Note 8 — Chapter XXV · Cost of the Philippines

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