Note 7 — Chapter XXVI · Congressional Legislation

Let us see just how far, according to the annual reports of our own agents in the Philippines—those charged by us with governing them,—this piece of legislation gotten through by “special privilege” has depressed the Manila hemp industry, the chief source of wealth of the Islands. And before we even get to the main trouble, let us permit the Insular Government to “place on the screen,” as a preliminary “view,” a glance at what the instinct of self-preservation of American sugar and tobacco interests, fearing competition from “cheap Asiatic labor,” have deemed it necessary to do to the Philippine sugar and tobacco industries, through the Dingley tariff. The annual report of the Philippine Commission for 1904, before it gets to the subject of hemp, draws a most gloomy picture of how we killed the markets for sugar and tobacco the Islands had under Spain, and gave them none instead. They speak of “the languishing state of these industries” (p. 26), and describe a state of affairs that sounds more like Egypt under Pharaoh than anything else, including a cattle disease that carried off ninety per cent. of the beasts of burden of the country, and wholesale destruction of crops by locusts.7 What they have to say of the annual tribute levied by the American Hemp Trust, through Congress, on the Manila hemp industry, should not be re-stated, but quoted. They say:8