung battle-line. Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine. Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget!"

In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pampangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the {155} tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban are savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits.

The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinoland generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile in the time of Pharaoh—especially when I looked at the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U with the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete.

Before going into any further description of the plows, however, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fashioned knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of {156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out of single logs.

Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live, clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part of the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the massive luxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, and a sort of lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes. A one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but of bamboo—the ever-serviceable bamboo—which, as my readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; the roofing is of nipal, which looks much like very long corn shucks.

In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough to hold six or eight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with shucks: such in appearance is the Filipino's house. Around it are banana trees bent well toward the ground by the weight of the one great bunch at the top, and possibly a few bamboo and cocoanut trees. For human ornaments there are rather small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men, women, and children in clothing rather gayly colored—as far as it goes: in some cases it doesn't go very far. The favorite color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixture of pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination of red and white. Bare feet are most common, {159} but many wear slippers, and not a few are now slaves enough to fashion to wear American shoes. The men, except the very poorest, wear white, nor is it a white worn dark by dirt such as Koreans wear, but a spotless, newly washed white. Nearly every Filipino seems to have on clothes that were laundered the day before. A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outer garment worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body.

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Nearly all the native houses I saw in the rural Philippines were of this type—about this size, set on stilts, and constructed of similar material. The scene is not quite natural-looking, however, without a banana grove and a fighting cock or two.

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Of all the native Oriental peoples, the Filipinos alone have become thoroughly Christianized. The great majority are Catholics.

{159 continued}

The beast of burden in the Philippines, the ungainly, slow-moving animal that pulls the one-handled plows and the two-wheeled carts, is the carabao. The carabao, or water buffalo, is about the size of an ordinary American ox, and much like the ox, but his hide is black, thick, and looks almost as tough as an alligator's; his horns are enormous, and he has very little hair. Perhaps his having lived in the water so much accounts for the absence of the hair. Even now he must every day submerge himself contentedly in deep water, must cover his body like a pig in a wallow: this is what makes life worth living for him. Furthermore, when he gives word that he is thirsty Mr. Tao (the peasant) must not delay watering him; in this hot climate thirst may drive him furiously, savagely mad, and the plowman may not be able to climb a cocoanut tree quick enough to escape hurt.

I saw quite a few goats, some cattle, a few hogs, and, of course, some dogs. Much as the Filipino may care for his dog, however, he always reserves the warmest place in his heart for nothing else but his gamecock, his fighting rooster. Cock-fighting, and the gambling inseparably connected with it, are his delight, and no Southern planter ever regarded a favorite fox-hound with more pride and affection than the Filipino bestows on his favorite chicken. In grassy yards you will see the rooster tied by one leg and turned out to exercise, as we would stake a cow to graze, while his owner watches and fondles him. I shall never forget a gray-headed, bright-eyed, barefooted old codger I saw near Tarlac stroking the feathers of his bird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over {160} her first-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him as a negro would carry a dog, and he is as ready to back his judgment with his last centavo as was the owner of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" before that ill-fated creature dined too heartily on buckshot. Sundays and saints' days are the days for cock-fighting—and both come pretty often.

I wish I could give my readers a glimpse of the passengers who got on and off my train between Manila and Daguban: Filipino women carrying baskets on their heads, smoking cigarettes, and looking after babies—in some cases doing all three at once; Filipino men, likewise smoking, and with various kinds of luggage, including occasional gamecocks; Filipino children in most cases "undressed exceedingly," as Mr. Kipling would say; and American soldiers in khaki uniforms and helmets. At one place a pretty little twelve-year-old girl gets aboard, delighted that she is soon to see America for the first time in six years. For a while I travel with an American surveyor whose work is away out where he must swim unbridged streams, guard against poisonous snakes, and sleep where he can. An army surgeon tells me as we pass the site of a battle between the Americans and the Filipino insurgents eleven years ago: the Filipinos would not respect the Red Cross, and the doctors and hospital corps had to work all night with their guns beside them, alternately bandaging wounds and firing on savages. In telling me good-bye a young Westerner sends regards to all America. "Even a piece of Arizona desert would look good to me," he declares; "anything that's U.S.A." A young veterinarian describes the government's efforts to exterminate rinderpest, a disease which in some sections has killed nine tenths of the carabao. A campaign as thorough and far-reaching as that which the Agricultural Department at home is waging against cattle ticks is in progress, but the ignorant farmers cannot understand the regulations, and are greatly hindering a work which means so much of good to them.

Such are a few snapshots of Philippine life.

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Of the vast natural resources of the Philippines there can be no question. With a fertile soil, varied products, immense forest wealth, and possibly extensive mineral wealth; with developing railway and steamship lines; with the markets of the Orient right at her doors and special trade advantages with the United States—with all these advantages, the islands might soon become rich, if there were only an industrious population.

Unfortunately, the Filipino, however, doesn't like work. Whether or not this dislike is incurable remains to be seen. Perhaps as he comes into contact with civilization he may conceive a liking for other things than rice, fish, a loin-cloth, and shade—plenty of shade—and proceed to put forth the effort necessary to get these other things. Already there seems to have been a definite rise in the standards of living since the American occupation. "When I came here in '98," Mr. William Crozier said to me, "not one native in a hundred wore shoes, and hats were also the exception; you can see for yourself how great is the change since then."

Moreover, in not a few cases Americans who have complained of difficulty in getting labor have been themselves to blame: they tried to hire and manage labor the American way instead of in the Filipino way. The custombre, as the Spanish call it—that is to say, the custom of the country—is a factor which no man can ignore without paying the penalty.

I am having to prepare this article very hurriedly, and I must postpone my comment on the work of the American Government until later. In closing, however, I am reminded that just as the old proverb says, "It takes all sorts of people to make a world," so I am seeing all sorts. A week ago yesterday the Hong Kong papers announced that Mr. Clarence Poe would be the guest at luncheon of his Excellency the Governor-General, Sir Frederick Lugard, K. C. M. G., C. B., D. S. O., etc., and Lady Lugard, in the executive mansion; yesterday {162} I had "chow" (food) in a Filipino's place, "The Oriental Hotel, Bar, and Grocery," away up in the Province of Pangasinan, and climbed to my room and cot on a sort of ladder or open work stairs such as one might expect to find in an ordinary barn! It was the best place I could find in town.

Nor do the incongruities end here. After getting my evening meal I walked out in the warm December moonlight, past the shadows of the strange buildings and tropical trees—and all at once there burst out the full chorus of one of the world's great operas, the magnificent voice of a Campanini or Caruso dominating all!

Great is the graphophone, advance agent of civilization!

Manila, P. I.



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XVII

WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE PHILIPPINES

There are so many islands in the Philippine group, which I have just left behind me (I write in a steamer off Manila), that if a man were to visit one a day, without stopping for Sundays, it would take him eight years to get around. Most of these islands though, of course, are little more than splotches on the water's surface and do not appear on the map. The two big ones, Mindanao and Luzon, contain three fourths of the total land surface of 127,000 square miles, leaving the other one fourth to be divided among the other 3138 islets.

The land area statistics just given indicate that the Philippines are about the size of three average American states and the population (7,000,000) is about three times that of an average American commonwealth. There are only about 30,000 white people in the islands, and 50,000 Chinese. Chinese immigration is now prohibited.

The 7,000,000 native Filipinos who make up practically the entire population represent all stages of human progress. The lowest of them are head-hunters and hang the skulls of their human enemies outside their huts, as an American hunter would mount the head of an elk or bear. The great majority, however, have long been Christians and have attained a fair degree of civilization. Even among the savage tribes a high moral code is often enforced. The Igorrotes, for example, though some of their number make it a condition of marriage {164} that the young brave shall have taken a head, shall have killed his man, have remarkable standards of honor and virtue in some respects, and formally visit the death penalty as the punishment for adultery. Because roads or means of communication have been poor the people have mingled but little, and there are three dozen different dialects. In the course of a half day's journey by rail I found three different languages spoken by the people along the route. The original inhabitants were Negritos, a race of pigmy blacks, of whom only a remnant remains, but the Filipino proper is a Malayan.

Filipinos are unique in that they alone among all the native peoples of Asia have accepted Christianity. Fortunate in being without the gold of Mexico or Peru, the Philippines did not attract the more brutal Spanish adventurers who, about the time of Magellan's discovery, were harrying wealthier peoples with fire and sword. Instead of the soldier or the adventurer, it was the priest, his soul aflame with love for his church, who came to the Philippines, and the impression made by his virtues was not negatived by the bloody crimes of fellow Spaniards mad with lust of treasure. The result is that to this day probably 90 per cent, of the Filipinos are Catholics. Before the priests came, the people worshipped their ancestors, as do other peoples in the Far East.

The only Asiatics who have accepted Christianity, the Filipinos are also the only Asiatics among whom women are not regarded as degraded and inferior beings. "If the Spaniards had done nothing else here," as a high American official in Manila said to me, "though, as a matter of fact, we are beginning to recognize that they did a great deal, they would deserve well of history for what they have accomplished for the elevation of woman through the introduction of Christianity. No other religion regards woman as man's equal."

The testimony I heard in the Philippines indicated that the female partner in the household is, if anything, superior in authority to the man. She is active in all the little business {165} affairs of the family, and white people sometimes arrange with Filipino wives for the employment of husbands!

The resources of the islands, as I have already said, are magnificent and alluring. In the provinces through which I travelled, less than 10 per cent. of the land seemed to be under cultivation, and statistics show that this is the general condition. A small area has sufficed to produce a living for the tao, or peasant, and he has not cultivated more—a fact due in part to laziness and in part to poor means of transportation. What need to produce what cannot be taken to market? This fact, in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipino unaggressiveness.

According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms in the Philippines, including the large plantations, is less than eight acres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane, tobacco, cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks for all the world like the banana plant (both belong to the same family), and the newcomer cannot tell them apart. The fibre is in the trunk or bark. Sisal hemp, which I found much like our yucca or "bear grass," is but little grown. Sugarcane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as in Louisiana, these plantations themselves called haciendas, and their owners hacienderos. The tobacco industry is an important one, and would be even if the export averaging half a million cigars for every day in the year were stopped, for the Filipinos themselves are inveterate smokers. The men smoke, the women smoke, the children smoke—usually cigarettes, but sometimes cigars of enormous proportions. "When I first came here," Prof. C. M. Conner said to me, "it amused me to ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, and have him answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes,' meaning the distance a man should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes!" Cocoanut-raising is a very profitable industry—all along the Pasig River in Manila you can see the native boats high-packed with the green, unhusked product, and two towns in Batanzas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is also believed that {166} the rubber industry would pay handsomely. The rubber-producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising.

Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made of the finest silver, but the blight which ruined his coffee plants was equally a blight to his fortunes and his home and it is now given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In some sections, however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was much interested in seeing the shrubs in bearing.

The Philippines are about the only place I have found since leaving home where the people are not trying to grow cotton. In California, in the Hawaiian Islands, in Japan, in Korea, and even in Manchuria as far north as Philadelphia, I have found the plants, and of course in China proper. But I should add just here, that in Southern China, about Canton, I did not find cotton. As for the industry in the Philippines, a Southern man, now connected with the Agricultural Department in Manila, said to me: "Cotton acts funny here. It runs to weed. I planted some and it opened five or six bolls a stalk and then quit: died down." He showed me some "tree cotton," about twenty feet high, and also some of the Caravonica cotton from Australia, which is itself much like a small tree.

When it comes to the lumber industry, not even Col. Mulberry Sellers would be likely to overestimate the possibilities the Philippines offer. There are literally millions in it. The government is leasing immense areas on a stumpage royalty of about 1 per cent., and as railways are built the industry will expand. Fortunately, there are strict regulations to prevent the destruction of the forests. They must be used, not wasted. The authorities realize that while timber is a crop like other crops, it differs from the other crops in that the harvesting must {167} never be complete. The cutting of trees below a certain minimum size is forbidden.

And now a word as to the activities of the American Government in the islands and the agencies through which these activities are conducted. The supreme governing body is known as the Philippine Commission, consisting of the Governor-General, who is ex-officio president, and seven other members (four Americans, three Filipinos) appointed by the President of the United States. Four of these commissioners (three of these are Americans) are heads of departments, having duties somewhat like those of Cabinet officers in America. This commission is not only charged with the executive duties, but it acts as the Upper House or Senate of the Philippine Congress. That is to say, the voters elect an Assembly corresponding to our House of Representatives, but no legislation can become effective unless approved by the Philippine Commission acting as the Upper House. In the first two elections, those of 1907 and 1909, the advocates of early independence, opponents of continued American supremacy, have predominated. The result has been that the American members of the commission have had to kill numberless bills passed by the Assembly. On the other hand, some very necessary and important measures advocated by the commission, measures which would be very helpful to the Filipinos, are opposed by the Assembly either through ignorance or stubbornness. Most of the Assembly members are of the politician type, mestizos or half-breeds (partly Spanish or Chinese), and very young. "In fact," a Manila man said to me, "when adjournment is taken, it is hard for a passerby to tell whether it is the Assembly that has let out or the High School!" The people in the provinces elect their own governors and city officials.

In some respects the legislation for the Philippines adopted by the American officials at Washington and Manila has been quite progressive. To begin with, our Republican National {168} Administration frankly recognized the blunders made in the South during Reconstruction days, and has practically endorsed the general policy of suffrage restriction which the South has since adopted. When the question came up as to who should be allowed to vote, even for the limited number of elective offices, no American Congressman was heard to propose that there should be unrestricted manhood suffrage. Instead, the law as passed provides that in order to vote in the Philippines one must be 23 years of age, a subject of no foreign power, and must either (1) have held some responsible office before August 13, 1898, or (2) own $250 worth of property or pay $15 annually in established taxes, or (3) be able to speak, read, and write English or Spanish. Of course, the Filipinos, with a few exceptions, do not "speak, read, or write" English or Spanish; they have been taught only their own dialect. I understand that only 2 per cent, of the people can vote under these provisions.

It should be said just here, however, that the government is now making a magnificent effort to educate all the Filipinos, and the schools are taught in English. The fact that half a million boys and girls had been put into public schools was the first boasted achievement of the American administration of the islands. It was, indeed, a great change from Spanish methods, but in the last three or four years the officials have been rapidly waking up to the fact that while they have been getting the Filipinos into the schools, they have not been getting them into the right sort of schools.

With the realization of this fact, a change has been made in the kind of instruction given. More and more the schools have been given an industrial turn. When I visited the Department of Education in Manila I found that old textbooks had been discarded and new text-books prepared—books especially suited to Philippine conditions and directed to practical ends. Instead of a general physiology describing bones, arteries, and nerve centres, I found a little book on {169} "Sanitation and Hygiene in the Tropics," written in simple language, profusely illustrated, and with information which the pupil can use in bettering the health of himself, his family, and his neighborhood. Instead of a general book on agriculture, I found a book written so as to fit the special needs, crops, and conditions in the Philippines. Moreover, I found the officials exhibiting as their chief treasures the specimens of work turned out by the pupils as a result of the practical instruction given them.

"I really think," said one of the officers, "that we have carried the idea of industrial education, of making the schools train for practical life, much farther in the Philippines than it has been carried in the United States. The trouble at home is that our teachers don't introduce industrial education early enough. They wait until the boy enters the upper grades—if he doesn't leave school before entering them at all, as he probably does. In any case, they reach only a few pupils. Our success, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we begin with industrial education in the earlier grades and get everybody."

And right here is a valuable lesson for those of us who are interested in getting practical training for white boys and girls in America as well as for brown boys and girls in the Philippines.

Another progressive step was the introduction of postal savings banks for the Filipinos before any law was passed giving similar advantage to the white people of the United States. The law has worked well. In fact, the increase in number of depositors last year, from 8782 to 13,102—nearly 50 per cent, in a single twelve-month—would indicate that the people are getting enthusiastic about it and that it is achieving magnificent results in stimulating thrift and the saving habit.

The government has also introduced the Torrens System of Registering Land Titles, as it has done in Hawaii. Formerly {170} the farmer or the peasant paid 20 per cent, or more for advances or loans. With his land registered under the Torrens system the bank will lend him money at a normal rate of interest, with nothing wasted in lawyers' fees for expensive investigations of all previous changes in title since the beginning of time. Judge Charles B. Elliott, now Secretary of Commerce and Police for the islands, was on the Minnesota Supreme Bench when the Torrens plan was put into force there, and he is enthusiastic about its workings both in his home state in America and in the Philippines.

For the public health an especially fruitful work has been done by the Americans, albeit the Filipino has often had much to say in criticism of the methods of saving life, and but little in praise of the work itself. "The hate of those ye better, the curse of those ye bless" may usually be confidently counted on by those who bear the White Man's Burden, and this seems to have been especially true with regard to health work in the East. In the Philippines the farmers object to the quarantine restrictions that would save their carabao from rinderpest; they object to the regulations that look to stamping out cholera, and I suppose the isolation and colonization of lepers, who formerly ran at large, has also been unpopular. In spite of opposition, vaccination is now general; pock-marked Filipinos will not be so common in future.

Nor is it likely that there will be many reports of cholera outbreaks such as an ex-army nurse described to me a few days ago: "When I was in Iloilo in 1902," she said, "it was impossible to dig graves for the poor natives as fast as they died. The men were kept digging, at the point of the bayonet, all night long—pits 100 feet long, 7 feet wide and 7 feet deep, in which the bodies of the dead were thrown and quick-limed—and yet I remember that on one occasion 235 corpses lay for forty-eight hours before we could find graves for them."

In Manila statistics show that 44 per cent. of the deaths are {171} of babies under one year old, and the ignorance of the mothers as to proper methods of feeding and nursing has resulted in a shockingly high death rate of little ones all over the Philippines. I noticed that the new school text-book on sanitation and hygiene gives especial attention to the care of infants, and it is said that already the school boys and girls are often able to give their mothers helpful counsel. In this fact we have another good suggestion for the school authorities at home, where it is said that proper knowledge and care would save the lives of a million infants a year.

Hardly less important than the school work has been the road-building undertaken by the American officials. And in Philippine road work a most excellent example has been set for the states at home, in that the authorities have given attention not only to building roads but to maintaining them after they are built. Too many American communities vote a heavy bond issue for roads and think that ends the matter. In the Philippines no such mistake has been made. "With the heavy rains here," the Governor-General said to me, "our entire investment in a piece of good road would be lost in four years' time if repair work were not carefully looked after."

The system adopted for keeping up the roads is very interesting. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over there were at intervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other material for filling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a Filipino is employed—he is called a caminero—and his whole duty is to take a wheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that piece of road in shape.

Prizes of $5000 each are also offered to the province that maintains the best system of first-class roads, to the province that spends the largest proportion of its funds on roads and bridges, and to the province that shows the best and most complete system of second-class roads.

That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there can be little doubt. As to whether it is our business in that {172} case to manage for them is another question. The Filipinos are, like our negroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever they may be from the standpoint of the evolutionist. "I never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct my plans," an American of rank said to me, "for I look on them as children. We are running a George Junior Republic; that's what it amounts to." Another American, who has had some experience with the Assembly, said to me: "When you have explained and reiterated some apparently simple proposition, they will come to you a day or so later with some elementary question amazing for its childishness." A large number of excellent measures for which the Assembly has received the credit were really instigated by the commission—"personally conducted legislation," it is called.

The Filipinos come of a race which has achieved more than the negro race, but on the whole they are probably hardly better fitted for self-government than the negroes of the South would be to-day if all the whites should move away. As a Republican of some prominence at home said to me in Manila: "A crowd of ten-year-old schoolboys in Chicago would know better how to run a government."

The mere fact that the Filipinos are not capable of managing wisely for themselves, of course, is not enough to justify a colonial or imperialistic policy on the part of the United States. It is not our business to go up and down the earth taking charge of everybody who is not managing his affairs as well as we think we could manage for him. But, in any case, there is no use to delude ourselves as to what are the real qualifications of Mr. Filipino.

I believe that the United States should eventually withdraw from the islands, but when it does so there should be an understanding with the Powers that will prevent the natives from being exploited by some other nation.

China Sea, off Manila Harbor.



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XVIII

ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA

The prosperity of every man depends upon the prosperity (and therefore upon the efficiency) of the Average Man.

So I have argued for years, in season and out of season, in newspaper articles and in public addresses; and the most impressive fact I have discovered in all my travel through the Orient is the fundamental, world-wide importance of this too little accepted economic doctrine. It is the biggest lesson the Old World has for the New—the biggest and the most important.

In America, education, democratic institutions, a proper organization of industry: these have given the average man a high degree of efficiency and therefore a high degree of prosperity as compared with the lot of the average man in Asia or Europe—a prosperity heightened and enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent's virgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we have said, to the high degree of efficiency with which the average man does his work.

And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos," as Kipling's German said about the monkey, for us to like to admit it, the plain truth is that, no matter what our business, we chiefly owe our prosperity not to our own efforts, but to the high standards of intelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on the part of our people as a whole. We live in better homes, eat more wholesome food, wear better clothing, have more leisure {174} and more recreation, endure less bitter toil; in short, we find human life fairer and sweeter than our fellow man in Asia, not because you or I as individuals deserve so much better than he, but because of our richer racial heritage. We have been born into a society where a higher level of prosperity obtains, where a man's labor and effort count for more.

In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told me that the average rate of wages throughout the empire for all classes of labor is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it is probably not more, and in India much less. The best mill workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents a day; the laborers at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10 cents; wheelbarrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operators in Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; the ironworkers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car conductors in Seoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou 10 cents; the highest wages are paid in the Philippines, where the ordinary laborer gets from 20 to 50 cents.

Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official statistics for Japan in the "Financial and Economic Annual for 1910," the latest figures compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908 wages had increased on the whole 40 per cent, above 1900 figures, and I give herewith averages for certain classes of workmen for 1899 and 1908:

Daily Wages in Cents 1899 1908 Farm laborer, male $0.13 $0.19 Farm laborer, female .08-1/2 .11-1/2 Gardener .24 .34 Weaver, male .15 .22 Weaver, female .09 .12 Shoemaker .22-1/2 .32-1/2 Carpenter .25 .40 Blacksmith .23 .34 Day laborer .17 .26-1/2

When I asked Director Matsui what he paid the hands I saw at work on the Agricultural College farm, he answered, "Well, being so near Tokyo, we have to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13-1/2 cents a day).

{175}

Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American laborer would regard as inhuman.

Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as our Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans would care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average man.

And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own—and this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home—though if he had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to it!

I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a summer's plowing.

Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.

Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets—how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human muscle—and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong Kong—certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer mountain-slope—and yet the wife of the governor-general told me that the material used in the building was brought up the mountainside by women!

Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhouses for American criminals!

Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-deep to plant the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, and harvest it with sickles. And after all this, they must often sell the rice they grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or poorer rice for their own food. The situation has probably improved somewhat since Col. Charles Denby published his book five years ago, but in its general outlines the plight of the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is true to-day:

"The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving—an important item in a country where heads must be shaved three or four times a month. His clothing costs about $4 per annum. In ten years he may buy one third of an acre of land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements. In ten years more he may {178} double his holdings and become part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years more he can procure a wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty-six years he has gained a competence."

So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial conditions in the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us to learn from these facts.

First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. Why is it that the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such low earning power? "An overcrowded population," somebody answers, "in China, for example, four hundred million people—one fourth the human race—crowded within the limits of one empire. This is the cause."

I don't believe it.

There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of population, even with the most highly developed system of industry, might lead to such a result, but I do not believe that this limit has been reached even in China. The people in England live a great deal better to-day than they did when England had only one tenth its present population. The average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, and a better income than he had in your grandfather's day when the population was not nearly so dense. The United States with a population of ninety odd million pays its laborers vastly better than it did when its population was only thirty million.

The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little more than he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess which should constitute his contribution to the "commonwealth," to the race. Our buildings, roads, railroads, churches, cathedrals, works of art—everything which makes the modern world a better place to live in than the primitive world was: these represent the combined contributions of all previous men and races. And if society is so able to handle men that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the more men the better the world.

{179}

My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not because of their dense populations, but because of their defective industrial organizations, because they do not provide men Tools and Knowledge to work with.

Ignorance and lack of machinery—these have kept Asia poor; knowledge and modern tools—these have made America rich.

If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with picks, hoes, and spades and tote out the earth in buckets. Nothing but human bone and sinew would be employed, and the men would be paid little, because without tools and knowledge they must always earn little. But America puts brains, science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big Ditch—Tools and Knowledge, in other words—and she pays good wages because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose only force is the force of muscle.

But Asia—deluded, foolish Asia—has scorned machinery. "The more work machinery does, the less there will be for human beings to do. Men will be without work, and men without work will starve." With this folly on her lips she has rejected the agencies that would have rescued her from her never-ending struggle with starvation.

Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in England—and alas! even in America; our labor unions even now sometimes lend a willing ear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine.

And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of the population when old-fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor has never been in greater demand and has never commanded higher wages than to-day.

With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it must ever be so—certainly as far ahead as we can look into the future. When a machine is invented which enables one man to do the work it formerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind and the spirit.

And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can work best, but is also itself a productive agency—a tool with which a man may work better.

Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is power.

{181}



{182}

One of the pleasures of being "on the road to Mandalay" was to see the—

"Elephints a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek"

The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking. But one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of human beings harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which make those in the lower picture look light by comparison.

{180 continued}

All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to the point of considering. In America a motorman or conductor by means of tools and knowledge—a street-car for a tool and the science of electricity for knowledge—transports forty people from one place to another. These men are high-priced laborers considered from an Oriental standpoint and yet {183} it costs you only five cents for your ride, and five minutes' time. In Peking, on the other hand, it takes forty men pulling rickshaws to transport the forty passengers; and though the pullers are "cheap laborers," it costs you more money and an hour's time to get to your destination—even if you are so lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place.

Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! Men and women weavers doing work that machines would do at home. Grain reaped with sickles instead of with horses and reapers as in America. Sixteen men at Hankow to carry baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would carry in New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up the mountainside at Hong Kong—and the Chinese threatened a general riot when the English built a cable-car system up the incline; they compelled the owners to sign an agreement to transport passengers only—never freight! No sawmills in the Orient, but thousands of men laboriously converting logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No pumps, even at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes: often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, in some cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powers are given no chance to do.

These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries where machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary labor is as yet but little better paid than in other lines because such industries are not numerous enough to affect the general level of wages. The net result of her policy of refusing the help of machinery is that Asia has not doubled a man's chances for work, but she has more than halved the pay he gets for that work. And why? Because she has reduced his efficiency. A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and where the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and poor tools, they produce little, and each man's share is little.

Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope for among a people who earn 10 cents a day—the head {184} of a family getting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant? Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among such a people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if a manufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how much circulation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much income?

Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions:

(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American much—a condition due to the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples his productive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools and knowledge, machinery and education. The Oriental does not.

(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; the fact that your labor earns two, three, or ten times what you would get for it if you had been born in Asia; this is due in the main, not to your personal merit, but to your racial inheritance, to the fact that you were born among a people who have developed an industrial order, have provided education and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner that your services to society are worth several times as much as would be the case if you were in the Orient, where education has never reached the common people.

Pity—may God pity!—the man who fancies he owes nothing to the school, who pays his tax for education grudgingly as if it were a charity—as if he had only himself to thank for the property on which the government levies a pitiable mill or so for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge among mankind. Pity him if he has not considered; pity him the more if, having considered, he is small enough of soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what education has brought us from all its past, but for what it has wrought through the invention of better tools and the better management (through increased knowledge) of all the powers with which men labor, our close-fisted, short-sighted {185} taxpayer would himself be living in a shelter of brush, shooting game with a bow and arrow, cultivating corn with a crooked stick! Most of what he has he owes to his racial heritage; it is only because other men prosper that he prospers. And yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing for the Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress.

"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of possible redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: Whatever prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what previous generations have done for increasing man's efficiency by means of knowledge and tools; your first duty to your fellows is to help forward the same agencies for human uplift in the future. And while this is the first duty of the individual, it is even more emphatically the first duty of a community or a commonwealth.

This is Asia's most important lesson for America.

Singapore, Straits Settlements.



{186}

XIX

THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA

The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and in Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer and winter are practically alike.

"But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime," a fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise at not finding it hotter than it really was—the speaker evidently forgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month as July, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with us become the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to the equator that for it "all seasons are summer," and the punkah wallas (the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth of July.

The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on the tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms are silhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavy foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; the sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the city are rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and uncleared jungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the unending {187} life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a long while because of the great number of lions found in the neighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.

There is probably no place on earth in which there have been brought together greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. I was told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversity of color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I am prepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them about as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian in the main—sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black hair; but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is Chinese.

It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to flourish equally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone. Here in Singapore under an equatorial sun, or in Canton on the edge of the Tropics, he seems as energetic, as unfailing in industry, as he is in wintry Mukden or northern Mongolia. For hours after sunset many of the Chinese shops in Singapore present as busy an appearance as at mid-day, and the pigtailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth about their bare bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would if they were in Peking.

The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and more impressed with the thought of what a hand they are to have in the world's affairs a hundred years hence when they get thoroughly "waked up." They were first brought to Singapore, I understand, as common laborers, but now their descendants are among the wealthiest men and women in the place and ride around in automobiles, while descendants of their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent sidewalks. It is a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and business skill of the Chinaman that nowadays when people {188} anywhere speak of desiring Celestials as laborers, they add, "Provided they are under contract to return to China when the work is finished, and do not remain to absorb the trade and wealth of the country."

From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Johore, a little kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and with a population of about 350,000. The soil and climate along the route are well suited to the cultivation of rubber trees, and considerable areas have recently been cleared of the dense jungle growth and set to young rubber plants. One of my friends who has a rubber plantation north of Singapore says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound as compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still enormous profits in the business, as the rubber should not cost over 25 cents a pound to produce. Some of the older plantations paid dividends of 150 per cent, last year, and probably set aside something for a rainy day in addition.

Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild speculation in rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which proved a veritable "Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors in Europe and Asia last year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were grabbed by eager buyers at $100 each. I know of a specific instance where a plantation bought for $16,000 was capitalized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock floated. When the madness had finally spent itself and people began to see things as they were, not only individuals, but whole communities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover for years, and some of its citizens—the young fellow with a $1500 income who incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble, for example—are left in practical bondage for life as a result. The men who have gone into the rubber-growing industry on a strictly business basis, however, are likely to find it profitable for a long time to come.

The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although the modest average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has {189} not appealed to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams about rubber. Where transportation facilities are good, the profits from cocoanuts probably average considerably in excess of 10 per cent., for the trees require little care, and it is easy for the owners to sell the product without going to any trouble themselves. In one section of the Philippines, I know, the Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree for the nuts and pick them themselves. And when we consider the great number of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, it is not surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut groves or plantations live in Europe on the income from the groves, going to no trouble whatever except to have the trees counted once a year.

Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in the midst of an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much interested in seeing the half-naked Hindus gathering the unhusked fruit for shipment. The tall, limbless trunks of the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of fruit and foliage, are in nearly every case gapped and notched at intervals of about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in climbing.

After tiffin on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves and overcoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and pongee as we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm trees. The dense foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight from our place by the seaside, and in the garden not far away were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poisonous upas, and palms of all varieties known.

Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and exports more tin than any other place on earth. The metal is shipped in molten bars like lead or pig iron, and to one who has associated tin only with light buckets, cups, and dippers, it is surprising how much strength it takes to move a bar of the solid metal the size of a small watermelon.

The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in walking through the warehouses along the wharves I was {190} struck by the number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bearing the legend, "Made in Germany." The Germans are today the most aggressive commercial nation on earth, and I find that their government and their business houses are searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade openings. Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet even what they may regard as the whims of their customers, and this is an advantage of no small importance. If a manufacturer wishes to sell plows in the Philippines, for example, it would not be worth while for him to try to sell the thoroughly modern two-handled American kind to begin with. He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at first and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in Manila, if you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled plow he would probably say that two handles may be all right for Americans who are not expert at plowing, but that the Filipino has passed that stage!

I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of respecting the custombre, or custom, of the country. The Germans realize this, and we do not.

One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, the capital and most important city in Burma, and (next to Bombay and Calcutta) the most important in British India. We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the river "on the road to Mandalay," but found that even then the half had not been told. If there were nothing else to see but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such butterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a little distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous flower-bed. All around you are men and women wearing robes that rival in brilliancy Joseph's coat of many colors.

The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties {191} in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, and for the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of apparel—or the lack of it. Most of the laborers on the streets wear only a loin-cloth and a turban (with the addition of a caste-mark on the forehead in case they are Hindus), but others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped, ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or trousers: and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors.

"The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kipling's "Road to Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or perhaps instead of the white cheroot it is an enormous black cigar. In either case it is as large as a medium-sized corncob, that the newly landed tourist is moved to stare thereat in open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's verses go?

"'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green. An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat—jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen, An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot. An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot."

They are all there in Rangoon yet—the gorgeous coloring of the lady's raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols—

"Bloomin' idol made o' mud. Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud."

How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossible to estimate—I saw them not only in the pagodas, but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior—and the gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine of the entire Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before you reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washington Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom—with actual gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim—and around it are innumerable smaller pagodas and shrines glittering with mosaics of colored glass in imitation of all the gems known to mortals. {192} Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin's palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives of the women—all a result, in the main, of the difference in religion.

And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough—its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faith mingled with gross superstitions and charms to propitiate the "nats" or spirits which are supposed to inhabit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc., and to have infinite power over the lives and fortunes of the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offerings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days and get his living in this way.

The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian {193} bullock. Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance and with a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; and it may be that the small boys utilize the long-eared goats (they have heavy, drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their small carts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China's capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating.

One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. It was better than a circus.

"Elephants a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek."

It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings in the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, while the others pulled them with chains. But the most marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half-naked driver, or mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders, makes him {194} understand what to do in each case by merely kicking his neck or prodding his ears.

At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about his trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in the camp.

For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plank he is remarkably careful about matching. Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or any single piece out of place, in which case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib" ("Salute the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.

One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting stories concerning them. He had two—one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or $833-1/3, and the other a mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or $750. On one occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild," and went back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn't like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers.

I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in {195} on him, and the mahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts set about taming him—talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In a couple of months "my lord the Elephant" is fully civilized, responds promptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adopts some useful occupation.

In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the great quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds a day will barely "jestify his stummuck," as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry "he wants what he wants when he wants it," and trumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be brought aboard for the elephants' breakfast.

I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon {196} Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.

I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will work through the Burman rice harvest—rice is the one great crop of the country—at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, and after three or four months of this will return home. Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carrying them back.

Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never sets on the English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders. Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone—more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197} it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas welcomed it!

With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.

Rangoon, Bunna.



{198}

XX

HINDUISM—AND THE HIMALAYAS

If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life— if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as "a sacred disease."

Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privileged and "superior" being, to whom all lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.

About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening combination of superstition, idolatry, and {199} vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, "Samsara," the belief that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the gods and win release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence will influence all your future rebirths—this is a doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit.

Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into God—this also (although destructive of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal.

Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.

It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion."

The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.

In the old days—and not so long ago at that—there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.

From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming—and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance—there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.

Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu "religion."