Chapter XXV · Cost of the Philippines
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If ’t were well to do right, ’t were better still if ’t were more profitable.
Cynic Maxims.
These figures are explained by the facts, already noticed hereinbefore, that most of our people knew how to shoot and the Filipinos did not. The great part of their army were raw recruits who did not understand the use of two sights on a rifle, and frequently relied solely on the one at the muzzle, not even lifting up the sight near the lock which when not in use lies flat along the gun-barrel, with the result that they almost invariably got the range too high and shot over our heads.
The mortality, caused no longer by the war, but by disease, such as malaria and dysentery, has reduced to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province had.
As to the cost of the Philippines in money, it used to be said in the early days that we paid $20,000,000 for a $200,000,000 insurrection. Just what the Islands have cost us up to date in money it is utterly impossible to figure out with any degree of certainty, except that a safe minimum may be arrived at. Said the distinguished Congressman from Texas, Honorable James L. Slayden, in a speech which appears in the Congressional Record of February 25, 1908 (pp. 2532 et seq.):
On this point, and in reply to a resolution of the Senate in 1902, the Secretary of War reported that the cost of the army in the Philippines from June 30, 1898, to July 1, 1902, had been $169,853,512.00. To this let us add $114,515,643.00, the admitted cost of the army in the Philippines from May 1, 1902, to June 30, 1907, and we will have a grand total of $284,369,155.00. That does not take into account the additional cost of the navy.
Nor, be it noted, does it count the $20,000,000 we paid Spain for the Islands, which item, is, however included in another part of Mr. Slayden’s speech.
The only other estimate of what the Islands have cost, made in the last few years, which seems to be specially worthy of consideration, is one which appeared in the New York Evening Post of March 6, 1907. This estimate was prepared by one of the best trained and most conservative newspaper men in the United States, Mr. Edward G. Lowry, then Washington correspondent of the Evening Post, and since 1911, its managing editor. The total which Mr. Lowry arrives at is $308,369,155, up to that time. There have been various absurd estimates made recklessly without knowledge, but Mr. Lowry’s estimate is very carefully studied out, and presented in detail in the newspaper referred to. From the testimony of Mr. Slayden and Mr. Lowry, given as a result of their inquiries into the matter, it would thus seem that the Islands must have cost us by the end of 1907 something like $300,000,000. The Insular Government is now self-sustaining, except as to military affairs.
Even if the Philippines have cost us $300,000,000, we are a nation of nearly 100,000,000 people. So they have cost us, all told, in the neighborhood of only about $3 a piece. And we subjugated them by mistake, after freeing a less capable people, the Cubans.
The Panama Canal is to be finished in 1913. This means a splendid, but free-for-all contest, for the trade of South America. In South America we will meet a tremendous pro-German sentiment, and a by no means inconsiderable anti-“Yankee” sentiment. The bigger Germany’s army and navy grows, the more she will loom up as the one great menace to the peace of the world, and the one avowed enemy of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to build up a Pan-American esprit de corps, based on the instinct of self-defence. We must win the good will of South America, and we cannot do it so long as we insist, in another part of the world, upon the righteousness of the principle of one Christian people policing a weaker Christian people, ostensibly to keep them from having revolutions, and really in the hope of ultimate profit. To free the Filipinos should be the first step we take after the Panama Canal is completed toward getting ourselves foot-loose entirely, with a view of getting everything from the Canadian border to the Argentine wheat fields and beyond, solidly and sincerely for the Monroe Doctrine. In that direction lies our only sensible and reasonable hope that the canal will get for us the trade and friendship of South America. With such tremendous issues at stake, what does it matter to the richest nation on earth what the Philippines cost? What does it matter, anyhow, how much it costs to do right?