The Economic Future of the Philippines

THE United States confront a serious task in the Philippine Islands, on the economic as well as the political side. This is obvious to every one who studies conditions on the ground, as has been the opportunity of the present writer during the past summer. The political and economic problems are more or less interwoven each with the other, for they grow naturally out of the comparative backwardness of tropical peoples and their need of Caucasian leadership. The work undertaken by the United States in the education of the Filipino people will be an important element in their economic future, and it is an undertaking almost unique in the dealing of colonizing powers with their dependencies. Whether the experiment of sending a thousand teachers to the islands, to teach the people the rudiments of modern ideas, will soon produce such results as have been achieved in a moral and intellectual way by education in the United States may well be doubted; but it will undoubtedly accomplish much in improving their material condition and in extending the influence of the United States. Already English is driving Spanish from the schools and the marts of trade, and eagerness is shown on every hand to learn American methods and American points of view.

Actual contact with tropical and Oriental races brings strong conviction of the necessity of Caucasian leadership for their orderly progress in the paths of civilization and economic efficiency. In the intellectual field there is a gulf fixed between the Caucasian and the Oriental mind, except in the case of a very few, which can be bridged only by several generations of culture. The fundamental distinction, however, between the Oriental and the Caucasian is not so exclusively one of culture as of traditions and points of view. The masses of the Oriental peoples are not only without the capacity for self-government ; they have no conscious interest in their government. They may, under extreme conditions, revolt against excessive taxation or other forms of oppression, but for the most part the struggle for existence is too constantly present to give them time for thinking of abstract problems. Oppression must become terribly concrete to arouse even their interest. In China and Japan, it is doubtful if one could obtain from the average coolie or agricultural laborer an intelligent answer to any question regarding his form of government. The essential dignity of human nature; the doctrine that the humblest man or woman is made in the divine image, dowered with immortality, and possessed of inalienable moral and political rights, are propositions of which only a faint glimmering filters, by means of Caucasian example, into the Oriental mind.

This difference between the Caucasian and the Oriental mind seriously affects the solution of every economic as well as every political problem in the Orient. The conception of “the economic man,” battling with all his power to distance his fellows in the production of wealth by the most efficient methods, and to raise his standard of living, would hardly be grasped by the ordinary Oriental. In some countries, as in the overpopulated parts of China, the struggle for existence is an intense reality, but is carried on according to archaic methods. In the less thickly populated countries, especially those under the tropics, the gathering of the scantiest subsistence suffices for the average native. That he should strive to increase his possessions at the expense of discomforting labor, that he should dig deep into the earth in order to draw forth its riches, and confront a circle of wants expanding constantly with the increase of his earning power, would strike him, if he were able to comprehend the idea, as a supreme waste of energy.

Caucasian leadership, therefore, will be vital for a long time to come to the progress of the undeveloped peoples. What Great Britain, in the economic field, has accomplished in Egypt and British India; what even Russia, with her brutal soldiery and autocratic methods, is accomplishing in Central Asia; what the United States are to accomplish in the Philippines, is not capable of accomplishment by the native races if left to themselves. Japan, under the guiding hand of European and American teachers, has risen to the rank of a power among the nations; and her people are reaping the benefits in improved methods of agriculture, the higher wages which follow greater productive power, and a better standard of living. Through better methods of sanitation and more healthy conditions of life population is increasing, until it threatens to overrun the limits of the empire, and has already forced Japan to become a colonizing power in the island of Formosa. But even Japan, in spite of the wonderful progress which she has made within twenty-five years under the tutelage of the Caucasian race, has much yet to learn before her people rise to the productive and intellectual stature of Europeans and Americans. Culture and high intellectual development is still confined to a few, and it may be questioned whether the country has not acted hastily in dispensing with the services of American and European teachers in some of those positions which call for constructive ability and the capacity for organization on a large scale.

Raising the standard of living is the most potent method of raising any people to the level of modern civilization and to the possibilities of independent intellectual and political life. This standard must in the long run follow productive capacity. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” What a man produces, that shall he also consume in its equivalent of what others produce. In rare cases only can he obtain from others more than the fair equivalent of that which he produces. The essential difficulty with all the inferior races of the earth is not chiefly what is taken from them by others, — whether this is great or small, — but the small volume of their own production. The lesson to be taught them by Caucasian leadership — how to increase the sum of their product — will benefit both the teacher and the learner, because increased producing power on the one hand means increased power to demand products on the other.

Caucasian leadership in the undeveloped countries means this raising of the standard of comfort. The cheapest thing in the Orient is human life and labor. The reason is found, on the economic side, in adherence to primitive methods of agriculture and of exchange. The present productive capacity of the civilized races is the fruit of the capacity for organization of a few minds. It has been their work to devise agricultural implements and machinery and intensive methods of culture, which have multiplied many times the productive power of a single individual as applied to the natural qualities of the soil, and have postponed for generations the evils which Malthus feared from the increase of population. To this power of developing the resources of nature in their most direct form the same class of minds has added the organization of industry on the side of manufacturing, finance, and transportation, which has made the civilized world one, and allotted to each community the task which it can best perform.

It is the mission of the civilized powers in the Orient and the tropics to put these potent weapons for increasing productive power into the hands of races which have thus far been incapable of devising or adopting them for themselves. This mission has been executed by every civilized power in its colonial possessions, upon a smaller or larger scale. It was done upon the smallest scale, perhaps, by Spain in the Philippines. Few colonizing powers, holding practically undisturbed possession, for four centuries, of an empire of such infinite possibilities, have left so little impress as Spain has left upon the Philippine Islands. Even upon her own political domain British enterprise has entered, in the guise of British merchants, to teach the native people some of the lessons of economical civilized production; but it has remained for the United States to bring to them, of direct purpose, and not as a mere incident of exploitation, the education which shall raise them to something like the producing capacity of the civilized races.

Few who have not come into contact with Oriental peoples can appreciate the inefficiency of labor, growing out of the lack of proper tools and education. This inefficiency is due largely to the lack of capital, which it is the mission of the great civilized nations to supply; but it is largely due, also, to the lack of initiative and of the means of acquiring the knowledge suitable for obtaining the best results from labor. Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese labor to a large extent by the primitive methods of their ancestors, and get only the equivalent produced by their ancestors, because they have not invented and have not acquired better methods. How far the small results of the tasks at which they toil day by day with their hands when they might use tools, with their own backs when they might use beasts of burden or the power of steam or electricity, are due to inherent lack of capacity will presently be referred to; but it is obvious that even the most inefficient laborer can be rendered greatly more efficient by placing in his hands modern tools and labor-saving machinery.

It is only by the application of modern machinery and organized industry that the almost unexplored riches of the Orient can be placed at the command of mankind. The methods of the native races have barely scratched the surface of the deep resources of these countries. These methods often do irreparable damage to the almost priceless gifts of nature by such crass improvidence as the cutting down of gutta-percha trees for the extraction of their product, when proper treatment would make them reproductive for many years. Gutta percha is already becoming a scarce commodity outside the Philippines, because of the improvidence and ignorance of the native races even in countries under Dutch and British control. The island of Mindanao, one of the least explored of the Philippine group, is rich in gutta percha, rubber, and elastic. Nearly all the islands are capable of profitable development in rice, sugar, and tobacco. Iron and coal of good quality are found, rich mines of copper only await proper development, and gold is found in paying quantities. The natives of the southern islands, Moros by race, Mohammedan by faith, and uncivilized in their condition, nevertheless welcome capitalists and prospectors who promise to respect their individual holdings of land, give them as much work as they are willing to do, and take the natural products which they gather in the forests or grow on their little plots. Wiser by intuition than some of their friends in America, they realize that the coming of organized industry means for them the full realization of the rich possibilities of their forests, streams, and mines.

Contact with the teeming millions of the Orient brings home in a striking manner to the economic observer the lesson of the influence of the organization of industry upon human progress. There is probably no more steady, industrious, and thrifty worker in the world than the Chinaman, To the limit of his individual capacity he makes the most of his producing power. But China does not possess the captains of industry who have lightened labor in the civilized countries by invention and by combining in the most effective manner the factors of production. Man performs the functions of a beast of burden in the rickshaw and in drawing the canal boat, even in progressive Japan, because no great organizer of production, like our railway and iron kings, has come to show him the best means of combining his resources in order to get the largest sum of product from the smallest expenditure of labor. The means of attaining these things will be taught in the Philippines by the agricultural colleges and the manual training schools, which promise to be among the most useful parts of the system of education which is being worked out on such a comprehensive scale by Dr. Fred W. Atkinson, the superintendent of education; but the capacity for great enterprises, not always encountered even among highly advanced people, will probably be found, for many years to come, among the Caucasian rulers of the Orient rather than among the people themselves.

The labor problem promises to be a serious one at first in the Philippines, because of the lack of inclination among the natives to systematic work. The nightmare of an invasion of the United States by “a flood of Filipino cheap labor, ” which has disturbed the dreams of some of the opponents of expansion, would lose its terrors by a visit to the islands. The average Filipino laborer in competition with American labor would have about as much chance of survival as a mouse in a threshing machine. The wants of the people of the Philippines have been confined within such narrow limits, and have been supplied in a scanty way from day to day by such desultory methods, that a considerable degree of education will be required to induce the continuous labor which has become the habit of civilized races.

Upon this side of the problem, however, the very benefits brought by the civilized races are likely to afford a compelling influence to greater labor. Races which have not adopted modern standards of civilization advance but slowly in population. In Manila it is reported that the average births to each mother run as high as fifteen, but that under Spanish rule only four of these children grew to maturity. Remarkable as this statement appears, both as to fecundity and death rate, and incapable of exact verification as it may be, it is in both respects below the figures given by Adam Smith for the Scotch Highlands less than a century and a half ago, when he says, “It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.” The introduction of scientific methods, in dealing with childbirth, in vaccination, in supplying nutritious food, and in the proper care of infants, is beginning to reduce the appalling death rate which these figures indicate. Already in the city of Manila twelve municipal physicians and eight midwives are acting under the American authorities, and the general death rate fell from 57.08 per 1000 in October, 1899, to 28.46 in July, 1901.

When the death rate among the workers of the Orient has been brought down to that of civilized peoples, one of two influences will act upon the mind of the native parent: either he will labor more to support his larger family, or he will apply the restraints to production which are employed by every civilized people through later marriages and fewer births. It is probable that both causes will operate to stimulate ambition for better standards of living and greater productive power on the part of the individual worker. The search for the means of increasing his producing power will promote intellectual capacity and the desire for higher culture. The tendency, at first, of a lower death rate may be to multiply families unduly and to bring the population close up to the margin of the food supply, as was believed to be the case among the workingmen of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. But in the long run the influence of the new conditions is likely to be the same as in more advanced countries, in raising the standard of living, and applying the moral and physical restraints to overpopulation which have replaced, among all civilized peoples, the terrible restraints of war, pestilence, and famine.

For people who in their daily lives stand on the boundary line of the minimum of subsistence, independent economic or political life is an impossibility. The struggle for bread excludes all else. No mawkish sentiment in favor of a political independence which means anarchy can stand in the face of the fact that Great Britain has lightened the burdens of the tax-ridden fellahin of Egypt, and that she has opened a pathway bright with hope to the thousands of Chinese who flock to Hongkong, Singapore, and her other Oriental possessions. France, though pursuing in many cases a less enlightened policy, has taught the masses of the people of Algeria the difference between a government which meant robbery and a government which means security. Under their old rulers, Algeria and Tunis were practically in that state which made honest labor and accumulation worse than useless, because they only invited the cupidity of the rulers. Much the same conditions existed in the Philippines, especially in the provinces, under the exactions of the friar and the taxgatherer. The rule of powers like Great Britain and America means for all these people greater security for life, a higher standard of living, a prospect of working and saving without being deprived of all they have earned and saved, and steady progress toward those ideals of justice, liberty, and law which are the glories of Western civilization. Even the efficiency of labor is likely to increase under such conditions, under the stimulus which Professor William Smart so aptly describes when he says, “There is no laborer but may develop unsuspected powers and intensity of labor if his subsistence is increased, or varied, or seasoned by hope.”

The responsibility assumed by the United States in the Philippine Islands is not likely to terminate at once in complete peace. The natives of the more civilized islands are rapidly learning the great lesson that American methods are not Spanish methods, and that what is taken from the people by taxation will be remitted back to them in public benefits. This lesson has not yet been fully learned, because of the brief time since military operations ceased and the works of peace began. The natives are naturally suspicious of any foreign power coming with promises on its lips, after their experience with Spanish commissioners and governorsgeneral. The methods of American civil administration cannot probably be introduced among the savage tribes for some time to come. A wise policy, however, on the part of American civil and military governors will tend to keep these people at peace, and gradually open their eyes to the benefits of trade and commercial relations with the sovereign power. From a military standpoint, the occasion may still arise, from time to time, for a brief campaign in the more savage islands and for the steady maintenance of proper garrisons ; but in the civilized provinces there is no reason why garrisons should be much larger than those in the United States, except as they are incident to the greater task of maintaining American prestige in the Orient, in case it is threatened from the side of China, Germany, or Russia. This necessity will always require a strong military and naval force in the Philippines, which can be relied upon in emergencies in many directions, but which cannot be properly charged to the necessities of American rule in the islands themselves.

That the United States have assumed a great task in seeking to raise a people like the Filipinos from their present economic condition up to the level of Western civilization is obvious to every candid observer. The reward for taking up the task must be found, on both the political and the economic side, in the benefits which have always come to great peoples when superabundant energy and resources, spreading beyond national boundaries, have carried their commerce, their flag, and their civilization to undeveloped countries. Whether the Philippines “will pay ” cannot be determined by the budget of a few years, any more than it could fairly have been determined whether Texas “would pay ” when we went to war with Mexico, or whether the Oregon purchase “would pay ” when we were almost annually suppressing the uprisings of the Indians.

The true problem in the Philippines and in all colonial establishments is whether they promise an ultimate return to the community. The answer to this question cannot be given in a single year, or even in a series of years. Governments, in their colonial policy, act for generations unborn, as they do in the improvement of rivers and harbors, in their lighthouse establishment, and in giving helpless children an education which will make them and their children’s children worthy citizens of the state. A careful comparison at any given moment of such expenditures with their results would show a deficit which would be appalling to the man who wishes every dollar of taxation paid back in tangible form into his own pocket.

The benefit of the Philippines and of nearly all colonial establishments is the degree to which they offer a field for the enterprises and capital of the nation. By means of opening markets for new products, by finding outlets for capital which would otherwise compete against existing capital at home, and by creating new wants among undeveloped peoples, capital and labor alike gain the benefits of diminished competition and wider markets for their products. Let a single great colonial market, like Hongkong or British India, be closed to British goods, and the effect would reach back from Bradford and Lancashire, with their idle and starving factory hands, to every agriculturist in the British Empire, and from them to the wheat farms and cotton fields of America. That the necessity for such openings is recognized by the statesmen of all countries is shown by the eagerness with which Germany is fighting for colonial footings in such barren and unpromising soil as German East Africa, under the burning sun of the equator; by the heavy expenditures assumed with so much lightness of heart by Belgium in the Congo; and even by the heavy sacrifices made by impoverished Italy in Eretria and the heart of Abyssinia. If the need is less obvious at the present moment for these openings for the people and resources of the United States, it needs but little reflection upon the great output of our mills and factories to show how soon this need must become imperative. Even if the Philippines were barren of productive results for a time, the United States would be peculiarly fortunate — while France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy have been contending for a quarter of a century for the most desolate and unpromising quarters of the earth — in having wrested from Spain one of the most fertile and promising domains of the Pacific.

Charles A. Conant.