Note 38 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Currency.—The List of the Library of Congress, under the heading Finance, cites a few Spanish and foreign treatises on Philippine currency prior to 1898, and the earlier American official reports on the subject. One will get more enlightenment upon the actual conditions prevailing during the last years of Spanish rule from memoranda and testimony in certain of these American reports than from any of the printed sources of date earlier than 1898. Nevertheless, the petition of the Manila Chamber of Commerce in 1895 reproduced in La Política de España en Filipinas, v, no. 105, brings out in part the highly unsatisfactory conditions produced by the Spanish government’s inaction and disregard of well-established economic principles. In ibid., vii, p. 217, is given the text of the decree of April 17, 1897, providing for the new Philippine silver peso which was beginning to circulate in the islands when American arms intervened, and which was proclaimed as a “settlement” of the Philippine currency evils, yet would obviously not have proved sufficient, unsupported as it was by provisions to sustain it in the face of the decline of silver. In much of the loose talk about economic depression in the Philippines since the wars of 1896–98 and 1899–1901, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that “hard times” had really begun before, during 1891–95 particularly, and that an unstable currency and exchange fluctuations had then played their part in producing these conditions; also that it was the Filipino laborer and small producer who was especially mulcted of his due by conditions produced in part officially and in part by governmental neglect.38 In addition to the American documents listed by the Library of Congress, reference should be made, as regards currency and exchange evils before 1898, to the survey of the subject by the Schurman Commission (Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, i, pp. 142–149), and the testimony of Manila bankers and business men in the same report (vol. ii); to magazine articles by Charles A. Conant printed as appendices in Report of the Commission on International Exchange (Washington, 1903); and, for a few details on previous conditions, with exchange tables, to the reports of E. W. Kemmerer, Chief of the Division of Currency, for 1904 and 1905.39