Note 4 — Chapter XXVI · Congressional Legislation

This also sounds liberal, on first reading, but its object was, and its effect has been, to enable the American Hemp Trust to corner and control the Manila hemp industry. There is but one article of Philippine export which any one in the United States is interested in, that was admitted into the United States free of duty under the Dingley Act.4 That article is hemp. The object of the law was to favor Americans interested in exporting hemp from Manila to the United States as against Europeans exporting it to England and other foreign countries. This does not look, on its face, either unpatriotic or un-Christian. It is not unpatriotic or un-Christian, ordinarily, to favor your own people, as against their foreign competitors. The moral quality of such favoritism, however, must depend on who is to pay for it. Under the Act of 1902, the Manila authorities have always collected an export tax on hemp coming to the United States, just as they do on hemp going from Manila to foreign countries, exactly as if the law abolishing the export tax on hemp coming to the United States had never been passed. Later, on proof that the hemp was in fact carried to the United States and used and consumed therein, they refund the export tax. This is on the idea that they cannot tell where the hemp is going to until they know where it went to, nor where it is going to be “used and consumed” until they know where it was in fact finally “used and consumed.” Of course the small farmer is in no position to follow his bale of hemp into the markets of the world and show, if it happens to go to the United States, that it did in fact go there and that it was there “used and consumed,” and, finally obtaining the proof of this, submit it to the Manila Government and get his little export tax on his bale of hemp refunded. Only the big buyer’s agents at Manila are in a position to do this. So the hemp crop is bought and moved under conditions which are the same as if all hemp were subject to an export tax. And only the big fish get the benefit. For instance, the International Harvester Company has its hemp buyers at Manila. And as to the part of the Philippine hemp crop it handles, it can, of course, follow the hemp to its ultimate consumption in the United States, make the proof, and get the refund.