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A FILIPINO'S HOME.
Nearly all the native houses I saw in the rural Philippines were of this type--about this size, set on stilts, and constructed of similar material. The scene is not quite natural-looking, however, without a banana grove and a fighting cock or two.
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THE CARABAO, THE WORK-STOCK OF THE FILIPINOS.
AN OLD SPANISH CATHEDRAL.
Of all the native Oriental peoples, the Filipinos alone have become thoroughly Christianized. The great majority are Catholics.
{159 continued}
The beast of burden in the Philippines, the ungainly, slow-moving animal that pulls the one-handled plows and the two-wheeled carts, is thecarabao. Thecarabao, or water buffalo, is about the size of an ordinary American ox, and much like the ox, but his hide is black, thick, and looks almost as tough as an alligator's; his horns are enormous, and he has very little hair. Perhaps his having lived in the water so much accounts for the absence of the hair. Even now he must every day submerge himself contentedly in deep water, must cover his body like a pig in a wallow: this is what makes life worth living for him. Furthermore, when he gives word that he is thirsty Mr. Tao (the peasant) must not delay watering him; in this hot climate thirst may drive him furiously, savagely mad, and the plowman may not be able to climb a cocoanut tree quick enough to escape hurt.
I saw quite a few goats, some cattle, a few hogs, and, of course, some dogs. Much as the Filipino may care for his dog, however, he always reserves the warmest place in his heart for nothing else but his gamecock, his fighting rooster. Cock-fighting, and the gambling inseparably connected with it, are his delight, and no Southern planter ever regarded a favorite fox-hound with more pride and affection than the Filipino bestows on his favorite chicken. In grassy yards you will see the rooster tied by one leg and turned out to exercise, as we would stake a cow to graze, while his owner watches and fondles him. I shall never forget a gray-headed, bright-eyed, barefooted old codger I saw near Tarlac stroking the feathers of his bird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over {160} her first-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him as a negro would carry a dog, and he is as ready to back his judgment with his last centavo as was the owner of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" before that ill-fated creature dined too heartily on buckshot. Sundays and saints' days are the days for cock-fighting--and both come pretty often.
I wish I could give my readers a glimpse of the passengers who got on and off my train between Manila and Daguban: Filipino women carrying baskets on their heads, smoking cigarettes, and looking after babies--in some cases doing all three at once; Filipino men, likewise smoking, and with various kinds of luggage, including occasional gamecocks; Filipino children in most cases "undressed exceedingly," as Mr. Kipling would say; and American soldiers in khaki uniforms and helmets. At one place a pretty little twelve-year-old girl gets aboard, delighted that she is soon to see America for the first time in six years. For a while I travel with an American surveyor whose work is away out where he must swim unbridged streams, guard against poisonous snakes, and sleep where he can. An army surgeon tells me as we pass the site of a battle between the Americans and the Filipino insurgents eleven years ago: the Filipinos would not respect the Red Cross, and the doctors and hospital corps had to work all night with their guns beside them, alternately bandaging wounds and firing on savages. In telling me good-bye a young Westerner sends regards to all America. "Even a piece of Arizona desert would look good to me," he declares; "anything that's U.S.A." A young veterinarian describes the government's efforts to exterminate rinderpest, a disease which in some sections has killed nine tenths of thecarabao. A campaign as thorough and far-reaching as that which the Agricultural Department at home is waging against cattle ticks is in progress, but the ignorant farmers cannot understand the regulations, and are greatly hindering a work which means so much of good to them.
Such are a few snapshots of Philippine life.
{161}
Of the vast natural resources of the Philippines there can be no question. With a fertile soil, varied products, immense forest wealth, and possibly extensive mineral wealth; with developing railway and steamship lines; with the markets of the Orient right at her doors and special trade advantages with the United States--with all these advantages, the islands might soon become rich, if there were only an industrious population.
Unfortunately, the Filipino, however, doesn't like work. Whether or not this dislike is incurable remains to be seen. Perhaps as he comes into contact with civilization he may conceive a liking for other things than rice, fish, a loin-cloth, and shade--plenty of shade--and proceed to put forth the effort necessary to get these other things. Already there seems to have been a definite rise in the standards of living since the American occupation. "When I came here in '98," Mr. William Crozier said to me, "not one native in a hundred wore shoes, and hats were also the exception; you can see for yourself how great is the change since then."
Moreover, in not a few cases Americans who have complained of difficulty in getting labor have been themselves to blame: they tried to hire and manage labor the American way instead of in the Filipino way. Thecustombre, as the Spanish call it--that is to say, the custom of the country--is a factor which no man can ignore without paying the penalty.
I am having to prepare this article very hurriedly, and I must postpone my comment on the work of the American Government until later. In closing, however, I am reminded that just as the old proverb says, "It takes all sorts of people to make a world," so I am seeing all sorts. A week ago yesterday the Hong Kong papers announced that Mr. Clarence Poe would be the guest at luncheon of his Excellency the Governor-General, Sir Frederick Lugard, K. C. M. G., C. B., D. S. O., etc., and Lady Lugard, in the executive mansion; yesterday {162} I had "chow" (food) in a Filipino's place, "The Oriental Hotel, Bar, and Grocery," away up in the Province of Pangasinan, and climbed to my room and cot on a sort of ladder or open work stairs such as one might expect to find in an ordinary barn! It was the best place I could find in town.
Nor do the incongruities end here. After getting my evening meal I walked out in the warm December moonlight, past the shadows of the strange buildings and tropical trees--and all at once there burst out the full chorus of one of the world's great operas, the magnificent voice of a Campanini or Caruso dominating all!
Great is the graphophone, advance agent of civilization!
Manila, P. I.
{163}
XVIIWHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE PHILIPPINES
There are so many islands in the Philippine group, which I have just left behind me (I write in a steamer off Manila), that if a man were to visit one a day, without stopping for Sundays, it would take him eight years to get around. Most of these islands though, of course, are little more than splotches on the water's surface and do not appear on the map. The two big ones, Mindanao and Luzon, contain three fourths of the total land surface of 127,000 square miles, leaving the other one fourth to be divided among the other 3138 islets.
The land area statistics just given indicate that the Philippines are about the size of three average American states and the population (7,000,000) is about three times that of an average American commonwealth. There are only about 30,000 white people in the islands, and 50,000 Chinese. Chinese immigration is now prohibited.
The 7,000,000 native Filipinos who make up practically the entire population represent all stages of human progress. The lowest of them are head-hunters and hang the skulls of their human enemies outside their huts, as an American hunter would mount the head of an elk or bear. The great majority, however, have long been Christians and have attained a fair degree of civilization. Even among the savage tribes a high moral code is often enforced. The Igorrotes, for example, though some of their number make it a condition of marriage {164} that the young brave shall have taken a head, shall have killed his man, have remarkable standards of honor and virtue in some respects, and formally visit the death penalty as the punishment for adultery. Because roads or means of communication have been poor the people have mingled but little, and there are three dozen different dialects. In the course of a half day's journey by rail I found three different languages spoken by the people along the route. The original inhabitants were Negritos, a race of pigmy blacks, of whom only a remnant remains, but the Filipino proper is a Malayan.
Filipinos are unique in that they alone among all the native peoples of Asia have accepted Christianity. Fortunate in being without the gold of Mexico or Peru, the Philippines did not attract the more brutal Spanish adventurers who, about the time of Magellan's discovery, were harrying wealthier peoples with fire and sword. Instead of the soldier or the adventurer, it was the priest, his soul aflame with love for his church, who came to the Philippines, and the impression made by his virtues was not negatived by the bloody crimes of fellow Spaniards mad with lust of treasure. The result is that to this day probably 90 per cent, of the Filipinos are Catholics. Before the priests came, the people worshipped their ancestors, as do other peoples in the Far East.
The only Asiatics who have accepted Christianity, the Filipinos are also the only Asiatics among whom women are not regarded as degraded and inferior beings. "If the Spaniards had done nothing else here," as a high American official in Manila said to me, "though, as a matter of fact, we are beginning to recognize that they did a great deal, they would deserve well of history for what they have accomplished for the elevation of woman through the introduction of Christianity. No other religion regards woman as man's equal."
The testimony I heard in the Philippines indicated that the female partner in the household is, if anything, superior in authority to the man. She is active in all the little business {165} affairs of the family, and white people sometimes arrange with Filipino wives for the employment of husbands!
The resources of the islands, as I have already said, are magnificent and alluring. In the provinces through which I travelled, less than 10 per cent. of the land seemed to be under cultivation, and statistics show that this is the general condition. A small area has sufficed to produce a living for the tao, or peasant, and he has not cultivated more--a fact due in part to laziness and in part to poor means of transportation. What need to produce what cannot be taken to market? This fact, in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipino unaggressiveness.
According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms in the Philippines, including the large plantations, is less than eight acres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane, tobacco, cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks for all the world like the banana plant (both belong to the same family), and the newcomer cannot tell them apart. The fibre is in the trunk or bark. Sisal hemp, which I found much like our yucca or "bear grass," is but little grown. Sugarcane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as in Louisiana, these plantations themselves calledhaciendas, and their ownershacienderos. The tobacco industry is an important one, and would be even if the export averaging half a million cigars for every day in the year were stopped, for the Filipinos themselves are inveterate smokers. The men smoke, the women smoke, the children smoke--usually cigarettes, but sometimes cigars of enormous proportions. "When I first came here," Prof. C. M. Conner said to me, "it amused me to ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, and have him answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes,' meaning the distance a man should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes!" Cocoanut-raising is a very profitable industry--all along the Pasig River in Manila you can see the native boats high-packed with the green, unhusked product, and two towns in Batanzas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is also believed that {166} the rubber industry would pay handsomely. The rubber-producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising.
Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made of the finest silver, but the blight which ruined his coffee plants was equally a blight to his fortunes and his home and it is now given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In some sections, however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was much interested in seeing the shrubs in bearing.
The Philippines are about the only place I have found since leaving home where the people are not trying to grow cotton. In California, in the Hawaiian Islands, in Japan, in Korea, and even in Manchuria as far north as Philadelphia, I have found the plants, and of course in China proper. But I should add just here, that in Southern China, about Canton, I did not find cotton. As for the industry in the Philippines, a Southern man, now connected with the Agricultural Department in Manila, said to me: "Cotton acts funny here. It runs to weed. I planted some and it opened five or six bolls a stalk and then quit: died down." He showed me some "tree cotton," about twenty feet high, and also some of the Caravonica cotton from Australia, which is itself much like a small tree.
When it comes to the lumber industry, not even Col. Mulberry Sellers would be likely to overestimate the possibilities the Philippines offer. There are literally millions in it. The government is leasing immense areas on a stumpage royalty of about 1 per cent., and as railways are built the industry will expand. Fortunately, there are strict regulations to prevent the destruction of the forests. They must be used, not wasted. The authorities realize that while timber is a crop like other crops, it differs from the other crops in that the harvesting must {167} never be complete. The cutting of trees below a certain minimum size is forbidden.
And now a word as to the activities of the American Government in the islands and the agencies through which these activities are conducted. The supreme governing body is known as the Philippine Commission, consisting of the Governor-General, who is ex-officio president, and seven other members (four Americans, three Filipinos) appointed by the President of the United States. Four of these commissioners (three of these are Americans) are heads of departments, having duties somewhat like those of Cabinet officers in America. This commission is not only charged with the executive duties, but it acts as the Upper House or Senate of the Philippine Congress. That is to say, the voters elect an Assembly corresponding to our House of Representatives, but no legislation can become effective unless approved by the Philippine Commission acting as the Upper House. In the first two elections, those of 1907 and 1909, the advocates of early independence, opponents of continued American supremacy, have predominated. The result has been that the American members of the commission have had to kill numberless bills passed by the Assembly. On the other hand, some very necessary and important measures advocated by the commission, measures which would be very helpful to the Filipinos, are opposed by the Assembly either through ignorance or stubbornness. Most of the Assembly members are of the politician type, mestizos or half-breeds (partly Spanish or Chinese), and very young. "In fact," a Manila man said to me, "when adjournment is taken, it is hard for a passerby to tell whether it is the Assembly that has let out or the High School!" The people in the provinces elect their own governors and city officials.
In some respects the legislation for the Philippines adopted by the American officials at Washington and Manila has been quite progressive. To begin with, our Republican National {168} Administration frankly recognized the blunders made in the South during Reconstruction days, and has practically endorsed the general policy of suffrage restriction which the South has since adopted. When the question came up as to who should be allowed to vote, even for the limited number of elective offices, no American Congressman was heard to propose that there should be unrestricted manhood suffrage. Instead, the law as passed provides that in order to vote in the Philippines one must be 23 years of age, a subject of no foreign power, and must either (1) have held some responsible office before August 13, 1898, or (2) own $250 worth of property or pay $15 annually in established taxes, or (3) be able to speak, read, and write English or Spanish. Of course, the Filipinos, with a few exceptions, do not "speak, read, or write" English or Spanish; they have been taught only their own dialect. I understand that only 2 per cent, of the people can vote under these provisions.
It should be said just here, however, that the government is now making a magnificent effort to educate all the Filipinos, and the schools are taught in English. The fact that half a million boys and girls had been put into public schools was the first boasted achievement of the American administration of the islands. It was, indeed, a great change from Spanish methods, but in the last three or four years the officials have been rapidly waking up to the fact that while they have been getting the Filipinos into the schools, they have not been getting them into the right sort of schools.
With the realization of this fact, a change has been made in the kind of instruction given. More and more the schools have been given an industrial turn. When I visited the Department of Education in Manila I found that old textbooks had been discarded and new text-books prepared--books especially suited to Philippine conditions and directed to practical ends. Instead of a general physiology describing bones, arteries, and nerve centres, I found a little book on {169} "Sanitation and Hygiene in the Tropics," written in simple language, profusely illustrated, and with information which the pupil can use in bettering the health of himself, his family, and his neighborhood. Instead of a general book on agriculture, I found a book written so as to fit the special needs, crops, and conditions in the Philippines. Moreover, I found the officials exhibiting as their chief treasures the specimens of work turned out by the pupils as a result of the practical instruction given them.
"I really think," said one of the officers, "that we have carried the idea of industrial education, of making the schools train for practical life, much farther in the Philippines than it has been carried in the United States. The trouble at home is that our teachers don't introduce industrial education early enough. They wait until the boy enters the upper grades--if he doesn't leave school before entering them at all, as he probably does. In any case, they reach only a few pupils. Our success, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we begin with industrial education in the earlier grades and get everybody."
And right here is a valuable lesson for those of us who are interested in getting practical training for white boys and girls in America as well as for brown boys and girls in the Philippines.
Another progressive step was the introduction of postal savings banks for the Filipinos before any law was passed giving similar advantage to the white people of the United States. The law has worked well. In fact, the increase in number of depositors last year, from 8782 to 13,102--nearly 50 per cent, in a single twelve-month--would indicate that the people are getting enthusiastic about it and that it is achieving magnificent results in stimulating thrift and the saving habit.
The government has also introduced the Torrens System of Registering Land Titles, as it has done in Hawaii. Formerly {170} the farmer or the peasant paid 20 per cent, or more for advances or loans. With his land registered under the Torrens system the bank will lend him money at a normal rate of interest, with nothing wasted in lawyers' fees for expensive investigations of all previous changes in title since the beginning of time. Judge Charles B. Elliott, now Secretary of Commerce and Police for the islands, was on the Minnesota Supreme Bench when the Torrens plan was put into force there, and he is enthusiastic about its workings both in his home state in America and in the Philippines.
For the public health an especially fruitful work has been done by the Americans, albeit the Filipino has often had much to say in criticism of the methods of saving life, and but little in praise of the work itself. "The hate of those ye better, the curse of those ye bless" may usually be confidently counted on by those who bear the White Man's Burden, and this seems to have been especially true with regard to health work in the East. In the Philippines the farmers object to the quarantine restrictions that would save their carabao from rinderpest; they object to the regulations that look to stamping out cholera, and I suppose the isolation and colonization of lepers, who formerly ran at large, has also been unpopular. In spite of opposition, vaccination is now general; pock-marked Filipinos will not be so common in future.
Nor is it likely that there will be many reports of cholera outbreaks such as an ex-army nurse described to me a few days ago: "When I was in Iloilo in 1902," she said, "it was impossible to dig graves for the poor natives as fast as they died. The men were kept digging, at the point of the bayonet, all night long--pits 100 feet long, 7 feet wide and 7 feet deep, in which the bodies of the dead were thrown and quick-limed--and yet I remember that on one occasion 235 corpses lay for forty-eight hours before we could find graves for them."
In Manila statistics show that 44 per cent. of the deaths are {171} of babies under one year old, and the ignorance of the mothers as to proper methods of feeding and nursing has resulted in a shockingly high death rate of little ones all over the Philippines. I noticed that the new school text-book on sanitation and hygiene gives especial attention to the care of infants, and it is said that already the school boys and girls are often able to give their mothers helpful counsel. In this fact we have another good suggestion for the school authorities at home, where it is said that proper knowledge and care would save the lives of a million infants a year.
Hardly less important than the school work has been the road-building undertaken by the American officials. And in Philippine road work a most excellent example has been set for the states at home, in that the authorities have given attention not only to building roads but to maintaining them after they are built. Too many American communities vote a heavy bond issue for roads and think that ends the matter. In the Philippines no such mistake has been made. "With the heavy rains here," the Governor-General said to me, "our entire investment in a piece of good road would be lost in four years' time if repair work were not carefully looked after."
The system adopted for keeping up the roads is very interesting. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over there were at intervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other material for filling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a Filipino is employed--he is called acaminero--and his whole duty is to take a wheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that piece of road in shape.
Prizes of $5000 each are also offered to the province that maintains the best system of first-class roads, to the province that spends the largest proportion of its funds on roads and bridges, and to the province that shows the best and most complete system of second-class roads.
That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there can be little doubt. As to whether it is our business in that {172} case to manage for them is another question. The Filipinos are, like our negroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever they may be from the standpoint of the evolutionist. "I never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct my plans," an American of rank said to me, "for I look on them as children. We are running a George Junior Republic; that's what it amounts to." Another American, who has had some experience with the Assembly, said to me: "When you have explained and reiterated some apparently simple proposition, they will come to you a day or so later with some elementary question amazing for its childishness." A large number of excellent measures for which the Assembly has received the credit were really instigated by the commission--"personally conducted legislation," it is called.
The Filipinos come of a race which has achieved more than the negro race, but on the whole they are probably hardly better fitted for self-government than the negroes of the South would be to-day if all the whites should move away. As a Republican of some prominence at home said to me in Manila: "A crowd of ten-year-old schoolboys in Chicago would know better how to run a government."
The mere fact that the Filipinos are not capable of managing wisely for themselves, of course, is not enough to justify a colonial or imperialistic policy on the part of the United States. It is not our business to go up and down the earth taking charge of everybody who is not managing his affairs as well as we think we could manage for him. But, in any case, there is no use to delude ourselves as to what are the real qualifications of Mr. Filipino.
I believe that the United States should eventually withdraw from the islands, but when it does so there should be an understanding with the Powers that will prevent the natives from being exploited by some other nation.
China Sea, off Manila Harbor.
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XVIIIASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA
The prosperity of every man depends upon the prosperity (and therefore upon the efficiency) of the Average Man.
So I have argued for years, in season and out of season, in newspaper articles and in public addresses; and the most impressive fact I have discovered in all my travel through the Orient is the fundamental, world-wide importance of this too little accepted economic doctrine. It is the biggest lesson the Old World has for the New--the biggest and the most important.
In America, education, democratic institutions, a proper organization of industry: these have given the average man a high degree of efficiency and therefore a high degree of prosperity as compared with the lot of the average man in Asia or Europe--a prosperity heightened and enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent's virgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we have said, to the high degree of efficiency with which the average man does his work.
And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos," as Kipling's German said about the monkey, for us to like to admit it, the plain truth is that, no matter what our business, we chiefly owe our prosperity not to our own efforts, but to the high standards of intelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on the part of our people as a whole. We live in better homes, eat more wholesome food, wear better clothing, have more leisure {174} and more recreation, endure less bitter toil; in short, we find human life fairer and sweeter than our fellow man in Asia, not because you or I as individuals deserve so much better than he, but because of our richer racial heritage. We have been born into a society where a higher level of prosperity obtains, where a man's labor and effort count for more.
In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told me that the average rate of wages throughout the empire for all classes of labor is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it is probably not more, and in India much less. The best mill workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents a day; the laborers at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10 cents; wheelbarrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operators in Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; the ironworkers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car conductors in Seoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou 10 cents; the highest wages are paid in the Philippines, where the ordinary laborer gets from 20 to 50 cents.
Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official statistics for Japan in the "Financial and Economic Annual for 1910," the latest figures compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908 wages had increased on the whole 40 per cent, above 1900 figures, and I give herewith averages for certain classes of workmen for 1899 and 1908:
Daily Wages in Cents
When I asked Director Matsui what he paid the hands I saw at work on the Agricultural College farm, he answered, "Well, being so near Tokyo, we have to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13-1/2 cents a day).
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Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American laborer would regard as inhuman.
Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as our Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans would care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average man.
And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--and this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if he had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to it!
I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a summer's plowing.
Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.
Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human muscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong Kong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of the governor-general told me that the material used in the building was brought up the mountainside by women!
Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhouses for American criminals!
Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-deep to plant the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, and harvest it with sickles. And after all this, they must often sell the rice they grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or poorer rice for their own food. The situation has probably improved somewhat since Col. Charles Denby published his book five years ago, but in its general outlines the plight of the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is true to-day:
"The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving--an important item in a country where heads must be shaved three or four times a month. His clothing costs about $4 per annum. In ten years he may buy one third of an acre of land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements. In ten years more he may {178} double his holdings and become part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years more he can procure a wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty-six years he has gained a competence."
So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial conditions in the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us to learn from these facts.
First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. Why is it that the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such low earning power? "An overcrowded population," somebody answers, "in China, for example, four hundred million people--one fourth the human race--crowded within the limits of one empire. This is the cause."
I don't believe it.
There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of population, even with the most highly developed system of industry, might lead to such a result, but I do not believe that this limit has been reached even in China. The people in England live a great deal better to-day than they did when England had only one tenth its present population. The average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, and a better income than he had in your grandfather's day when the population was not nearly so dense. The United States with a population of ninety odd million pays its laborers vastly better than it did when its population was only thirty million.
The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little more than he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess which should constitute his contribution to the "commonwealth," to the race. Our buildings, roads, railroads, churches, cathedrals, works of art--everything which makes the modern world a better place to live in than the primitive world was: these represent the combined contributions of all previous men and races. And if society is so able to handle men that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the more men the better the world.
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My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not because of their dense populations, but because of their defective industrial organizations, because they do not provide men Tools and Knowledge to work with.
Ignorance and lack of machinery--these have kept Asia poor; knowledge and modern tools--these have made America rich.
If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with picks, hoes, and spades and tote out the earth in buckets. Nothing but human bone and sinew would be employed, and the men would be paid little, because without tools and knowledge they must always earn little. But America puts brains, science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big Ditch--Tools and Knowledge, in other words--and she pays good wages because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose only force is the force of muscle.
But Asia--deluded, foolish Asia--has scorned machinery. "The more work machinery does, the less there will be for human beings to do. Men will be without work, and men without work will starve." With this folly on her lips she has rejected the agencies that would have rescued her from her never-ending struggle with starvation.
Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in England--and alas! even in America; our labor unions even now sometimes lend a willing ear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine.
And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of the population when old-fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor has never been in greater demand and has never commanded higher wages than to-day.
With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it must ever be so--certainly as far ahead as we can look into the future. When a machine is invented which enables one man to do the work it formerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind and the spirit.
And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can work best, but is also itself a productive agency--a tool with which a man may work better.
Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is power.
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"SOCIETY BELLES" OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.