when it should cease, for if they were competent to say this they would be already fit for complete seif-government; on the other hand, parental authority, with its conviction of well-doing, can seldom if ever be trusted to know when to break itself. Thus a certain conflict is inevitable.

THIRTY YEARS' PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT

There is one further dimension of doubt. These ideas that now make the white race irresolute and disarm its power may, after all, be of no validity in the East. Self-government as we idealize it may be impossible there for reasons fundamental in the Asiatic mentality. Three western sayings to be heard everywhere in the East remain to be disproved. One is that the Asiatic can not comprehend an unrealistic political motive. Another is that he can not understand concessions on the ground of principle, supposing concessions to be made always on the ground of necessity. The third is that what he most respects is power and what he most despises is weakness in the exercise of it.

So it is that the Philippines represent our share in one of the world's profound vexations. There, a little more than 30 years ago, we became responsible for seven millions of backward people racially Malay, yet self-divided into 40 ethnic groups with 80 tongues among them and no memory of anything higher than a tribal civilization. Two ways were open to them. One way would have been to treat them as isolated groups and tribes, by dissimilarities of religion, culture, language, and qualities. The other way, which we took without debate, was to treat them as one people, with prior natural rights in the land and its resources, and the right to achieve self-government. We imposed upon them western ideas of sanitation, hygiene and nurture, and the securities of law and order, in consequence of which they multiplied in one generation from seven to thirteen millions. Then free universal education, and the western idea of popular government, by and with the consent of the governed, beginning for practice as native autonomy in the towns, working up thence to the provinces and presently to the central government at Manila, where Filipinos began very soon to be seated alongside of Americans. Next a Philippine Assembly, all native, with which the American commission divided the legislative function, and then a Philippine Legislature, all native, to which the whole of that function-namely, the lawmaking powerwas surrendered.

Controlled by a new ruling caste of Filipino mestizos-"mestizo" meaning the native Malay mixed with Chinese or European blood-the Philippine Legislature very adroitly and in a systematic manner used the lawmaking power to gain control of executive and administrative functions that had been legally reserved to American sovereignty.

RIGHTS WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITIES

On one side was the Filipino political leader of the new ruling caste, with but a single thought, and that was to increase his power at the expense of American sovereignty. On the other side was this American sovereignty, represented by a succession of Governors General differently construing the American intention and no fixed policy at Washington to guide or restrain them. What emerged at last, like an imago from the case of American sovereignty, was a Malay State demanding from the American Government its own sovereignty, and demanding it as a right. The grand peculiarity of this Malay State is that it stands clothed with dignities, rights, and privileges, but no responsibilities. The American Government is responsible to the world for its behavior. The American Government is responsible to the Malay State for its territorial integrity, for its defense, for the safety of its citizens abroad, for its credit, and for its prosperity. But in the Philippines, though they are legally American territory, the American Government has no rights or privileges that are not disputed, and its civil authority is empty. The American Government can not now enact a law in the Philippines. If it wants a new law, it must ask the American Governor General to suggest it to the Philippine Legislature; and if the Philippine Legislature refuses, that will be the end of it.

The American Government could abolish the Philippine Legislature; it could abolish the Malay State entire and restore in the Philippines a commission form of government, as it was in the beginning. But to do so would be an exercise of absolute power, with the implication of force behind it, and that is the kind of solution the white race now is loath to consider. The American Congress could repeal the organic law of the Philippines, called the Jones law, under which American authority has been played into Filipino hands; it could enact in place 106240-32——12

of it an organic law restoring to the American Governor General the supreme executive power, at the same time leaving the lawmaking power to the Philippine Legislature. That would work as the Jones law was meant to work and didn't; but again, to take back from the Filipino that which he is unwilling to surrender, even though it was not meant that he should have it in the first place, would be an exercise of absolute power, and practically that way is forbidden. Nevertheless, it has become necessary to act on the situation. The necessity is increasingly urgent and threefold. There is first the ambiguous and untenable position of American sovereignty; its responsibilities increasing and its authority vanishing. Secondly, the incertitude is in every way bad. With independence seeming at one time imminent, at another time remote, and then imminent again, new capital is not easily persuaded to build itself into the islands' economic future, since nobody can say what their political future will be; and the capital already there must charge for its anxiety and the risk of change. All the economic ground is provisional. Instance, free trade between the United States and the Philippines would end, in principle and in fact, as soon as independence was granted. Then Philippine products-sugar, for example-would have to pay duty at American ports, like Cuban sugar; and to be suddenly cut off from free access to the American market would radically affect all Philippine industry.

WHEN FILIPINOS MIGRATE

Thirdly, there is rising an ugly immigration problem. Asiatic people are not eligible to become citizens of the United States; that is the law, and on that legal ground they are barred as immigrants. The Filipino is Asiatic and therefore he can not become a citizen of the United States. He is already a citizen of the Philippines. But because the Philippines are under American sovereignty, which he wants to be rid of, and because the Philippines are American territory, which he disputes, the Filipino demands unlimited leave to enter the United States, to live or to work, and this has never been denied him. For a while there was no race problem. The Filipinos apparently had no impulse to migrate. Then suddenly, in 1910, the movement began. They are coming now in growing numbers, both direct and by way of the Hawaiian sugar plantations.

The number already in the country, actually uncounted, is estimated at from 75,000 to 100,000. That is really not so many, but as they are very gregarious and tend to congregate in a few places, certain effects are disproportional to the relative number. There are types of corporation agriculture in California, particularly around Stockton, in which they have displaced other labor; in the Salinas Valley it is the same; all over the State the condition is appearing. As fast as possible, they leave agriculture to their successors and go to the cities, where they displace both men and women in jobs of the light sort.

This is California's third experience with an Asiatic tide. The first was Chinese, the second was Japanese; and remembering how hard it was to stop these two and how quickly Asiatic labor ramifies itself into the economic life of the Pacific coast, California's protest against Filipino immigration began almost at once. Moreover, there were special reasons. Besides appearing competitively in the labor market as the Chinese and Japanese did, and by his presence creating blighted labor areas to be avoided by white people, the Filipino Malay provokes racial animosity of a particularly disagreeable kind. He comes to this country unmarried, seldom meaning to settle or get on his own, but in a spirit of young adventure; and one adventure for which he has a special taste is to consort with white women. The anti-Filipino riot at Watsonville last year was so provoked. One Filipino was killed, and when his body was received in Manila there was some effort to treat it as that of a martyr to racial prejudice in the United States.

CITIZENS BY BIRTH

The facts as to this aspect of Filipino character have been much discussed in the press of California and in hearings before committees of Congress. Dr. D. P. Barrows, of the University of California, who was for some years director of education in the Philippines, summarized them for the House Committee on Immigration, in April, 1930, thus: "The Filipino makes a good friend-generous, loyal, untiring in friendly services, buoyant, lively. He is a fine companion for almost any kind of adventure. His vices are almost entirely based on sexual passion. This passion in the Malay, and which includes practically all types of Filipino, is inordinately strong, and, in accordance with native custom, it is rarely directed into channels or restrained by individual will. The irregularity of his conduct and the social problem in American life which his presence aggravates

is, in my opinion, entirely based on this phase of his character. The evidence is very clear that, having no wholesome society of his own, he is drawn into the lowest and least fortunate associations. He usually frequents the poorer quarters of our towns and spends the residue of his savings in brothels and dance halls, which, in spite of our laws, exist to minister to his lower nature."

But if the Filipino created here a native society of his own, by bringing his women along, there would appear at once that irrational second-generation problem which results from the legal fact that anyone born in the United States, Asiatic or not, is by that accident alone made an American citizen. A Filipino child born here of Filipino parents would be an American citizen. In an acute form, the problem now exists in the Hawaiian Islands, which, unlike the Philippines, are American territory in the incorporate sense, as Alaska is. The distinction is legal. The effect of it is that the fact of birth in the Philippines does not confer citizenship; in the Hawaiian Islands it does. And so, now all the Japanese children born in the Hawaiian Islands of Japanese parents who went there to work on the sugar plantations are American citizens.

WHAT FILIPINO FREEDOM MEANS

Independence for the Philippines would automatically terminate Filipino immigration, for then Filipinos coming from territory no longer American would necessarily be treated simply as Asiatics. And since independence, for which the Filipinos themselves are eloquently contending, would naturally end not only the immigration evil but also forms of economic competition that are bound to become more and more disadvantageous to this country, great bodies of what we call selfish interests are coming to be in favor of it.

Organized labor is solidly for Philippine independence to rid itself of the present fact and the unlimited menace of direct Asiatic competition. American agriculture is aligned in the same way, and or the same reason. It wants pro

tection against indirect Asiatic competition. We keep a tariff against Cuban sugar, though we are the principal buyers of it; and the reason we do this is that the American growers of sugar beets and sugarcane are entitled to be protected, by the measure of the tariff, against the competition of Cuban labor with its lower standard of living. But Philippine sugar, produced by Asiatic labor, is admitted duty free. The American farmer has no protection against the Filipino tao in his bamboo hut, living on rice in a tropical sun.

The

Holding with the American farmer is the American capitalist, whose investment in the Cuban sugar industry is many times as large as the total American investment of all kinds in the Philippine Islands. There is a worldwide depression in sugar from excessive production. The Cuban industry is groaning. American growers of sugar beets and cane are injured. Moreover, a very desirable development of American agriculture in the field of sugar production is retarded. And this condition is in every way aggravated by the increasing quantities of Philippine sugar that come duty free into the American market. By waiving the duty on Philippine sugar, the American Government practically subsidizes the production of it, stimulates the Filipino's sugar industry, and makes it profitable in competition with beet and cane growers in 20 American States, and enables the Filipino tao to enjoy a standard of living much higher than that of his own nearest competitor in the sugar fields of Java. If Philippine_sugar had to pay a duty like Cuban sugar, one of two things would happen: Either the production of it would cease or the Filipino tao would be obliged to accept a standard of living as low as that of the Javanese.

And it is not sugar only. Philippine coconut oil and Philippine copra, which is the dried coconut meat with the oil still in it, are admitted to the American market free of duty. Coconut oil, used in oleomargarine, competes with butterfat, and this the dairy industry complains of. Coconut oil completes also with American vegetable oils, such as those from cottonseed and the soy bean. There is supposed to be some compensation in the fact that we have a market in the Philippines for American wheat, but so much surplus wheat is produced at a loss in the United States that Government money is employed to support the price. Thus the economic absurdity, on one hand, to be assisting the American wheat grower with public funds, and, on the other, to be admitting free of duty the oil product of the Philippine coconut groves, with the result that the American farmer is discouraged from substituting oil-producing vegetable crops for wheat. This is the farmer's point of view as it was set before a committee of the United States Senate last year: "Half a billion pounds of coconut oil now reach the American soap makers, cooking-fat makers and oleomargarine makers free of duty. This oil occupies every place where soybean oil could be used, at a price

1

*

less than soybean oil can be produced for * * Turning 10 per cent of the winter-wheat acreage into soy beans will go farther, faster and safer in solving the export-surplus problem and equalizing American agriculture than all the legislative remedies ever proposed or ever possible. Four million acres in soy beans means 56,000,000 less bushels of wheat, 68,000,000 more bushels of soy beans, and if one-half of the soybean seed went to the crusher there would be somewhere around 300,000,000 pounds of oil-enough immediately to replace three-fifths of the coconut oil now imported from the Philippines. Besides, there would be 200,000 tons of soybean cake—as good a high-protein feed as any dairyman can want-to replace the 129,000 tons imported last year for which $4,690,000 of farmers' good money went to some foreign farmer, native in the Philippines, peon in the Argentine or coolie in China."

THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE

We take it to be deplorable that economic considerations should weigh in a discussion of independence for the Philippines. Americans who favor independence for grand reasons do not reject the sugar people, the farmers, the voice of organized labor, as selfish allies; all the same, they wish the question could be decided on noble grounds alone. One will hear it said that at last American selfishness may avail to free the Filipino where the American conscience had failed. This is the cynical habit of view. The view itself is worse than distorted. It is false. These economic problems exist precisely for the reason that conscience forbids us to exploit the Philippines in our own interest. Why have we not laid a duty against Philippine sugar and Philippine coconut oil? We could say: "We do not want your sugar and your oil, because these compete with our own agricultural products. Produce, instead, rubber and coffee and other things we will tell you of, which we do want because we can not produce them for ourselves, and these we will admit free of duty." The only reason we have not done that is that to do it we should be exercising our power over the Philippines to benefit ourselves at the expense of the Filipinos. They already had their sugar plantations and their coconut groves, and we would sooner see these industries expand and bear the competition, or let the American farmer bear it than to hurt the Filipinos. Moreover, it would not seem fair to lay a tariff upon Philippine products coming to this market so long as the Filipinos are forbidden to lay a tariff on American goods in the Philippines. Not that we have not the right or the power. Simply that it would not be fair.

In immigration the factor of conscience is even clearer. Why do we not bar the Filipino as an immigrant? Congress has a perfect right to that. But again, it would seem unfair to bar Filipinos from the United States so long as they can not bar Americans from the Philippines. If the Philippines were independent, then we could forbid Filipino immigration, as we forbid all other Asiatic immigration, with no sense of unfairness in it; for they would then be free, if they pleased, to forbid American immigration into the Philippines. As it is, we could say to them, "Stay out," but they are powerless to retaliate and say to us, "Stay out."

Do you see what it comes to at last? We are restrained by the fact that we have the power to act in an arbitrary manner against a people who have not the power to act against us in like manner. Call it conscience or by any other name, this is a kind of restraint that is now acting in the white race, and acting effectively, perhaps, for the first time in the world. It is quite possible that the Asiatic can not understand it, and it is certainly true that the history of his experience with the white race would not have prepared him to understand it.

THE FILIPINO'S CREDO

One of the tragedies of Filipino-American relationship is that the Filipino believes the Americans' interest in the Philipines to be in the first sense economic and that the principal obstacle to independence is the American investment there. He sees American capital in business, industry, utilities, and shipping; he sees American motor cars and American merchandise everywhere; and with nothing by which to scale the relative importance of these activities, they look to him colossal. Tell him the whole American investment of every kind in the Philippines would not equal the capital of one fairly large American corporation, that the total loss of it would hardly be felt by the American people, that the cost of defending the territorial integrity of the Philippines for the Filipinos might be more in one year than the wealth of all the cities in them, and that the

principal obstacle to independence is sentiment, or a sense of moral obligation— tell him this and still he will be incredulous.

His mestizo leaders keep telling him that in a few years more the American investment will be so great and the economic life of the Philippines will have become so dependent upon it that his political independence will be forever doomed. And they keep saying to the American Congress that for the sake of independence the Filipino people are willing to forgo all the advantages they have in the American relationship. They are willing to see their sugar and copra and coconut oil and tobacco cut off from free access to the American market. It will be very hard for them at first. They know that, they say. But they are willing to accept a lower standard of living until they can learn how to compete in the markets of the world. The longer they wait, the harder it will be. Therefore they pray for independence immediately. They are willing at last to be treated as Asiatics by the American immigration authorities, provided, of course, they gain thereby the sovereign right to control immigration into the Philippines.

If they mean it, and if they are competent to say it, then, of course, there is no reason why the American people should not look at the question of independence in a new light. That is to say, if the Filipinos are both anxious and able to face the risks of independence and if, at the same time, we should be, on the whole, better off to get out of the Philippines, then independence is the natural and perfect solution.

PRO AND CON IN CONGRESS

Last year the Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate took several thousand folios of testimony on the subject of independence for the Philippines. The Filipinos were heard. They sent an independence commission to make their case. The State Department was heard; also the War Department, which has the Philippine Bureau. Then the sugar and oil people, the ropemakers who use Manila hemp, representatives of commerce, labor, and agriculture, and still others bearing witness to free views and opinion in a public spirit. Not one among all these opposed the idea of independence in principle. Some, however, did very anxiously oppose the idea of immediate independence.

The controlling questions were such as these: Do the Filipino people want independence? Do they want it now? Do they know what it will mean? Do the eloquent mestizo leaders truly represent them when they say they are willing to pay the price of independence, even to accept a lower standard of living for the sake of a sovereign political status? And if the answer is in every case yes, then are the Filipino people or their mestizo leaders competent to decide whether they are ready for independence and can afford to accept it? Lastly, is it fair to them to put American judgment aside and let them decide for themselves? The proposals on which this hearing was held-the principal proposals now pending in Congress-are four. One is to let the Filipino people write their own constitution, then withdraw American sovereignty and see what will happen. Another is to give them their independence with five years of grace in which to absorb and graduate the change the tariff, for example, to be raised against Philippine products not in full all at once but one-fifth part annually. Cutting off the dog's tail by inches to avoid the pain of a major operation is an interesting idea, and that is perhaps all you could say for it. A third and less formulated proposal, uniting many who for various reasons are opposed to immediate independence, is to announce as a fixture of American public policy that independence will be granted a number of years hence-say 30. This, of course, is refuge in postponement. The Secretary of War, writing to the Senate committee, said: "This proposal appears basically unsound. If independence is to be granted and the Filipinos are now adequately prepared therefor, no sufficient reason for delay is apparent. If adequate preparation-political, economic, or social does not now exist, the hazard of attempting to anticipate future developments to the extent of indicating a definite date at which it can be safely assumed that adequate preparation will have been achieved appears to be unnecessary and inadvisable. The period to elapse before complete independence shall be granted should be outlined, if at all, in terms of objectives.

And then the proposal, stated in the form of a Senate resolution, that "whereas the question of the future status of the Philippine Islands has never been explicitly determined by the Congress of the United States, and, whereas, it is important for the economic and political future of the Philippine Islands that this question