OF

INDEPENDENCE PROPAGANDA

F THE hundred and ten million inhabitants of the United States, only a small fraction have visited the Philippines or have personal knowledge of the islands and their people. Whatever information they have in the matter, or whatever judgment they form, must necessarily be based upon the printed word or upon the testimony of those who speak from actual experience. Upon this evidence, incomplete though it be, and dealing with a situation entirely outside their ken, our people must decide whether the Philippines are to remain territory of the United States, subject to its protection and guidance, or be delivered over to Filipino rule. Not only this, should their decision favour political independence of the islands, the verdict will be final and conclusive, with no opportunity for new trial or appeal.

Something Filipinos seldom if ever face, and few Americans realize, is that there can be no halfway arrangement. Either United States sovereignty must continue in the archipelago, with reserved powers sufficient to insure an orderly and progressive government, or the withdrawal must be complete and absolute. For the United States to assume responsibility without authority, or for Filipinos to expect it of us, is sublimated folly. Situated as are the Philippines, "authority" and "sovereignty" cannot be divorced, and once the United States deliberately destroys the union it will be estopped alike

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from turning back or from asserting rights not shared in equal measure by other nations.

The issue involves the welfare and future destiny of eleven millions of people and their descendants, and merits a deliberate judgment upon the best evidence obtainable. Particularly is this true considering that the United States is a voluntary trustee of the rights and interests of the islanders as a whole, and cannot in decency cast them off, either because of their own clamour or from selfish motives, until the trust is discharged.

President Coolidge, in a recent communication addressed to Manuel Roxas, Speaker of the Philippine House, stated:

I should be less than candid with you if I did not say that in my judgment the strongest argument that has been used in the United States in support of immediate independence of the Philippines is not the argument that it would benefit the Filipinos, but that it would be of advantage to the United States.

Feeling as I do, and as I am convinced the great majority of Americans do regarding our obligations to the Filipino people, I have to say that I regard such arguments as unworthy. The American people will not evade or repudiate the responsibility they have assumed in this

matter.

The American Government is convinced that it has the overwhelming support of the American nation in its conviction that present independence would be a misfortune and might easily become a disaster to the Filipino people. Upon that conviction the policy of this Government is based.

Flattering as it is to be told that the American people will not evade or repudiate their Philippine obligations, the fact remains that a considerable element among them is prepared now, and has been since the beginning, to do that very thing. When the President's letter was written, four separate bills were pending in Congress to grant the Filipinos immediate and absolute independence, while the "American Civil Liberties Union," and numerous

other entities and celebrities, were "resolving" that Philippine independence be declared "as soon as the civil and military representatives of the United States can be withdrawn."

Bryan's slogan of "Imperialism" in 1900, as also the labours and expenditures of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston and thereabouts, had as their basis the alleged "welfare of the United States," all such persons pretending to see in this forward movement of our country across the Pacific some sort of menace to the government builded by the fathers. It was and is the same old cry which has gone up since the boundaries of the original Thirteen States were first pushed westward. The purchase of Florida and Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, the gradual extension of our frontier to the Pacific, and then on to Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands, all gave rise to these prophets of gloom, who revelled in pictures of national disaster following each addition to our domain. That all now laugh at the folly of these "little Americans" deters not a whit this new crop of pessimists, who launch as new gospel all the time-worn arguments of their discredited predecessors.

Any claims advanced that the "welfare of the Filipinos' would be served by this scuttle policy were intended largely to salve the conscience of an uneasy and doubtful public. Few or none of those who agitated the loudest against Philippine occupation incurred the trouble or expense of visiting the islands to secure first-hand information. Their ideas were purely theoretical, founded upon premises utterly at variance with actual conditions. The fact that we had destroyed and supplanted Spanish sovereignty, and had become obligated by a treaty, duly ratified, to establish and preserve law and order in the

islands, bothered them not at all. With equal complaisance they ignored the findings of Messrs. Schurman, Denby, Worcester, Dewey, and Otis, who, after an exhaustive personal investigation, had unanimously reported:

Should our power by any fatality be withdrawn, the Commission believe that the Government of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchy, which would excuse, if it did not necessitate, the intervention of other Powers and the eventual division of the islands among them. Only through American occupation, therefore, is the idea of a free self-governing Philippine commonwealth at all conceivable.

None but the fanatical or ignorant now pretend it would have been other than tragical for the United States to have abandoned the Filipinos to their fate in 1898. How then explain the reasoning or motives of those who, in the years between-with but little change in material conditions have nevertheless persistently continued to champion Philippine independence and to urge withdrawal of American authority? The answers are various.

Supposed "political exigencies" caused the outs in 1900 to pronounce in favour of turning the islands back to the natives. This "plank" was accepted as gospel at the time by the rank and file of the party, many of whom have not yet discovered that our Philippine problem affects us as Americans and not as Democrats or Republicans. A considerable element also harbours the idea that similar action is possible and desirable in the Philippines as was taken respecting Cuba. Recently an American Congressman, addressing a gathering of Filipinos in Manila, stated that should the latter misbehave themselves after independence was granted, then "Mother would have to come out and spank them occasionally as we did Cuba." The fact never percolated his mind that the

Monroe Doctrine does not extend to Asia, and that once the Philippines are cut loose and our Army and Navy withdrawn, this "spanking privilege" will not be our exclusive function.

Then again, there is a considerable element in Congress, particularly from the Southern States, which frankly avows its desire to get rid of the Philippines "because we have enough coloured people at home." Congressman Jones of Virginia, who wrote into a preamble to the Organic Act of 1916 the purpose of the United States to withdraw its sovereignty over the islands "as soon as a stable government can be established therein," when asked what he regarded as a "stable government," replied: "One that will last until we can get out of Manila Bay." Neither he nor those like-minded were concerned with the effect upon the natives, and yet, as author of the "Jones Law," he became a hero to the Filipinos, who erected a monument to his memory.

United States sugar and tobacco growers, realizing the tremendous potentialities of the Philippines in the production of these articles, and desiring to eliminate the competition which free trade with the islands portends, also regard "Philippine independence" with favour regardless of where the Filipino gets off. Notwithstanding that the islands are domestic territory of the United States, these interests succeeded in holding Philippine products to payment of seventy-five per cent. of regular tariff rates until 1909. In that year free trade was granted as to all articles "the growth and product of the Philippines," except that as to sugar such free entry was limited to 300,000 tons, and as to tobacco, to 150,000,000 cigars annually. It was not until October, 1913, that Congress finally surmounted "the arguments" of the sugar