Chapter XVII · Governor Taft, 1903 (Continued)

The Philippines for the Filipinos.

Speech of Governor Taft.

This is true, and it is not as it should be. We should either stop the clamor, or stop the American capital and energy from going to the Islands. After an American goes out to the Islands, invests his money there, and casts his fortunes there, unless he is a renegade, he sticks to his own people out there. Then the Taft policy steps in and bullyrags him into what he calls “knuckling to the Filipinos,” every time he shows any contumacious dissent from the Taft decision reversing the verdict of all racial history—which has been up to date, that wheresoever white men dwell in any considerable numbers in the same country with Asiatics or Africans, the white man will rule. Yet the American in the Philippines, once he is beguiled into going there, must bow to the Taft policies. He has taken his family to the Islands, and all his worldly interests are there. Yet he is living under a despotism, a benevolent despotism, it is true, so long as the non-office-holding American does not openly oppose the government’s policies, but one which, however benevolent, is, so far as regards any brooking of opposition from any one outside the government hierarchy, as absolute as any of the other despotic governments of Asia. Though the Governor of the Philippines does not wear as much gilt braid as some of his fellow potentates on the mainland of Asia, still, in all executive matters he wields a power quite as immediate and substantial, in its operation on his subjects, as any of his royal colleagues. It never for a moment occurs either to the American Government official in the Philippines, or to the American citizen engaged in private business there who is in entire accord with the policies of the insular government and on terms of friendship with the officials, that the government under which he is living is any more of a despotism than the Government of the United States. The shoe never pinches the American citizen engaged in private business until he begins, for one reason or another, to be “at outs” with the insular government, and to have “opinions” which—American-like—he at once wants to express. If he permits himself to get thoroughly out of accord with the powers that be, the sooner he gets out of the Islands the better for him. This is the most notorious single fact in the present situation. There is no public opinion to help such a person, in any case where he differs with any specific act or policy of the insular government. The American colony is comparatively small, say between ten and twenty thousand all told, outside the army (which consists of ten or twelve thousand individuals living wholly apart from the rest of the community). The doctor who is known to have the patronage of high government officials is sure of professional success, and his wife is sure to receive the social recognition her husband’s position in the community naturally commands; and this permits her to make auspicious entrance into the game of playing at precedence with her next neighbor called “society,” so dear to the hearts of many otherwise sensible and estimable women—to say nothing of carpet knights, callow youths, cads, and aging gourmands. Also if the doctor and his lady have adult children, their opportunities to marry well are multiplied by the sunlight from the seats of the mighty. Thus the doctor and his wife are a standing lesson to the man “with convictions” that yearn for utterance, but who is also blessed with a discreet helpmate, more concerned in the general welfare and happiness of all the family than in seeing her husband’s name in the paper. What is true of the doctor is also true of the lawyer known to be persona grata to the government. Again, the newspaper man in favor with the government is sure to get his share of the government advertising, according to a very liberal construction, and that insures his being able to command reportorial and editorial talent such as will sell his paper, and the consequent circulation is sure to get him the advertising patronage of the mercantile community, thus placing success for him on a solid, comfortable basis. Also, a contrary course will, slowly, maybe, but surely, freeze out any rash competitor. Consequently, the American in the Philippines is deprived of one of his most precious home pleasures, viz., letting off steam, in some opposition paper, about the real or imagined shortcomings of the men in charge of the government. For the reasonable expectancy of life of an opposition paper in Manila is pathetically brief. The hapless editor on the prosperous paper, whatever his talents, who happens to become afflicted with “views” which he airs in his editorial columns, is soon upbraided by his friends at his club as “getting cranky,” and is told by the orthodox old-timers among them, “John, you’ve been out here too long. You better go home.” If he does not change his tone, the receipts of the advertising department of his paper soon fall off, and his friend, the more tactful proprietor, who “knows how to get along with people,” is not long in agreeing with the rest of his friends that he has “been out here too long.” Again the successful merchant has too many interests at stake in which he needs the cordial friendship of the government to be able to afford to antagonize it. And so on, through every walk of life, the influence of the government permeates every nook and corner of the situation.

I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with shaping the course of the government out there for which they are responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable governmental asset, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.

Having now given, I hope, a more or less sympathetic insight into what absolute rulers our governors in the Philippines have been, in the very nature of the case, from the beginning, let us observe the change of tone of the government, after the reign of the first ended, and the reign of the second began.